About
Who built this
I'm Leonard French — an American lawyer living in Réimech, and a future Luxembourger. I moved here in 2021 and I'm working toward naturalisation, which means passing the Sproochentest.
I've sat it twice. I scored 48, then 40. The pass mark is 50.
Why the second score was lower
Not because I'd learned less. Because of what happens to me under examination pressure.
I have a diagnosed condition that produces a freeze response in high-stakes situations — a fight-or-flight reaction that shuts down language retrieval entirely. It isn't an inability to learn Luxembourgish. It's that when the word won't come, I don't substitute a simpler one. I lock up. In an exam scored on fluency and interactivity, locking up costs everything.
I asked the Institut National des Langues for an accommodation: not a different test, not easier questions, not more points — simply time to settle before speaking. I submitted a letter from my psychologist documenting the condition.
The request was denied.
So I built this instead
Fofzeg is what I made to work around a barrier I couldn't get removed. Its whole design is aimed at one problem: making speech come out even when the perfect sentence won't.
- Three tiers for every answer. A polished version, an A2 version, and a survival floor of three or four short sentences that still communicate. The middle tier is the one you drill. The floor is the one that saves you.
- Escape-hatch phrases. Ways to keep talking when a word disappears. Circumlocution is a scored skill, not a confession of failure.
- Low-stakes repetition. Spaced review, self-rating, timed mocks — so that exam pressure feels familiar rather than novel.
The name means "fifty." The number you need.
For other candidates
If you're preparing for the Sproochentest, you're welcome to use this. If you're preparing for it while managing anxiety, a processing difference, or anything else that makes a timed oral exam disproportionately hard: you are not failing at the language. You are failing at the format. Those are different problems and only one of them is yours to fix.