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Product Details
Hardcover: 310 pages
Publisher: Higby Family Trust; 2 Revised edition (June 1997)
All language texts are not created equally. They tend to fall roughly into one of two categories: 1) lightweight quasi-phrasebooks that make liberal use of phonetic spellings and sweep grammar under the rug; 2) bone-dry reviews of the mechanics of a language, peppered with the occasional vocabulary for memorization. How rare it is to find a book that preserves the flavor of a language while laying it forth in an eminently practical manner; such is the present volume. New words, conjugations and formulae are introduced in the context of short readings and quotations, often humorous, from Voltaire, La Rochefoucauld and many others. The authors have made ingenious use of cognates, words recognizable by their English counterparts, to tap an instant vocabulary. It's gratifying to discover how much French you already know as an English speaker. This approach gives you the opportunity to put that knowledge to work immediately, and to build upon it -- not without effort, but without the drudgery that you might expect from such rigorous fare. The preference for real French text (as opposed to textbook cookery -- "See Pierre run. Run, Pierre, run!") ensures that material is covered in a natural and useful order. Although it provides simple guidelines for pronunciation, the book's focus is (as the title suggests) on the language as written. For conversational skills and comprehension of the spoken language, aspiring francophones should supplement this book with tapes and CDs (such as the "Living Language" series) and/or videos (e.g. "French in Action").
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French for Reading Knowledge, 1997 edition, a second edition is in fact the re-printing of the 1952 edtion by Aleetha Palmeri in memory of her father and his colleague E.E. Milligan, the co-author.
The book " is meant to reach that large number of students, college freshmen or graduates, who would like to acquire a reading knpwledge of French in the minimum amount of time."
The Outstanding feature of the text resides in the fact that " the reading matter includes a LARGE NUMBER OF QUOTATIONS from a great variety of Authors and Scientists. " The student gets to read excerpts from Voltaire, Camille Flammarion an astronomer, Montesquieu a political theorist, Leon Binet a famous doctor , and other illustrious French writers in all fields of knowledge.
The weakness is that the exercises do NOT provide the correct answers and so a student is left to his own device to figure out the answers.
The text is expensive to get ; having read the text of a competitor I would definitely recommend to purchase instead the following :French for Reading by Karl Sandberg as it provides the same features while offering the answers to exercises and considerably more systematic in approach with more exercises.
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Palmeri and Milligan's book is a refreshingly pre-internet text. That is, it was written at a time when textbook writers didn't have to compete with the internet and try to make things extra fun for learners by adding superfluous "interactive" components that simply distract from the task of learning French itself. There are no bells and whistles here. There are no bright, shiny pictures or icons directing you to the 500 on-line spots where you can reference sound files, play learning games and "interact" with an online French learning community. There are no side bars and boxes that so many modern textbooks feature these days either.
If you are truly interested in French and don't need to be poked and prodded and coerced and reminded that "if you learn French, you'll be able to order crossiants and sip cafe au lait like a native!!!" every time you open to a new chapter, then this book is for you. The authors assume you are interested in French because you are reading the book. Their gift to you is not bling and pizazz; it's a clearly written, straight forward book.
If you are interested in French generally, or in reading French particularly, this is a gem of a book.
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I bought this book in the hopes that I would be able to use it to pass my graduate language examination. I worked with the book for about five months, I made it about half way through the book, I took the test, and I passed quite easily. So the book definitely works. The book is clear and there are a ton of translation exercises at the end of each chapter so you get a lot of practice translating passages as you make your way through.
There are a couple of things I did not like about the book. The translation examples given at the end of each chapter were sometimes frustrating. There were two things that made them frustrating at times.
First, sometimes the sentences, when translated literally into English, did not make a lot of sense. It was sometimes quite difficult to make sense out of them. In some ways that is a good thing since it gives the reader practice translating which is the whole point of a book like this. I think the practice I got translating those difficult passages, trying to figure out how to make sense of them and translate them into intelligible English, was quite helpful when I took my test. It was still quite frustrating at times, however, especially since there are no translations in the book, so the reader is often not entirely sure whether they are actually translating the sentence correctly. I wish that the move to more difficult translations had been more gradual so that the reader had a little more time to build up their confidence. I would recommend the reader use Google translate to check their translations.Read more ›
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