There’s a strange moment that happens to many adults when they start learning a new language. In the rest of their lives, they’re competent. Experienced. Used to knowing what they’re doing. And then they try to say a sentence in a new language — and suddenly they feel twelve years old again. My guest today has watched that moment unfold hundreds of times. Léa Perret is the co-founder of Coucou French Classes in New York, a language school she built around a deceptively simple idea: if adults are going to learn languages successfully, the classroom has to account for the emotional reality of being a beginner again. Not just the grammar.Not just the vocabulary.But the vulnerability. Years ago, I was actually one of Léa’s students. So this conversation felt like a small full circle. We talk about why the most common question language teachers get — “How long will it take me to learn?” — misunderstands the nature of language entirely. Languages aren’t projects you complete. They’re environments you gradually begin to inhabit. We talk about listening comprehension — the part of language learning that often surprises people the most. You can study grammar for years, and still find yourself completely lost when someone replies to you at normal speed in a crowded room. And we talk about the strange identity shift that can happen when another language enters your life — how people often discover slightly different versions of themselves depending on which language they’re speaking. Those ideas eventually led Léa to build 6pm in Paris, a platform designed to tackle one of the hardest problems in language learning: how to create real immersion outside the classroom. This isn’t a theoretical conversation. It’s a conversation with someone who has spent more than a decade designing environments where people can actually live inside another language — first in a physical school, and now online. Along the way we also talk about French understatement (“c’est pas mal”), code-switching, subtitles, wine in language classes, and why sometimes the most important part of learning a language is simply learning to relax into it.

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