The 'Police Method': A Simple Exercise to Stop Giving One-Word Answers in French

Introduction

Here’s a problem almost every French learner runs into: you understand far more than you can say. Someone asks what you did last weekend, and the honest, immediate answer is “j’ai mangé au restaurant.” Full stop. You know the words for the details, but stringing them together on the spot feels blocked. Over years of teaching one-on-one online classes, I developed a simple, repeatable exercise to fix exactly this — I call it la méthode policier, the “police method.”

Where This Comes From

In conversation classes, my main goal is to get students talking as much as possible. The most natural way to do that is to ask about their own life — what they did, what they’re planning, what they enjoy. But a short, closed question like “what did you do this weekend?” tends to produce a short, closed answer. The student isn’t wrong, but they also aren’t practicing much.

I noticed I’d unconsciously slip into interrogation mode after a student’s short answer — asking “with who?”, “why?”, “how?”, almost like a detective. It worked well because it was personalized to the student’s real experience, but it was unstructured. So I turned it into a repeatable method: a fixed list of question words, asked in the same order, every time.

The Question List

Whenever someone gives you a simple sentence in French — or whenever you want to expand a simple sentence you’ve just said — run through this list:

1. Quand (when)
2. Où (where)
3. Avec qui (with whom)
4. Pourquoi (why)
5. Comment (how)
6. Combien de temps (how long)

Watching a Sentence Grow

Take the starting sentence: j’ai mangé au restaurant (“I ate at a restaurant”). Applying the question list turns it into something like this, one layer at a time:

• Quand est-ce que tu es allé au restaurant ? → Samedi soir, vers 19h.
• Où est-ce que tu es allé ? → Dans un restaurant en plein centre de Paris, dans le troisième arrondissement.
• Avec qui est-ce que tu y es allé ? → Tout seul.
• Pourquoi est-ce que tu y es allé ? → Parce que j’avais envie d’essayer ce nouveau restaurant japonais.
• Comment est-ce que tu y es allé ? → J’ai pris le métro jusqu’à Charles de Gaulle Étoile, puis j’ai marché trois minutes.
• Combien de temps est-ce que tu es resté ? → Environ une heure.

Put it all together, and the original single sentence becomes: Samedi soir vers 19h, je suis allé dans un restaurant en plein centre de Paris, dans le troisième arrondissement, parce que j’avais envie d’essayer ce nouveau restaurant japonais. J’y suis allé seul, en métro, et j’y suis resté environ une heure. From one flat sentence to a detailed, natural-sounding paragraph.

Why This Works

The exercise feels a little artificial at first — running through a checklist of questions isn’t how real conversation flows. But that’s intentional. Each question word targets a different grammatical skill:

• Quand and combien de temps train expressions of time and duration.
• Où trains prepositions of place.
• Avec qui trains vocabulary around relationships and the preposition “avec.”
• Pourquoi trains cause-and-effect structures (parce que, pour).
• Comment trains means and manner (en métro, à pied, en voiture).

By practicing all six systematically, rather than whichever question happens to come up naturally in conversation, you build automatic reflexes for each one. Over time, the artificial “checklist” feeling fades, and reaching for these structures becomes fluid.

Practicing It in Both Directions

There are two ways to use this exercise:

1. Answering. Start with a simple sentence about something you did or plan to do, then answer all six questions about it yourself, out loud or in writing.
2. Asking. This is the harder direction. Give yourself (or a study partner) a bare sentence like “je suis allé au Japon” and try to generate all six questions from scratch. Many learners can answer these questions easily but freeze when they have to form them — which tells you exactly which skill still needs work.

Try It Yourself

Take a simple sentence about something you did recently. It doesn’t need to be interesting — “I went to the supermarket” works just as well as “I went to Japan.” Answer all six questions about it. Then take a simple sentence about something you’re planning to do, and do the same using the near future or the simple future.

Conclusion

The gap between understanding French and speaking it fluently often isn’t a vocabulary problem — it’s a structural one. You know the words; you just haven’t practiced turning a flat sentence into a detailed one. The police method gives you a repeatable framework to close that gap: six question words, applied consistently, until reaching for time, place, company, reason, manner, and duration becomes second nature.