Petit Béret Training Guide — All Modules Explained

Six modules, one training system

Active production, not passive recognition — that's the whole idea. Every module puts you in the same position: see a prompt, type the exact form, find out immediately if you were right. No multiple choice, no word bank, no hints. It's harder than most language apps, and it's harder on purpose. The six modules cover the areas where French actually trips intermediate learners up: tense forms, the Subjonctif decision, pronoun order, prepositions, noun gender, and written accents. Each works on its own. All of them feed into the same Daily Precision Drill.

Conjugation — active tense production

You see an infinitive, a subject, and a tense. You type the conjugated form. If you're wrong, the correct answer appears and the verb comes back until you get it right twice. That's the drill. It sounds simple — the difficulty is that there's nowhere to hide. The difficulty setting matters more than most people expect: Top 300 is the everyday core (être, avoir, aller, vouloir and their relatives); Top 2000 is where you find verbs you know but can't reliably conjugate under pressure. Lock a session to one tense for focused work, or run mixed tenses to practise recognising what the context needs before producing the form.

Tenses: Present, Passé Composé, Imparfait, Futur Simple, Conditionnel Présent.
Difficulty: Top 300, 1000, 1500, or 2000 verbs by frequency.
Single-tense focus or mixed tense — your choice per session.
Wrong answers re-enter the queue until you get two correct in a row.

Subjunctive — trigger-based decision training

This module doesn't ask you to conjugate — it asks you to decide. You see a sentence and you have to pick: Indicatif or Subjonctif? Then produce the form. The trigger categories are taught as a logical system: desire and volition (vouloir que, préférer que), emotion and judgment (être content que, il est important que), doubt and denial (ne pas croire que, douter que), and a fixed list of conjunctions (bien que, pour que, avant que). Start with conjunctions-only mode if you're at B1. Most people who think they know the subjunctive discover their real weak point is category three — negated verbs of belief — not the conjunction list.

Decision drill: Indicatif or Subjonctif — choose first, then produce the form.
Four trigger categories taught as logic, not a list to memorise.
Common traps included: espérer takes Indicatif; penser que changes by polarity.
Mixed sessions across all four categories once you're comfortable with each.

Pronouns — placement and agreement logic

Pronoun placement in French isn't complicated — there are just a few stacking rules, and most learners never drill them until they're automatic. This module isolates those rules and practises them in full sentences you type, not tick. There's also a block-drag format for the placement sequences themselves. It starts with single pronouns and builds up to double-pronoun constructions — me le, te les, lui en — which are genuinely tricky even at B2.

COD, COI, y, en — individually and in sequence.
Placement in simple tenses, compound tenses, and with infinitives.
Past participle agreement with preceding COD.
Two formats: full sentence typing and block-drag for placement.

Prepositions — verb + preposition patterns

Most preposition errors in French aren't random — they cluster around a small set of high-frequency verb + preposition pairs. The module targets those directly: verbs that take à, verbs that take de, and the pairs that change meaning depending on which you use (penser à vs. penser de is the most important). The preposition is removed from a sentence and you type the correct one. Straightforward in format, more effective in practice than it sounds.

Key verb + preposition pairs: aider à, essayer de, rêver de, tenir à, and more.
Meaning-changing pairs: penser à / penser de, parler à / parler de.
Contextual prepositions: à, en, dans for location and time.

Noun Gender — 900 curated nouns

French noun gender is about 80% predictable from the ending. That's where to start. -tion, -sion, -eur are almost always feminine; -ment, -age, -eau are almost always masculine. The module teaches the patterns first, then drills 900 nouns against them — you see the noun, you respond le or la. When you're wrong, you get the pattern explanation before it comes back. After enough repetitions you stop thinking and start knowing. That's the target.

900 hand-curated nouns, ordered by frequency and learning value.
Ending patterns taught explicitly before drilling begins.
Exceptions flagged with explanations, not buried in the queue.
Persistent weak nouns tracked and resurfaced.

Accents — dictation-style orthography

Accent errors are the most visible sign that someone is still learning, and the last thing most people fix. Fill-in-the-blank exercises let you guess from visual context. Dictation doesn't. You hear the word, you type it — accents and all. Sessions are short and focused on high-frequency words, the ones where getting é vs. è wrong is most noticeable.

Dictation format: hear the audio, type the word with correct accents.
Covers: acute (é), grave (è, à, ù), circumflex (â, ê, î, ô, û), cedilla (ç).
High-frequency words only — where errors are most visible.
No visual scaffold — full orthographic recall required.

Daily Precision Drill

Five to ten minutes a day, drawing from your weakest items across all active modules. Whatever you got wrong most recently — a tense form, a pronoun sequence, a noun gender — shows up here. It sounds modest. In practice it does more for retention than longer sessions once a week, because it catches errors before they solidify into habits. This is the one feature worth using every single day.

Five minutes on your actual weak points every day beats one hour of review once a week.

Mistakes Cabinet

Every wrong answer goes into the Mistakes Cabinet. It's not a list — it's a queue. Wrong answers come back in the next session, then the day after, then three days later. To clear something you need three correct answers across separate sessions. You can browse the cabinet any time, which turns out to be useful: the patterns in your errors tell you more about where you actually are than your own impression of your level.

Every wrong answer enters the cabinet automatically.
Resurfacing schedule: same session → next day → 3 days → cleared.
Three correct answers across separate sessions to remove an item.
Browsable — use it to spot patterns in persistent errors.

How to structure your practice

Start deep on one module, not shallow on all of them. The correction loops need enough exposure to build a useful pool of weak items — spreading across five modules from the start means each one stays shallow. Once a module feels stable, add the Daily Precision Drill and move to the next. The sequence that works for most people is roughly this:

A1–A2: Conjugation first (Top 300, Present and Passé Composé). Add Noun Gender after two weeks.
B1: Open Conjugation to mixed tenses. Add Pronouns (COD/COI to start). Introduce Subjunctive with conjunctions-only mode.
B2–C1: All modules in rotation. Daily Precision Drill every day without exception. Mistakes Cabinet review once a week.