Coffee Break French
Two journeys across France, written as diaries by the people making them. Twenty lessons of real French, unpicked line by line with Mark and Pierre-Benoît.
See the summer price £79 / $105 until Tuesday 28th July · lifetime access · yours to downloadThere is a version of your next trip where you understand the announcement on the platform, read the menu without reaching for your phone, and catch what the couple at the next table are laughing about. That version starts now, not at the airport.
Travel Diaries works because it gives you something to follow. Each lesson is built around a diary entry written by someone on a real journey, in natural French, about an ordinary day. Not a textbook dialogue, not a list of phrases for the airport. Just a person describing what happened, the way they would to a friend.
Then Mark and Pierre-Benoît take that entry apart with you, line by line, so nothing goes past you unexplained.
Both seasons, in full. Each follows a different set of people on a different kind of trip, so you get two registers of French rather than more of the same.
Lara and Noah take the train south, and Lara writes up each leg of the trip as they go. Markets, small towns, long lunches and the language you actually need to move around a country.
Charlotte, Lucas and Théo pick up a hire car and spend a week on the history of the north: the Normandy beaches, Mont Saint-Michel and the castles of the Loire Valley, all in Charlotte's words.
Here is a real sample from one of Charlotte's diary entries in Season 2. She and her friends have just picked up a hire car in Paris and are driving to the first stop of the trip, Rouen.
Debout de bonne heure avec un petit-déjeuner parisien à l’hôtel : des viennoiseries, des fruits, et un bon café. Je prends des forces pour la première journée de notre « road-trip ». On s’est rendus dans un garage du coin pour prendre notre voiture de location. Aujourd’hui c’est moi qui conduis. Après un peu plus de deux heures, nous sommes arrivés à Rouen.
Une fois la voiture garée, on a commencé par une visite de la ville médiévale. En effet, Rouen est la capitale historique de la Normandie. On a mangé notre déjeuner sur le pouce, sur la place du Vieux Marché avec ses maisons à pans de bois. C’est d’ailleurs la place où Jeanne d’Arc a été brûlée. Lucas était particulièrement ému, car il a fait beaucoup de recherches sur cette femme emblématique.
If you can follow most of that, with a word or two you would need to look up, the course is pitched right for you. The lesson notes and the audio explain every line of it, so nothing stays a mystery.
The same three steps, 20 times over. Simple enough to keep going with, thorough enough to move you on.
A page of real written French, the kind a person actually writes about their own day. You read it first, and see how much you get.
Mark and Pierre-Benoît go through the whole entry: the vocabulary, the grammar and the turns of phrase that make it sound like a native speaker wrote it.
The video pronunciation practice replays the text with a pause after every phrase, so you can repeat it properly rather than just recognising it.
Travel Diaries is written for intermediate learners, roughly B1 to B2. You should be comfortable with the present and the past, and ready to spend time with longer stretches of real French rather than single sentences.
If you have worked through the middle seasons of Coffee Break French, this sits neatly on top. If you are earlier than that, it will feel like hard work, and we would rather tell you now than take your money.
There is a sense of natural progression, and the way the material is presented never makes you feel you are being tested. Just cheerful encouragement.
Tony, Coffee Break French learner
One payment for both seasons of the Travel Diaries and every resource that comes with them. Yours for good.
Prefer to pay in US dollars? Join for $105
Instant access to all 20 lessons. No subscription, nothing to cancel.
20 lessons, over 10 hours, and a journey worth taking. At £79 / $105 until Tuesday 28th July.
Offer closes Tuesday 28th July 2026 at 23:59 BST
Start the journeyNo. Travel Diaries stands on its own. It assumes some French, not any particular course.
20 lessons, over 10 hours of audio, plus the notes and pronunciation practice. Most people do one or two a week. There is no schedule and no deadline once you are in.
Forever. It is a one-off payment, and you can download the audio, notes and video to keep.
You can, both seasons are sold separately in the Academy. At this price the two together cost less than one season normally does, so the bundle is the sensible choice.
The audio lessons are the heart of it, and there is a lot more around them: the written notes for every episode, the full diary texts, and the video pronunciation practice, all in one place in the Academy.
Everything is digital and available to download the moment you join, so we do not offer refunds. If you are unsure whether the level is right, email team@coffeebreaklanguages.com before you buy and we will give you an honest answer.
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Photography: Rich Martello · dan wilding · Simon Spring · Mmoka (Unsplash)