Customer Reviews

French: 1st Rev. Ed. (Pimsleur Quick and Simple)

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I like the Pimsleur system. I have used it with Traveler's Spanish, the Spanish I, and this set for French. I prefer the cassettes to the CDs becasue of they are easier back up so as to retrace areas. The concept of listen/repeat in your car on the way to work without alot of book-study at the lower levels is effective, easy, fun.
The purpose of this particular French set of 4 cassettes is to provide an introduction into the Pimsleur system to see if you like the system and want to move directly up to the larger Level I set.
If you are planning to use this set to get ready for a trip to France, this may not be the correct set for you. If you will only be in Paris two days or less, this might be OK. But if you are going to be there 3 days or longer, or if you want to brush up on your high school French, then pass over this set and go for the Traveler's Edition set, which is specifically designed for those purposes.
It works, its fun, get the right one.

The Pimsleur tapes do an outstanding job of ingraining the language so that it can subsequently spew forth naturally. However, it does this at the expense of teaching a more extensive vocabulary. It is an excellent introduction to the language, in particular the sound of the language. But if you want to really be able to communicate, you will need a much larger vocabulary than provided by these tapes. Though they are excellent in and of themselves, these tapes were probably designed to be "teasers" to entice learners to buy the comprehensive Pimsleur tapes.

I am studying French formally, but picked this up for a two-day road trip, hoping to practice my French.

It would have worked, except that the French speaker in these is obviously a non-native. It's French with a very bad American accent - I actually couldn't listen to it - was too afraid I'd screw up the French pronunciation I'd already learned.

This seems to happen a lot with foriegn language audio. But c'mon, how hard is it for these guys to hire native speakers?

Final Review - Good idea, Good price, Bad execution