French For Dummies, with CD (For Dummies (Language & Literature))
French For Dummies, with CD (For Dummies (Language & Literature))
The fast, informal way to learn to speak French
French is known as perhaps the most beautiful of all languages. Listen to someone speak French—sure, you don’t have a clue what they’re saying, but aren’t you enraptured by the sound of it?
French is a beautiful language but quite difficult to learn. Whether you need to learn the language for a French class, or you travel overseas for business or leisure, this revised edition of French for Dummies can help. Written in an easy-to-follow format, it gives you just what you need for basic communication in French
- Expanded coverage of necessary grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciations
- A fully updated and expanded audio CD (including real-life conversations)
- Useful exercises, practice questions, and a mini-dictionary
Business, an upcoming class, travel – whatever your reason for wanting to learn a new language but don’t have time to take a class, French For Dummies can get you well on your way to becoming fluent in no time!
List Price: $ 24.99
Price: [wpramaprice asin="1118004647"]
Ce livre, c’est nul (This book is the pits),
Like an pre-adolescent, FRENCH FOR DUMMIES can’t make up its mind what it wants to be when it grows up. It wants to be more than phrase book, but it (by its own admission) it does not want to be a text book. In the end, it falls short on both counts.
It opts for quick answers and shortcuts, so much so that students wanting to do more than repeat stock phrases will be sorely dissapointed. Yes, you could spend the asking price for the book, then set about memorizing the dialogues, but what for? You could tell a doctor, “I have an upset stomach” (J’ai mal au cur), but not “I am having chest pain.”
In the end, the wise reader would do well either to go about seriously learning the language (and for that I would recommend the text that accompanies the PBS series French in Action) or buy an inexpensive phrase book or two. (Or three… Anyone traveling to Paris ought to order WICKED FRENCH a tongue-in-cheek phrase book so that when you are being ignored by the haughty staff at a cafe can ask a waiter “C’est vrai que vous avez honte de votre menu?” (Is it true that you are ashamed of your menu.) Not exactly the type of phrases found in Berlitz’s phrase book.
But please, pass on this one.
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|French-Lite but too light and not right,
I purchased this book in a Hongkong bookshop because it was the only choice and I am sorry that I did. The authors say that they want to teach essential communication skills, but their text is basically a phrase book that teaches a large number of one-liners. It is deficient in the progressive, building block approach that is so essential to language learning. Moreover, the book often digresses into too much cultural and travel information. For example, we are told how to read temperatures in Celsius, where to find a nightclub, and the advantages of buying a museum pass. Fine, but I bought the book because I wanted to study French. There are also more than a few pesky typographical mistakes and instances where the dialogue on the CD doesn’t exactly agree with what is written in the text. A neophyte learning French has enough to deal with without having to figure out what the authors are trying to say. Finally, the book tries to be too cute in de-mystifying language learning and is constantly talking down to its readers. (They waste a total of six pages on cartoons written in English that make fun of studying French.) A book with a name like ‘French for Dummies’ should try to exceed expectations. Unfortunately, this book tends to live up to its title.
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|Good primer for beginners,
No book can make you fluent in a language. But this is a great resource for those who only want to learn enough to get by while traveling or who want a good back-up for other instructional methods.
You’ll get a solid working vocabulary, easy-to-understand pronuciation tips and a foundation in basic grammar.
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