Inconsistency Is Consistently Frustrating
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I used to live in France and acquired fluency during my stay there. I visited old friends there last week, and my girlfriend (who already speaks two languages to a high level) purchased this book in order to do a crash course.
As I was surfing the net, she came to me with a question. "Why do these first three examples feature an accent, bit the fourth not?" I looked at the item to which she was referring, which was a guide to saying 'cheers' in chapter one. It gave something like:
à votre santé
à la vôtre
à ta santé
A la tienne
I replied that there is no reason to have dropped the accent there. (In reality, one has the right to, because l'Académie decreed that upper case letters don't require accents, but everyone knows to include them because pronuncation changes with some of them. In the case of this book, the authors should pick a style and stick to it ... and everybody knows that you teach beginners with the accents in place, so that the learners register the word as having one.)
Not five minutes later, she's asking me a question again, because she had spotted that the word for sister (soeur) was twice written with a cojoined 'o' and 'e' and once with 'oe' unseparated. She wanted to know why that was done; did it affect the pronunciation? Were there two cases at work that she needed to know about, one requiring the cojoined letters, one without?
She wasn't pleased when I told her that it is traditionally spelt with the cojoined letters but people type and write it without them quite acceptably, and that the publishers had instead been inconsistent with their typography.
Now, I haven't actually read the book, so I can't comment on how good it is really. Please bear that in mind when reading this review. Nonetheless, it is my opinion that a book that features such inconsistencies is not the best from which to learn.
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