|
 |
Looking for the best way to learn French | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Ignatius@ Newbie United States Joined 4241 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes | Message 1 of 19 15 April 2013 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I'm looking for a good book to learn French that starts from the
beginning to intermediate. What are the book anyone would recommend for french 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 19 15 April 2013 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Some good choices:
- Assimil New French With Ease. This is divided into about 110 daily lessons, and each lesson contains (1) a short recording in French, (2) a written transcript of the recording in French, and (3) a written translation in English. There are also some useful notes and a couple of fill in the blank exercises. The idea is that you spend 20 to 30 minutes per day listening to the recording while reading along in English and in French, and you "soak up" the language. After 50 days, you start the "active wave", which involved going back to lesson 1 and translation from English to French, which is relatively easy at that point. After about 5 months, Assimil will get most people to a basic, low-intermediate level: They can carry on a basic conversation and more-or-less read easier native books in French. - If you like audio courses, see if your library has Michel Thomas or Pimsleur. - If you'd like a video course with a workbook, look for French in Action. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 19 15 April 2013 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Perhaps add to it these books/workbooks: Grammaire Progressive and Vocabulaire
Progressif, both by CLE. They are awesome. The first volume of each is meant exactly for beginners. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| watupboy101 Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4902 days ago 65 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 4 of 19 18 April 2013 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
|
1. Assimil New French With Ease
2. Pimsleur 3. MIchel Thomas 4. FSI French 5. Teach Yourself French Those are the bigs ones, my personal favorite, I've tried all but Pimsleur, is Assimil Hands down. Now another helpful book could be "French Verb Tenses" by practice makes perfect! And heck that whole series of Practice makes perfect stuff is great! I recommend getting a few different materials so the basics are mastered then after that do whatever you want. FSI is scarily intensive and is BORING but it is an amazing course if you make it through. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5208 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 19 19 April 2013 at 12:16am | IP Logged | ||
|
I've also used Living Language French, in the 2002 edition .
Forum member RobAustria has a podcast in which (among other things) he compares the older LL "Ultimate" series with the newer ones, and notes that the publisher seems to have significantly less content in the newer editions: Sprachbegeistert on "My favourite language course". (His other videos are also quite interesting.) The LL site, with its current products, is http://www.livinglanguage.com/products/french/ There's also a v. long thread on these forums, comparing various language courses, "Your favourite language programme? ": link. You can also do a "tag" search by: clicking on the tags (if any) at the top of a thread, or by clicking on the Search button at the top of your screen (in the black banner), and then choosing the tag you wish (e.g. Assimil, Living Language, etc.) . Most of us on Htlal consider Rosetta Stone much better in the "marketing" department than in the "language instruction" department, by the way. (To put it mildly.) Updated to add: FSI stands for Foreign Service Institute. Many of their language courses have been repackaged by companies such as Barron's (e.g. the French course was available as "Barron's Mastering French"), but the original content is also legally available online for free: FSI (The yojik.eu site is from Htlal member Ericounet, who put it up when the original one went down.) FSI's very thorough, but you do have to have a fairly high tolerance for drills. Edited by songlines on 23 April 2013 at 1:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Skvoznyak Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4234 days ago 6 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: French, German | Message 6 of 19 22 April 2013 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||
|
Okay, before I get into my answer I have to point out that
a.) I'm a book-and-tape (or CD) guy. The deity of your choice could put together an all-audio course guaranteed to bring me to native fluency in a year and I still wouldn't try it. I have to have both the book and the audio, and unless you've studied a couple languages on your own before your decision to take up French I recommend the same approach for you. DO NOT TRY TO LEARN A LANGUAGE WITH THE BOOK ALONE unless you're absolutely positive that you know the pronunciation cold. b.) Unless I'm cramming a language specifically for a trip, I avoid any book that uses things like "At the Hotel," "At the Train Station," "At the Airport," etc, as selling points. I want to learn how the language works, not phrases - that way I have the tools to build on what new knowledge comes in. Granted, "At the Restaurant" is always going to be useful, but I might be going to another country visit a military friend and have no need for train station vocabulary...but I digress. c.) I am a big believer in the following: unless you're obscenely wealthy, you'd be making a mistake buying an expensive course as your first one. Get yourself a course for $25 or so and go through it. If you can do that and still want to learn more, that's when you actually open your wallet. I've long since lost count of the number of Rosetta Stone courses I've seen at garage sales. d.) I'm assuming you're starting out from scratch. With those points in mind, I studied French a bit in the early-to-mid 2000s and found that out of the tons and tons of available choices, these were the best courses for the needs I've outlined above for pure beginners: 1.) Teach Yourself Beginner's French. The first ten lessons out of the twenty in the book tell you to some degree how the language works. The second group of ten lessons are on specialized topics and can be taken in any order, so you can skip anything you feel you don't need at the time. I realize that language purists might not like that idea, but the important thing is to keep up your enthusiasm and the quickest way to kill that is to slog your way through a chapter or two that you have no interest in. Note, by the way, that I said "Teach Yourself BEGINNER'S French," not "Teach Yourself French." The latter course isn't bad, but the first is much better for those starting out from scratch. MUCH better. 2.) Beginner's French made easy: A course for beginners: 45 lessons (Francois Makowski). You might have a problem finding this one (and if you do, it'll be a book with two cassettes that you'd be well advised to convert to CD or MP3 from the outset), but it's worth it if you're a beginner. Granted, you can't skip chapters like you can with Teach Yourself Beginner's French, but all the chapters are very short. The book is full of useful cultural notes and the course is actually quite fun to work your way through. The amount of vocabulary in it (a little over 1,000 words) isn't huge, but it's more than you'll get from Teach Yourself Beginner's French and certainly more than you'll get from your $179 Rosetta Stone Level One course, and this course cost me $19.99. (BTW, I just took a look at Amazon: the new copies are absurdly priced at Rosetta Stone levels by those jerks who hope they can find one sucker to drop $163 for a twenty-dollar course, but they have 12 used copies starting out at $0.01) 3.) Living French by Jean-Claude Arragon. This course has been around for half a century, but it gets updated often. One CD, pretty solid text for the beginner, full of actual language and grammar lessons rather than specialized tourist crap. All of these courses were under $25 when I bought them new. However, I should point out that the first answer you got comes from someone whose knowledge of French dwarfs mine, so if what he proposes is in an acceptable price range for you, then you should take his advice over mine. I have not tried the audio courses he suggested because of my aforementioned hate for all-audio courses, and I have not tried Assimil but I have heard great things about it. Still, if you've never studied a language on your own before, at least consider my "I'll prove to myself that I can handle the short cheap course first before really investing money into this" approach. That way, if you can't do it or if you lose interest, you won't be out too much money. It's the same principle as people who drop hundreds for gym memberships or martial arts lessons and then don't gain a pound of muscle, lose a pound of fat or progress past their white belt because they can't bring themselves to get into the habit of just doing it. This approach, by the way, really paid off for me a short while ago. I was dating a girl whose mother was Vietnamese and I was REALLY into the idea of learning the language to at least a passable conversational level. However, wanting this to be a surprise for her and not having any natives to help me, I wasn't sure I would be successful so I limited my initial investment to the $21.95 Teach Yourself Vietnamese course. It's a good thing I did, because after about a month of study it became clear to me that I don't have the ear or natural aptitude to learn a tonal language without a native speaker to coach me through my mistakes. As such, my attempt to learn the language was a failure and a fairly colossal one, but it only cost me $21.95. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 19 22 April 2013 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I personally know two people who paid for Rosetta Stone's French course, and neither was a slacker—one was a retired military officer, and the other a retired school teacher. Both of them made an honest effort, and neither of them ever made it within miles of A2. And there's a suspicious lack of successful RS students online and at French meetups. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but it does seem like an awful lot of money for uncertain results. For folks on a budget, Assimil's New French with Ease is usually available from online stores for US$50–55, which is quite reasonable for a good quality course with a book and CD. If you'd like a grammar book, another excellent buy is Essential French Grammar, which is often under US$5. And there's always FSI French Basic, which is completely free. I'm sure that there are excellent courses out there for US$25. If you find one you enjoy studying at that price, go for it and don't look back. I only recommend Assimil because it's still relatively cheap and it seems to work really well for at least 80% of the people who try it and stick with it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| watupboy101 Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4902 days ago 65 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 8 of 19 23 April 2013 at 1:25am | IP Logged | ||
I've personally seen it for about $32 on Amazon! It's a steal! So to the OP, you can't go wrong with that cheap of a language course that is backed by so many people, IMHO. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
