What is
Frenchy Sauce?

Here to support your intellectual and professional flourishing, so you don't have to do it alone. Together, we work towards two closely linked goals. The first is a precise command of written and academic French: we read the texts themselves, closely, and build the grammar from there rather than from drills. The second is ease and eloquence when you speak, because eloquence isn't about knowing everything, or sounding perfectly French; it's about sounding like yourself, in French. Expect rigour, and expect wit.

This is for you if...

You're studying or writing on Beauvoir, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Lacan, Badiou, Meillassoux, Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss… any French thinker, and the English translation no longer feels like enough.

Reading a single page of French takes you longer than you can bear.

You can feel what you're missing: the connotations slip through your fingers.

You're heading to a seminar, a conference or a job interview in France, and you want to sound like yourself, not like a phrasebook, or like the silent one at the back of the room.

A PhD can be a lonely road. You could use someone from outside your everyday life, cheering you on, one step at a time.

What is NOT going to happen

Not a language school, not a translation service, not coaching. No drills, no one-size-fits-all method. A thinking partnership, in French, built on the texts that matter to you.

The missing piece?

You don't need another language course, and you don't need another academic reviewing your work. You need someone who reads philosophy for a living, speaks French natively, and stands just outside the pressure you're under. I teach philosophy at a French lycée, where the explication de texte, reading a philosophical passage line by line, is one of the two exercises of the baccalauréat. I hold a master's degree from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, with the highest distinction, and wrote my dissertations on Kant's concept of illusion in relation to human finitude, and on Freud's contribution to the psychology of religion.

AND, above all, I'm NOT currently doing a PhD myself: I'm not in the same sauce as you, which is exactly why I can help you with yours. An outside eye.

The setup

Now welcoming my first five Frenchies <3

What you get

One-to-one sessions on the texts you're actually working on, so every hour moves your research forward.

Targeted exercises on key concepts and argumentative subtleties, to catch what translations miss.

Reading strategies for French academic texts, so a single page no longer takes you hours.

Practice scenarios, from seminars and conferences to informal conversations, to speak with confidence when it counts.

Personal feedback on your abstracts, papers and presentations, to write in French with precision.

A reading sheet after each session: the passage we worked on, annotated, to review at your own pace.

A personal glossary built from your own texts, gathering your field's vocabulary as we go.

A rehearsal before your next talk or interview, so you walk in ready.

Messages between sessions for quick questions, so you're never stuck on your own.

And if you come to France, an IRL coffee, a walk, and of course: talks! With pleasure.

Get started

Write to me, and you'll receive your free starter pack, built around your research: a French passage chosen for you, with notes to help you read it closely, and the keys to introduce yourself and your work in French.

Tell me which thinker, text or paragraph is giving you a hard time, and I'll build it around that.

Then, since French is learned by practising it, let's talk: 45 minutes together.

My guarantee

At the start, we set a clear goal together.

If you come to our sessions, do the work we agree on between them, and still haven't reached that goal by the end of your three or six months, I'll refund you in full.