Why I built TFS Master

In China, French is also studied as a degree specialism: the Chinese Ministry of Education counted close to a hundred and sixty such programmes in June 2024, against some twenty in 1978 [source]. The students who choose it are not taking a language course among others — French is their discipline. I teach at one of those universities, in Changchun.

As everywhere else in the country, their degree is punctuated by two national exams: the TFS-4 and the TFS-8. They condition how a student is recognised on leaving, and a department’s pass rate is read, from outside, as the measure of what that department is worth. Which is to say they are not prepared for absent-mindedly.

What the TFS-4 and TFS-8 actually are

Their full name is the national French test for specialists. The TFS-4 (法语专业四级, “zhuānsì”) is taken at the end of the second year; the TFS-8 (法语专业八级, “zhuānbā”), at the end of the degree. Both are meant for students whose major is French, not for general learners.

They are not conversation exams. They assess several blocks of competence separately — dictation, grammar and structures, reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary, expression — in a calibrated, timed format. Each block has constraints of its own: the TFS-8 dictation, for instance, runs on a set number of permitted readings, with no pause and no going back, and requires filling twenty numbered blanks in a continuous text.

That division is what governs everything else. You do not pass these exams by having “a good level” of French: you pass them by having worked each block for what it is, with its own rules and its own clock.

Between the two exams, the difference is one of degree, not of kind:

TFS-8 takes up the same skills — grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, writing — and pushes them further. That is why TFS Master is not two separate sites: there is a single catalogue, and every lesson carries a level badge (on the CEFR scale, A2 to C1) showing where it sits.

Three obstacles, always the same ones

Preparing for these exams, concretely, means running into three difficulties. Over the years I kept seeing the same ones — and they were not, in the first place, difficulties with the language.

Resources are scattered. A textbook here, a handout there, a website found the night before. Students accumulate without ever knowing whether the whole covers the syllabus.

Tracking is thin. I can mark an essay; I cannot say, for each of my students, which precise notion is secure, which is fragile, which has never been tested at all.

And the load falls on the teacher, who designs, distributes and marks by hand the drills a machine distributes perfectly well.

TFS Master grew out of those three observations. It is a teaching project carried out within the university, built on a simple demand: academic rigour on one side, clarity on the other.

I come from research in Francophone literature (PhD at Aix-Marseille, 2019) and from painting. Both taught me the same thing: you only truly understand a form once you can see it, handle it, return to it.

A pathway, not a catalogue

This is the distinction that governs everything else. A catalogue offers resources and leaves the student to decide; a pathway decides with them.

Every activity produces usable information: success, error, time spent, regularity, correction, reassessment. Those traces do not merely display a score — they determine what comes next. The loop has five moments: frame the goal and the exam date, interpret the gaps, prescribe a precise action, observe the result, then decide between progressing, remediating, or bringing in the teacher.

Let me say straight away what this adaptivity is not: it does not mean everything moves on its own. Unlock rules, thresholds and the teacher’s judgement frame the decision. Chapter assessments, for instance, only open once the corresponding lessons have been worked through — a deliberate constraint that guarantees ordered progress rather than scattered skimming. I preferred a system that sometimes refuses to one that lets you do anything.

Around that loop, a single daily thread: a “Today” page, around a quarter of an hour, chaining revision, vocabulary, a grammar point and dictation according to the needs of the moment. Nine modules — grammar, conjugation, vocabulary, reading and listening comprehension, dictation, communication, written expression, literature and civilisation, mock exams — but one single thing to do today.

What the machine does not do

Written production is marked with the help of artificial intelligence, and I would rather say so than let it be guessed. That correction is formative in purpose: it does not merely flag a mistake, it explains it — a mark out of 20, sub-scores by criterion, localised corrections, all of it in French and Chinese. But the verdict stays indicative: the teacher can reread it, adjust it or validate it, and it is the teacher who keeps responsibility for academic assessment.

Gaston, the bilingual assistant that accompanies navigation, follows the same rule: it points towards the site’s own content, it substitutes neither for the teacher nor for assessment, and the exchanges are not recorded.

The rest follows the same discipline. The platform carries no advertising network and no commercial tracking. Fonts, scripts and media are served in house, with no dependency on a public CDN. Reading the content stays free; only active interactions require an account.

Finally, something the platform’s own dossier states and that I repeat here: TFS Master does not claim completed psychometric validation. The assessments are calibrated and the calibration bench is documented, but the empirical evidence is still being assembled. Saying otherwise would sell better, and be less true.

What TFS Master is not

It is not a bank of exercises, nor a digitised textbook, nor a magic promise: progress comes from regularity, and no mechanism replaces the fifteen daily minutes.

Nor is it a substitute for the class. Nothing I have described claims to replace a teacher in front of a room — all of it is designed so that they see more clearly and mark less blindly.

What I wanted to build is a working companion: demanding, readable, bilingual, that meets students where they are and takes them, step by step, to where the exam awaits.

If you are a student, a teacher, or simply curious: the lessons are free to read at tfsmaster.com. The placement test is the best way in. Three further articles continue this one, in French only.