Customer Reviews

Conversational French in 20 Lessons (Cortina Method)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you were to rip this book in half and just keep the reference grammar section, you'd still have a bargain. The twenty lessons are excellent and are also a bargain on their own. Compare this book to everything else on the shelves at your favorite bookstore, compare its price to the prices of the others, and you'll soon learn that by that scale any Cortina "20 lessons in Conversational (whatever language)..." is worth four times what it costs. The free tape they offer is merely a promo and not overly helpful, but the book is top notch. In short: the best bang for the buck out there, period.

The Cortina series are awesome. I have the French nad the German books in this series. I have always thought French was beyond my abilities. I love languages but French always seemed heard. But with the Cortina it was easy to sound the words out and once I got the free tape that they include a postage paid card for, I had French down pat. Eventually I want to learn 10 languages plus my native English! I highly recommend this book.

This is an excellent book for beginners! My son was able to pick it up and immediately use it. The lessons are easy to understand. It is a well written book and was well worth the money. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn French.

I have always been very eager to learn French and I bought this book thinking it would be helpful. I read the prior customer reviews, which were all very positive, so I decided to buy it. As an added bonus, this company promised to send a free CD or cassette in French to the buyer of this book to ease the learning process. So I bought the book and mailed the order card that was in the back to get my free CD. When I received the CD, I immediately listened to it, and to my dismay, found that it wasn't the actual lessons. The CD/cassette is actually just an advertisement to make you buy the real CD/cassette with the actual lessons. And wait, there's more! The real CD/Cassette set is $157, which, after my experience with this company's sneaky marketing strategies, I am very reluctant to pay. The book itself is actually quite helpful, but please heed my advice and do not buy this book with the hopes of recieving a free cassette or CD in French that will start you speaking French "almost overnight".

With a French Student visiting, I needed a quick simple approach to communication. I found enough phasing to be immediately useful. I am now using this book to enable my beginners attempt at writing my French acquaitance in French. Having learned just enough French in school to have some basic understanding, I needed the linguistic support this book offers. The phaseology is simple, but not pedantic with minor effort. I would imagine this will come in handy when we travel to France. Au revoir.

The book is very helpful for me and I now look forward to returning to Paris with more proficiency in French. A good buy indeed.

This is a great book to learn French but especially good to refresh your high school or college French lessons. An older book but still very good.