Teach Yourself French by Gaelle Graham, 034094675X, Lowest Book Price Finder

Customer Reviews:

French (Teach Yourself)

I found the combination of the BOOK AND CASSETTE very helpful in teaching me the basics of French. (The book alone is good but lacks the helpful "how do you say it" that you get with the cassette.)

A good refresher, but not for beginners

I bought this CD/book in an attempt to relearn French 17 years after O level. At the same time I bought the Michel Thomas CDs and went to night school. The Gaelle Graham course is really only for people with a prior knowledge of French. I agree with the previous reviewer that the spoken bits are very fast and hard to keep up with, but then so is French in France and so the recordings are certainly not patronising like some. I think this course is rare in being truly quite a useful intermediate / adjunctive course in a market swamped with beginners resources but without other materials I don't think that this would be enough. If a beginner wants to learn French (or Spanish, German or Italian) from scratch, then Michel Thomas is by far the best way (in my humble opinion!).

For those with low intelligence and a photographic memory.

For some reason this book just doesn't give the user anything to learn. It is not really surprising that languages such as Latin and Ancient Greek, (and Russian), would generally have better learning materials for them, as French is a much more popular language for people from this country to learn and there are many more course books to sieve through. This is one of the french courses that should be sieved out. There is one good french course that I know about, but it wasn't this book. The way that grammar is introduced couldn't be more arbitrary and the phrases that the author suggests the reader to learn are unbearably trite. The cartoon scenarios are also unbearably trite and unimaginative. I bought the analogous "Teach Youself Welsh" book and tapes and that was of exactly the same layout as this book but turned out to be very good. I think it is because plenty of originality and imagination was put into the Welsh course, but in this french course, the author distances herself from the reader and makes it seem more like a chore than fun. And my reason for learning languages, (as is the reason that many other people learn languages I expect), is for the aesthetic value of the languages, and this book just doesn't offer any help to the learner of French, whatever their reason for learning the language. More could be gained from buying a French dictionary and remembering words, or certainly by getting a phrase book and remembering some phrases. As far as the grammar treatment in this book goes I can't stress enough how much easier it would be to get a grammar guide, (and verb drills exercise book etc.); it seems that the book is intended for people of low intelligence but with photographic memories. I prefer the approach of being offered to learn a language as a difficult undertaking, but one which is possible if you are intelligent and hard working enough, but without needing any special abilities like a photographic memory.

Very disappointing

I'm sorry to say this is probably the worst self-taught language product I've run into. I've just been through the first chapter and I won't be going further. The box and book look good, but you'd have to know French pretty well already to get anything out of this program. It *might* work as a brush-up for someone who's just out of practice but, for a beginner, it's next to useless.

There's very little in the way of instruction. You are shown a few phrases, with no clue how to pronounce them, then you have a chance to hear a dialog from the CD using the phrases you were shown. Now it's "your turn" to answer questions from the book. You can check the answers in the back of the book to see if you've guessed correctly, then hear the answers on the CD. "Sounds fair enough," you say? Not really. The native speakers rush through the dialog so fast you can barely read along, let alone try to repeat what the've said. There's no pause while you practice your pronunciation. The best you can do is skip back to the beginning, listen to the whole conversation, then muddle through your own version in a big, garbled lump. Kind of demoralizing, really.

And the questions you're given are absolute quesswork, because you haven't had a chance to get familiar with the material. Often, it's more a matter of picking out a few words that are similar to English and figuring out the answer from those.

Here's an example from Chapter 1:

Look at the illustrations (cartoons of a cafe table, a taxi, and a shopping cart) and listen to the three short dialogs. In the first dialog, a woman says, "Taxi! Taxi! La gare du Nord, s'il vous plait!" And a man replies, "Oui madame!" That's the whole dialog. And the question is: Are the people (a) at home (b) at a grocery shop (c) in a taxi?

I guessed (c) in a taxi -- and that was the correct answer. I must be learning French!

Erm... right. I might learn something from this course if I plow on ahead, but... I think there are better products out there. And why make it harder on yourself than it has to be? Now I'm off to look for a better product, and you can believe I'll check and make sure it has good customer reviews first.

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