Having been too lazy at school to work on French, I decided when I retired to learn the language, and have spent five years at Cardiff University's Centre for Continuing Education slowly and painfully acquiring vocabulary and some grammar.

 Exams are always a good way to put your knowledge on the line, so I took the French exams within the European framework for foreign languages. These are known as   DELF and DALF - Diplôme D'Etudes en Langue Française and  Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française

 I took the DALF three years ago when it was the highest language qualification in French, and the Eurocrats responded a year later by creating another exam - the DALF C2 which was much harder. Which meant I had to start all over again...

 This site responds to a rather remarkable hole in these (and other) exams. To pass the DALF C2, you have to read and write French at a pretty high level. You have to be able to speak concisely and without difficulty.

 However, the listening test is not much higher than the British A level (ie the school 18 year old level). The content is harder, the extract longer, but the voices are clear, educated, moderately paced.

 That means that if you are at the listening level expected by the DALF C2, 80% of French television and 100% of French films will be incomprehensible to you. There are no educational resources available - the audio magazines peter out at about the level of the DELF. 

  That's why I started this site. It helps me, first, because I try to understand and make transcripts of the extracts I put up, and hopefully it will provide a focus for your ear-training too.

Good luck !