Eleven skills for navigating cities and talking about the world around you. Foundations covers weather, geography prepositions, and ordinal numbers; Grammar adds two core verbs, question formation, and adjective agreement; The city builds out transport, directions, place prepositions, and the pronoun y; the Capstone integrates everything into a tourist-scenario exchange.
Impersonal weather structures. Il fait beau / chaud / froid. Il pleut. Il neige. The contrast with il est (current time) and c'est (identification).
02à Paris, en France, au Canada, aux États-Unis. The rule: gender of country determines en/au/aux; all cities use à. Francophone world geography.
03Premier / première, deuxième, troisième… Formation rules, irregular first, agreement with feminine nouns. Used for arrondissements, floors, rankings.
"To come" and "to take / to catch". Both irregular. Prendre covers transport (prendre le métro) and ordering (je prends un café). Venir de for recent past.
05Two standard question frames. Est-ce que for yes/no questions; qu'est-ce que for "what" questions. Contrast with inversion and informal rising intonation.
06Feminine forms (+e, doubled consonant, -eux/euse, -ien/ienne). Plural forms (+s). Position: most adjectives follow the noun in French.
Tourist vocabulary: la tour Eiffel, le musée, la cathédrale, la gare. Transport: le métro, le bus, le taxi, à pied. Combined with aller à / prendre.
08Tournez à gauche / à droite. Allez tout droit. Prenez la première rue. Imperative forms of direction verbs. Asking and responding to Pour aller à… ?
09Devant, derrière, à côté de, en face de, entre, près de, loin de. Contracted forms with masculine nouns: à côté du, en face du.
10Replacing a place or à-phrase: Tu vas à Paris ? — J'y vais demain. Position before the verb. Contrast with direct object pronouns. The fixed expression il y a.
Eleven integration items built around a tourist-encounter scenario: giving directions, recommending transport, describing a neighbourhood, discussing weather. Every Unit 3 skill drawn on at least once.
The XP and streak system isn't here for its own sake. Each mechanic is designed to reinforce a specific learning principle the preface refers to: retrieval before exposure, spaced practice, and consolidation through retakes. Here's what each one is doing.
XP for every attempt — including wrong ones
You earn +10 XP per item, whether you get it right or wrong. This is deliberate. The pretesting research (Pan & Chua, NUS 2026) shows that the act of attempting an answer — even an unsuccessful one — strengthens later memory. Rewarding correctness only would push you toward avoiding hard items; rewarding the attempt encourages you to engage with everything, which is what produces the memory benefit.
+50 XP for completing a skill
A small bonus for finishing all items in a skill. The structure of finishing matters: it's the moment your brain commits the corrective feedback, after several attempts, into a more durable form.
+20 XP per improvement point on retake
This is the most important XP source for your learning. When you retake a skill and beat your previous best, you earn extra XP per point improved. Retaking a skill spaces out your encounters with the material — and spaced retrieval is one of the best-evidenced memory consolidation strategies we have. The improvement bonus is the system's way of saying "this is the work that counts."
Streak multiplier — for showing up regularly
Submit at least one item on consecutive days to build a streak. Your daily XP is multiplied:
×1.0×1.1×1.25×1.5×2.0Daily contact, even brief, is more effective than long sessions clustered together. The multiplier rewards the rhythm, not the volume.
Freeze tokens — for the days life happens
Earn ❄️ one freeze token at every 7-day milestone (max 3 stockpiled). If you miss a single day, a freeze is automatically used to keep your streak alive. The freeze exists because the goal is sustained engagement over six weeks, not punishment for missing a day. Streak anxiety undermines the very thing the streak is designed to encourage.
The leaderboard (coming later in the semester)
Will rank by long-term engagement and retake-improvement, not first-try perfection. The students who do best aren't the ones who got everything right immediately — they're the ones who kept coming back and improving. That's the trajectory this system is built to reward.
In short: XP rewards attempts, streaks reward spacing, and improvement bonuses reward consolidation. Each one is a piece of the cognitive science the preface points to.