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Linguaphone French Expert - Really? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| issemiyaki Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5018 days ago 38 posts - 58 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 8 29 December 2014 at 5:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How "advanced" is Linguaphone's "Advanced-to-Expert" program, really?
My goal is to be able to understand presidential speeches, keep up with political talk shows on French television and radio, watch movies, and of course, read complex news articles, editorials and opinion pieces. I'm currently working my way through these products: Assimil With Ease Assimil Without Toil Assimil Using French Assimil Business French News in Slow French (this website is AWESOME) French in Action - the PBS series (the transcript is available online - great!) Bien-Dire Audiomagazine (Still too advanced for me now, but it's on tap.) Basically, if someone's talking about tax problems, I need to understand that. If they're talking about international talks between two countries breaking down, I need to keep up with that. In short, if someone were to plop me in the middle of a news program as a special guest and ask me to speak about the differences between the political parties in France, I want to be able to understand what's being asked, and be able to respond coherently. This is the level of proficiency I'm going for. Thanks for your help. Edited by issemiyaki on 29 December 2014 at 6:11am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4041 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 8 29 December 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In my study of German, I progressed through the "advanced" courses of Assimil, Linguaphone, and Living Language Ultimate, as well as some specialized business texts. At the time, I found the Linguaphone "advanced to expert" course interesting and challenging and I did, indeed, learn something. However, in terms of content, save for the audio, I could have learned as much through reading a couple of a good newspapers or news magazines, as the advanced Assimil material was, in retrospect, sufficient preparation. In my opinion, if you manage to work through all of the material that you listed above, you should move directly to "native" materials, be they newspapers, magazines, radio, podcasts, television, films, or other. Bonne chance avec vos études! Edited by Speakeasy on 29 December 2014 at 11:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4998 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 8 29 December 2014 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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No matter how advanced it is, you've obviously got enough learner aimed material to get
to the point from which you can jump right to native input. You can start from easier news, continue to regular articles and news broadcasts and than to longer and more complex discussions and commentaries. I would even disagree slightly with speakeasy: you will be ready to start using the real input way before you finish all of what you've listed above, in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5521 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 8 29 December 2014 at 1:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The tasks you describe here can be performed awkwardly at the B2 level (with the addition of a small amount of specialist vocabulary), and pretty well at the C1 level. For more information on the CEFR levels, see this self-assessment checklist. We could roughly summarize these levels are follows: Beginner: A1, A2 Intermediate: B1 (can function as a tourist), B2 (can survive a native high-school civics class, or 1st-year university with support) Advanced: C1 (basic professional fluency), C2 (can probably be admitted to law school) In general, courses will help you the most during the levels A1 and A2. For B1 and B2, courses will still help, but they won't be remotely enough—you'll need to read and write and listen and speak quite a bit. For C1 and up, you can build your passive skills through large amounts of native input (a Super Challenge or two). Advanced active skills may require a period of actual immersion for many people.
I'm not familiar with Bien-Dire, but the other resources here go up through B2 or so at the highest:
By the time you reach B2, you should be heavily engaged with actual, native materials, and not just relying on courses. To give you an idea, my B2 exam required: 1. Listening to actual French radio news broadcasts, and not particularly easy ones. 2. Writing a "letter to the editor" of a fictitious magazine, arguing for a change in advertisement policy. 3. Reading news articles from relatively "high-brow" newspapers. 4. Giving a 10-minute presentation on Paris toll policy without notes, and answering 10 minutes of questions. (The topic was drawn from a jar.) The level of coherency and insight required was relatively low: About what you'd expect from a high-school student who doesn't read enough books. So given that you need to reach a strong B2 level, or preferably C1, you can see that the courses you've listed won't be enough for most people. The most helpful course on your list is probably Business French, which absolutely encourages you to build B2-level skills, albeit with too narrow a subject-matter focus for a general B2 exam. But what you really need is practice, and lots of it: 1. Read books, watch TV, and listen to news radio. 2. Read a newspaper like Le Monde regularly. 3. Write, and get corrected (possibly using lang-8). 4. Practice speaking, and practice speaking about topics you want to discuss. A good Skype-based tutor may be an excellent investment—they tend to specialize in the sort of topics that interest you, at least at the B2 level and up. Strongly consider doing a Super Challenge (5,000 pages/150 hours watching) or even a double Challenge. That will at least get your passive skills up where you want them. Bon courage! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5364 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 5 of 8 29 December 2014 at 3:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree with what was said above. I'll add that I recall a few discussions about the level of Linguaphone's Advanced to Expert courses because I was interested in the Spanish program. The general consensus (at least for Spanish) was that Linguaphone created a good product (entirely in the target language) but it was at a level less than what would be obtained by the advanced Assimil courses. I think your best bet is to stick to Using French and the Business French course... and native materials.
One mega-course you did not mention is the FSI French Basic Course which is not only free but is regarded as more advanced than all of the other courses out there. With a basic Assimil course, an advanced Assimil course (or two) and FSI I don't think anyone would need any other courses. Edit: I'll also add that your goal level is essentially what I want to obtain in Spanish. I did all of the advanced courses in Spanish (Assimil Using, Living Language, FSI, etc) and have been working with native materials every day for a couple years and I'm still not at the level you describe. The advanced courses are great, but they will only take you so far. They'll give you a great foundation to move on to native materials. Edited by James29 on 29 December 2014 at 3:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5521 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 8 29 December 2014 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
FSI French Basic is quite good, and it thoroughly covers almost all the grammar you'd be expected to use on a B2 exam. I actually spent an hour reading through the advanced lessons shortly after passing my B2 exam, and my reaction was: 1. I know all this stuff already, though I haven't automatized the rarer irregular verbs. 2. FSI devotes too much time to rare irregular verbs that can easily be avoided in speech. 3. Some important intermediate topics, such as the subjunctive and the concordance des temps are covered very late by FSI. 4. If you've passed a B2 exam with a decent speaking score, there's no obvious reason to use FSI French Basic. I actually think that Business French is a slightly more advanced course than FSI Basic French, thought the focus is completely different: 1. FSI focuses almost entirely on speaking drills and core grammar. 2. Business French includes lots of longer writing exercises that could be very useful at a B2/C1 level, assuming you had good feedback. 3. Business French has quite a bit of native-speed conversational audio. If didn't have regular access to lots of conversational partners, and if you didn't mind a heavy business bias, then I'd imagine that FSI and Business French would complement each other nicely through B2, though you'd still want to include lots of native media and speaking/writing practice. At a true C1 level, there are very few French courses. The closest I've seen are advanced grammar workbooks like Grammaire progressive du français: Niveau perfectionnement, which covers lots of fiddly little details that trip up even advanced learners. But again, this will be a relatively small part of your studies at advanced levels. Sctroyenne also recommended Alter Ego 5 at this level. There are two problems which make high-level courses rare: 1. Very few learners reach this level unless they're fully immersed, professional immigrants, so the market is tiny. 2. There's just so much to learn at this level that no course could hope to cover it all. On the input side, you can solve these problems with large quantities of native materials. Writing can be practiced and corrected online and with tutors (and you can always take your time when writing). The real trick is learning speak the language truly comfortably, automatically and persuasively, especially in the registers used by well-read, university-educated adults. I'm still short of that goal, though in a few rare, glorious moments, I can fake it badly without visibly annoying the natives. Beyond a certain level, speaking skills benefit from serious immersion, especially for people learning a language less ubiquitous than English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| issemiyaki Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5018 days ago 38 posts - 58 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 7 of 8 30 December 2014 at 8:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wow, you guys really came through for me. This was a healthy and productive discussion; I enjoyed reading all the comments; and I know this info will help others in the future.
@Speakeasy, you answered my question. I will not be purchasing the Linguaphone “Expert” edition. What you say makes a LOT of sense. After some of these courses, I’ll be able to tackle native material. @Cavesa, thanks for your imput as well. @Emk – great job with the breakdown. Again, that will be vital for others as they dig in to their studies. Alto Ego is amazing, if you have a good teacher. The books are kind of hard to use on your own. The best preparation so far for me has been “News in Slow French.” They have a competitor, RFI Français Façil. But right now, News in Slow French is my go-to. They’re slower, the topics are more varied, and the hosts actually talk about the news and give their opinions, so it’s much more engaging than RFI Français Façil, at least for me. Also, after looking through the Business French … even though it’s only dealing with one field, the framework is there to do so many wonderful things with the language. I will easily be able to move to science, politics, or whatever afterwards. Literature is another beast all together. (FYI: When I learned Spanish, I spend weeks underlining words in novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I said this time around I’m not going to make the same mistake. I’m looking for colloquial language and idiomatic expressions, something I severely overlooked when learning Spanish. I’m interested in learning more about the Super Challenge. Where can I get more info? Thanks again for all your help. Dwayne Edited by issemiyaki on 30 December 2014 at 8:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5465 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 8 of 8 08 February 2015 at 1:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As useful emk excellent feedback here, your advice provides some insight for myself too, cheers. Bien-dire is a subscription based (or you can buy individual magazines) audio magazine which comes with an audio CD for each magazine, although you can choose to buy it cheaper without the audio. Articles are based predominantly around French themes- cultural, tourist, politics, entertainment, outdoors, food, focus on certain areas or villages of France, and to a lesser degree other parts of the francophone world. It looks high quality and I can't wait to get my teeth into it - for me that's still a while off yet, but I have read through a handful of the articles and have subscribed to build up a nice collection. This is actually a very strong interest of mine- Geography, cultural insights, about France etc so it makes sense to subscribe- I can't be bothered with most other themed magazines. The articles are all clearly graded next to their headings between A1 (not so many) and C2. There are a lot of articles particlulary in the B1-C2 range. It's beautifully presented and well recommended by me :) Fry on 1 person has voted this message useful |
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