Customer Reviews

Learn to Speak French 8.0

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I have had this cd-rom for approximately 4 months now and I am coming close to being very fluent en francais. It offers 3 complete courses, boasting vocabulary builders, lessons in grammar and verb conjugation, games to reinforce what you have learned and you can also have conversations with virtual characters so that you can practice speaking. I am engaged to a Frenchman and I just keep surprising him with how much I have learned. I go to France frequently, and this has made a huge difference in my linguistic skills. Future Francophiles (persons who love french language and culture), Good luck.

This program is excellent value for the money. It provides a huge amount of material which will bring you up to the equivalent of a first year college French course at least on a conversational level. Previously, it did not work with Windows 2000, but there is now an easy to install patch. If you are thinking of travelling to France and have about 2 - 3 months to get through the course, this will provide you a basic level of French for getting around. I know, because that is what I did.

This course was very helpfull in helping me to learn French. I have purchased many French learning software and this is the best one yet. I really like the conversation CD where you are able to conversate with people at a party and they answer according to what you say out of the given list of options. This course started out very basic and is helping me to work my way up. The dictionary is helpfull also.

This is a great product, but watch out! It only works with Win 95 and 98, not with Win 2000. I called Mattel's helpline twice and both times they said that they don't offer a patch anytime soon. If you have Win2000, it cannot be installed at all!

I agree with a previous review that software can never take the place of an interactive class or spending time in a French speaking country, but this product comes as close as possible. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to ramp up on my vocabulary and comprehension. This is a great package especially if you are new to the language.

The only negatives: First, I would rather it forced you to come up with the French words/phrases more. Too often it prompts with the French and asks for the English. Second, the dog in the game gets annoying reallly fast.

okay okay- i don't totally know french yet, i am just fronting- but really this program had helped me ALOT, i love it- the conversations for me are not slow, maybe it depends on your computer. i love how it rates your accent, had movies about the different regions, had awesome special interest internet courses that you can download...it really is a great resource to start to learn french, for me well worth the money...i practise on it all the time...i am still going to take a course, even as good as this program is, i don't think you can totally learn french using just this, or just anything else, to learn a language takes a whole lot... funny thing though, i wanted to kill that dog also!

yeah but in summation, i think this is the best language learning product around, go for it...

In general, this isn't that great a tool for learning French. I gave it a decent rating, however, based on its one redeeming feature, the speech-recognition feature. This feature is an excellent tool for practicing pronunciation of French.

In the "Vocabulary" section, you have a list of words that you can click on to hear a native French speaker speak the word. You also have a needle-style gauge with buttons for record and playback. You hit the record button, pronounce the word, and the gauge shows how well you did, from "tourist" to "native".

This might not be an optimal tool for honing your accent, because it doesn't give you any indication of what you're doing wrong. It's an excellent tool otherwise, because it allows you to practice endlessly and because it gives you decent feedback. I had already had explanations of what shape your mouth should be for pronouncing certain things and the difference between the 'ou' sound in vous and the 'u' sound in tu. If you can get that, and if you have a decent ear, you can accomplish a lot with this software.

Anecdotal evidence: I used this software for about half an hour to an hour a day for about six months before moving on to instruction that involved real people. Everyone that I spoke to in French told me that I sound like a native French speaker.

Disclaimer: as with anything in life, you'll only get out of it what you put into it. Your mileage may vary.

Although it says on the top that the software is compatible with 95 or 98, don't think that it will work on 2000.
I even called in their support line for possible upgrades and they have nada.
This is a not review but just a friendly warning!

Although the software is extensive, with a workbook and audio tape, I found the organization of the program difficult. As a beginner in French, I thought that I would be able to learn more than I was able to from this program. In the first 2 weeks, I went through the program, listened to the tape in my car, and attempted to go through the workbook. What I found to be lacking was the fact that it focuses on vocabulary words and phrases before teaching the grammar and logic to the language. For those of you who want an actual understanding of French past a few vocab words, I suggest you look somewhere else. The tape was also hard to understand, even at the very beginning. The speakers talked too fast, so it made it hard for me to repeat after them since I was trying to figure out what they'd said exactly. Overall, it is a nice presentation, but I'd hoped to gain an overall understanding of the language, not just how to say, "I'm fine, thank you."

My daughter (age 12, and fixated on all things French) has been trying to learn French through a variety of media--workbooks and audiotapes, Muzzy videos, textbooks, none very stimulating--so I bought this CD for her to try.

First, let me start with the software itself: it was real discouraging when I first installed the French 8.1 Deluxe edition--kept getting error messages about MicServer Pass (error 26). Had to shut down probably 30 times the first few hours of use. Finally determined that there seemed to be some kind of conflict with other programs/graphics on my system--primarily a Japanese Hello Kitty screen saver installed. ALSO, I learned that you just can't click that mouse as fast as you'd like in the Play/Record mode, because if you click faster than, say, a 5 sec increment, the system freezes. I assume it's because the program just isn't developed enough to handle incoming audio recognition and cursor commands while simulataneously processing video/graphics/data transmission. Well, what do you expect, it didn't cost that much to begin with. So I have learned to slow my mouse clicking down a bit. In addition, I highly recommend you run AdAware, Spybot, and some kind of Utilities Clean-up/Fix program before installing this--and do what the installation instructions suggest, END all other programs running in the background. Finally, I would say that the less processes you have running while you are using this feature, the better!

About the program itself: I learned French in middle school, as well as 1 semester in college. (I also have a total of 3 years high school/college Spanish experience). So, based upon my knowledge of foreign languages, and the varieties of media I have used--the classroom, workbooks, textbooks, videos--I would say this software is the most entertaining method of learning a language. My daughter, who has NO foreign language experience, says this system of language learning works best for her, thus far.

This program--although not labeled so, take my word for it--is designed for conversational French. The strengths in this program are the French speakers and their pronounciation. Their phrases are short and to the point. In the beginning, the phrases are everyday phrases and the key to learning them is saying them over and over again; basically, MIMICRY [the accompanying 184-page reference book is just a written form of all the narrative you hear on the software, it is NOT a workbook or dictionary]. I told my daughter DO NOT RUSH through this, stick with the same lesson for at least a week. There are optional grammar notes for those interested or for those (like me) who never paid much attention to grammar exercises in school, but they are not the key to learning. After all, you don't see young children reading grammar books and they can speak quite well.

The voice recognition feature is not entirely accurate (I said ba-ba-ba-ba into the mic once and it gave me an excellent rating!) but it provides enough feedback so my daughter feels like she is making progress, mainly by copying the French speakers. It trains the ear to recognize French sounds.

As you go on in this program, you can pace yourself when things get a bit more challenging. Some of the phrases don't have much to do with everyday life, but they tend to teach the repetition/variation of common phrases over and over again, so it builds on the foundation. Using the program myself, I can determine where I am rusty. Also, I see my daughter decide (by herself and by the automatic scoring) where she needs to go back and review. The interactive functions--visual, written and verbal--really help reinforce what you've learned.

I would think that if one continued with the entire program and put as much effort into it as in a class--say, at least 1/2 hour a day up to 1 hour a day on weekends--then, by the end of the CD course one would be quite confident and fairly proficient at speaking and understanding spoken French, or the written level used by a daily newspaper in France.