And Assimil?

Assimil is not the worst book you can buy, but it's totally insufficient to learn a language and will take you as much time as another, better program. The pity is that they are so marketable, a real bookseller's dream. But don't get caught if you think that with an Assimil book it will be "easier to learn the language". It just won't. On the tapes they only have somebody reading the dialogs, no drills nor any oral exercise. And the phrases in the dialogs are not that useful.

One day I was at the French/Spanish bookshop in the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, and I asked the owner if he sold FSI or Pimsleur tapes. He answered that no, he did not, but that they had better tapes. As he actually had some FSI material, I thought I was on something hot until I saw this nice gentleman show me his "fantastic tapes", Assimil, one of the worst rip off you can find. I pointed that I knew the tapes and that they just did not work, because they have no drills, few tapes and unusable dialogs. He satisfied answer was that they were "very popular" and that he sold quite a lot of them every year. What could I say, he was right, after all most people that buy language books will never speak their target language, so what's the matter?