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Learning French: A Rendezvous With French-Speaking Cultures
The musical sound of the French language tends to conjure certain images for English-speakers. Leisurely mornings of coffee and pastries in a café. The Bohemian life of an artist on the Left Bank of the Seine. The romance of « Je t'aime. » The understatement of « Ça va. » the inspiration of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité: French is a beautiful—and global—language, and one of the most rewarding you can study.
30 pages, Audiobook
Published January 1, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 20, 2020
This is an amazing DVD course very smartly crafted, in the progress of 30 lessons packed in almost all the tenses and moods, a lot of vocabulary and idiomatic phrases, with well-designed in-class and homework practices. Most importantly, parallel to the language itself, the course covers enormous practical material about French custom, food, how to dress, transportation, travel in different regions and other francophone countries (and shopping advice there), technology, how to respect the French privacy, music, theater, visual arts, museums, and especially the French values. One special component is the analysis of various differences between the French and the Americans, apparently aided by this American author's marriage to a French, and her life in France for some years. There are enormous photos and video clips of real or acted scenes, demonstrating the use and the meaning of the language in different situations. The lessons are further made very interesting by studio acting (which must have been aided by the authors' acting experience) and the author's remarkable humor. The course seems meant for serious learners, with a fast pace and a 534-page work book, which suggest extra work needed for the students to pause and replay parts of the DVD, to take notes of new vocabulary, and to do homework. The only imperfection to me is the author's strong aspiration of the P, T, and K sounds, but that is offset by the pronunciation of the lab portion by a French speaker, seemingly her husband. This course is so interesting that each lesson stimulates eagerness to move onto the next one.
April 4, 2021
A good review for one who has taken years of French, but I would not...repeat NOT...recommend this to a beginner.
August 20, 2020
Note: I did not finish this (stopped around lesson 10) because I found better materials to suit my purpose (I've been using the Coffee Break French podcast, a flashcard app, and the free MOOC course Vivre en France by Alliance Française Paris Île-de-France (highly recommend!). This review is based on my impression on the content I did get through in this course and skimming later lessons in this workbook.
This is the companion book to The Great Courses' Learn French: A Rendezvous with French-Speaking Cultures, which is available at that link, on their subscription service The Great Courses Plus, and available as an audiobook, though I'm not sure that I'd recommend audio only for learning French because of spelling. The workbook itself is not a textbook, and I would not recommend buying it on its own without the course because the content is heavily dependent on the content of the course lessons and does not come itself with standalone audio.
The course is taught college lecture-style by Ann Williams who has co-authored several college level learning French textbooks. There are 30 lessons that roughly cover the grammar needed for CEFR levels A0-A2, beginner/débutant to elemetary/élémentaire (this is my opinion; I have not seen anywhere online that has evaluated and aligned this course with the CEFR). Each lesson is about 50 minutes long. The first 35 or so minutes are lecture by Ann Williams, and the remaining 15 or so minutes are audio readings from the language lab section of the workbook.
The course starts from zero, all the way from "Bonjour monsieur, bonjour madame." But don't think for a second that this course is going to be slow. By the end of the first lecture, you can already conjugate -er verbs in the present tense and make simple sentences.
I do not think this course is suitable as the first introduction to the French language. The lecturer often uses sentences in French with vocabulary and grammar that has not yet been covered, and she does not always translate these sentences for the viewer. This course much better suited to people who have tried learning French before. It's ideal, I think, for "false beginners", people who have started to learn the language in the past but have forgotten enough to need to start from the beginning to refresh their memory. It would also be good for people who have incomplete studies from various online tools, like Duolingo and similar apps which can be great for getting used to vocabulary and grammar but don't necessary have the structure of a class or textbook. Lecture-style courses are good for connecting dots that may be hard to connect through self-study alone.
One negative thing I have noticed is that the course has a fairly strong American bias. The lecturer is American and assumes her audience is too. Her pronunciation notes use reference words that assume standard American pronunciation, and she makes comments about "losing the American accent" and "sounding less American". As an American myself, this doesn't really affect me, but I know it may bother those from other countries. Ultimately, I don't think this bias would have a major impact on the course for non-Americans if they can look past the "American accent" comments, but your mileage may vary.
As someone who took three years of French in middle and high school almost ten years ago, I found this course to be the sort of fast paced refresher I was looking for to continue my studies. Personally, I find I learn better with lecture-style courses, so this kind of course suits me, but there are many people who don't like lectures for languages. Of course, this sort of course is not going to be the end-all, be-all for French studying--like any IRL class, you're going to have to supplement your learnings in class and through homework with building vocabulary and consuming French-language media on your own time. But I think a course like this can help build a good foundation for diving deeper into the French language.
This is the companion book to The Great Courses' Learn French: A Rendezvous with French-Speaking Cultures, which is available at that link, on their subscription service The Great Courses Plus, and available as an audiobook, though I'm not sure that I'd recommend audio only for learning French because of spelling. The workbook itself is not a textbook, and I would not recommend buying it on its own without the course because the content is heavily dependent on the content of the course lessons and does not come itself with standalone audio.
The course is taught college lecture-style by Ann Williams who has co-authored several college level learning French textbooks. There are 30 lessons that roughly cover the grammar needed for CEFR levels A0-A2, beginner/débutant to elemetary/élémentaire (this is my opinion; I have not seen anywhere online that has evaluated and aligned this course with the CEFR). Each lesson is about 50 minutes long. The first 35 or so minutes are lecture by Ann Williams, and the remaining 15 or so minutes are audio readings from the language lab section of the workbook.
The course starts from zero, all the way from "Bonjour monsieur, bonjour madame." But don't think for a second that this course is going to be slow. By the end of the first lecture, you can already conjugate -er verbs in the present tense and make simple sentences.
I do not think this course is suitable as the first introduction to the French language. The lecturer often uses sentences in French with vocabulary and grammar that has not yet been covered, and she does not always translate these sentences for the viewer. This course much better suited to people who have tried learning French before. It's ideal, I think, for "false beginners", people who have started to learn the language in the past but have forgotten enough to need to start from the beginning to refresh their memory. It would also be good for people who have incomplete studies from various online tools, like Duolingo and similar apps which can be great for getting used to vocabulary and grammar but don't necessary have the structure of a class or textbook. Lecture-style courses are good for connecting dots that may be hard to connect through self-study alone.
One negative thing I have noticed is that the course has a fairly strong American bias. The lecturer is American and assumes her audience is too. Her pronunciation notes use reference words that assume standard American pronunciation, and she makes comments about "losing the American accent" and "sounding less American". As an American myself, this doesn't really affect me, but I know it may bother those from other countries. Ultimately, I don't think this bias would have a major impact on the course for non-Americans if they can look past the "American accent" comments, but your mileage may vary.
As someone who took three years of French in middle and high school almost ten years ago, I found this course to be the sort of fast paced refresher I was looking for to continue my studies. Personally, I find I learn better with lecture-style courses, so this kind of course suits me, but there are many people who don't like lectures for languages. Of course, this sort of course is not going to be the end-all, be-all for French studying--like any IRL class, you're going to have to supplement your learnings in class and through homework with building vocabulary and consuming French-language media on your own time. But I think a course like this can help build a good foundation for diving deeper into the French language.
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September 14, 2022Note this comes with a dvd, not a cd for you to practice just listening to the subtle sounds of the language.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews