I’m typing up my French notes in excel and currently have 2 columns, one for French and one for English translation

Can I partition a page somehow so that part of the page has 2 columns, and then part either one column or more than 2 columns?

am I making any sense whatsoever?

try merging and unmerging cells?

am I making any sense whatsoever?

No

rootes1 probably has the answer though.

Use merge and centre – looks like a letter a with arrows pointing to each side.

Not sure merge/ centre does what you need, or I’ve not understood your question as other have.
Try Window > Split. Or, you can duplicate your current window by going to Window > New window, then Window > Arrange… Tile vertically. In Office 2007 there’s synchronous scrolling feature too.