Customer Reviews

Fast French (Gimmick Series)

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I would not purchase this book unless I had studied Frenh before. It is extremely light on grammar and concentrates mainly on providing the student with 1000+ vocabulary words that can be used in certain simple sentence structures. However, I believe the book's claim---you will be able to communicate in French as a tourist or business traveller, if you actually memorize the entire book and understand the grammar within its pages---to be true. But whether or not you will be able to accomplish this by using this book alone is debateable. Firstly, there is no accompanying CDROM to help with pronunciation and the author does not provide any phonetic spellings to help the student sound out the word in the correct way. Secondly some of the idioms used within the chapters are never adequately defined. The vocabulary is grouped thematically, but all this means is that you may find the word "Voiture" for car in a section that teaches the present tense. Adrienne summarizes all vocabulary in a French-English glossary at the end of the book, but completely omits the all important English-French section that is imperative for a language neophyte. Thirdly, the book covers the present, the future, and the passé composé but completely omits any discussion of the imperfait or passé simple. It is a beginning book, but these tenses should be, at least mentioned.

I bought this book because I liked the way it handled expressions that are needed for everyday conversation but are not always included in other beginning or intermediate books. For example, if I wanted to say "I am in the middle of eating" or "We were about to leave" or "How often do you go to class?". this book provides the means of expressing these sorts of indefinite ideas like "already", "not yet", "no longer" and "still" that we use all the time in English, but have no clue on a beginners level of how to express in French.

Bottom line: the book contains some hidden gems, but you must look for them and be at a point where you need little explanation; if you are not at a conversational level, or are strictly a beginner, purchase one of the more popular workbooks that includes a CDROM for pronunciation.

I took some French in college, and wanted to review before starting classes again. This book is great for that purpose. The lessons are extremely concise. The drawback is that they might be a little too concise for beginners. Detailed explanations of grammatical rules/structure are not given; instead only very brief explanations followed by practical examples. The lessons are short, but they're effective if you really take your time and go through them slowly and thoroughly.

My primary complaint is that absolutely NO help is given with pronunciation. Not a single word or phrase is followed by a pronunciation key.

Overall, if you are looking to brush-up on your French, I would recommend this book. But if you are completely inexperienced with the language, this book might serve as a supplemental study guide, but not your primary resource.