The step up from Junior A1
A2 is where a teenage candidate stops answering questions and starts telling stories. The exam asks them to recount a weekend, explain why they liked a film, and settle a plan with a friend. The vocabulary widens to match, and places, travel, shopping and school life each get a detailed set.
The paid deck holds 460 cards over 19 topics. Transports alone has 46 of them and Loisirs & Culture has 51, because those are the two the exam keeps coming back to. The 25 free cards here are the false friends and the words you cannot guess from English, chosen to be worth memorising.
Words a teenager will actually use in France
Une correspondance is what you make when you change trains, and it turns up in nearly every travel role-play. Un quai is the platform you make it on. Miss those two and the rest of the sentence will not save you.
La rentrée des classes has no clean English equivalent. It is the return to school in September, and in France it is an event, covered on the news, with its own shopping list. Expect it in a reading text.
How the A2 exam is scored
The same four papers of 25 points, the same pass mark of 50 out of 100, and the same rule that under 5 in any single paper fails the whole exam. What changes is length: the writing paper wants two short texts rather than a form to fill in.
In the oral role-play the candidate has to ask for something and react to the answer, which is why shop and travel words carry so much weight. Une offre exceptionnelle and une poissonnerie belong to that scene.