Although the French orthographic system has been the subject of numerous studies highlighting some of its inherent complexity, researchers in Applied Linguistics rarely rely on these results to establish the areas of difficulty for learners of French as a Foreign or Second Language. Our research aims to understand the challenges of an adult audience (n = 20) as they enter the French orthographic system (first 20 hours of A1 level). We based our sudy on the multi-system approach of Catach (1995), to which we added phonemico-graphic and ideogrammic components to analyze the errors produced during five dictations proposed at the end of the circle of literacy (neurolinguistic approach). Results and analyses show that 63% of the words were error-free. Most errors were phonemico-graphic (59%), meaning that the learners had the wrong acoustic perception of the sounds composing a word or failed to choose the correct graphemes to transcribe certain sounds at the heart of the French phonological system (archiphoneme [OE] and nasal vowels). The learners also struggled with specific components of the French orthographic system such as apostrophes or the use of capitals (ideogramms). Morphogrammic, logogrammic, and phonogrammic errors are residual and represent each less than 10% of the errors detected.