Customer Reviews

Instant Immersion French v2.0

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My title should make clear what I think, so I won't go on at length.

The excercizes have helped me *tremendously* with my French accent, which previously had garnered a lot of laughs. I've never had a language product that was this helpful when it came to accent.

Having said that, I have owned or borrowed a few products from Instant Immersion. And if something won't work, or breaks, you'd better be Catholic: Only St. Jude can deal with the hopeless customer "service" at Topics Entertainment. You will *never* be able to talk to a human being, and your emails will *never* receive a response.

So my most hearfelt advice is DO NOT buy CASSETTE TAPES from these guys. EVER. In a six-tape set, two tapes broke the first time I hit the "Play" button; and this occurred on two different machines, so the flaw was in the tapes. A third tape broke after a few plays. Software--at least on Mac--has similar problems. Topics Entertainment WILL NOT respond to requests for replacement of defective products. A good product from a company that appears to want to go out of business due to rampant patron dissatisfaction.

Borrow it from your local library. If it still works, that is.

The program works with my Mac. It has a very nice function that plays the words and phrases in order so you don't have to keep clicking and get a cramped finger. You can print out vocabulary and practice on your own. There are two little people on the corners of the page and they get very excited when you correctly pick a word or phrase. The program has many quizzes and test, that have been helpful to me. I also have this program in Italian and Spanish.

The only problem I have with it, is that they don't say the words in English and French. They say it in French, but no English so you have to sit and watch the screen, unless you have a good understanding and you want to test yourself.

It's good buy for the price. Some friends of mine and I are going to learn Spanish and French together.

However, if you want to go pro and can afford the cost, get the Rosetta Program, I test drove it and I was amazed. Instant Immersion is a good buy if you want to test drive a language. I got mine at Best Buy for $20.00 or so.

~Au revoir~

it's slightly helpful and sometimes entertaining.
This is NOT a "course" in French. It is a collection of five individual programs that are not related in any way. (Each CD has something different.) And while it can teach you some French words, it will NOT teach you to speak French; that's a very different thing. If you want to learn French, check out French in Action. Yes, it can be expensive, but if you're persistent, you can find ways to cut costs. For instance, the videos can be found on some PBS stations and online from the publisher at no cost.
If you're learning French from an actual course, you can find some things in this package that you might benefit from, but it's severely limited. For instance, there is the talking dictionary. Sounds pretty cool for learning pronunciation, but the number of words in the dictionary is soooo limited; every word that I've looked up to check the pronunciation wasn't there! Another thing that can be helpful is a little routine where the program says a word, then you can record yourself saying it, and play it back to see how you sound. Just be aware that you have no input from the software as to whether or not you're saying it correctly.

A perfect illustration of the lack of care that was put into this package: The quizzes in the picture dictionary. They work like this: 2 to 6 pictures will pop up on the screen, and the same number of words. You drag the words to the matching pictures. There are 3 levels of difficulty, and the most difficult is timed. Unfortunately, the user interface is so slow that you don't have TIME to match all the words to the pictures, even if you KNOW all of them! So you time out, with a very obnoxious sound, and the quiz is over. It's just very sloppy programming.

This package has a trait that I find extremely annoying: You have to have the CD in the drive in order to use the program. Have a terrabyte of free space, and just want to put the software on your hard disk and run it from there, without having to mess with the CD? Tough luck, you can't. And, as someone else said, there is no support from the company. So, if you can find it cheap enough, buy it, just knowing that it might be entertaining and might be helpful, but if there's a problem, you're on your own. (My copy works most of the time.) Whatever you do, don't pay retail; not only is it not worth it, but you'll only encourage this company to produce more substandard stuff.

has bugs that prevent the s/w from functioning. Program stuck at the beginning of the program. Don't waste your time and money.