Customer Reviews

Teach yourself French (A Crest book)

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The first version of TEACH YOURSELF FRENCH, by Sir John Adams with revisions by Norman Scarlyn Wilson, first appeared in 1939 and then was inexplicably kept in print for decades even as French society, the French language, and the practice of teaching French shifted radically. The version I have dates from the mid-1970s. Unlike many old textbooks, the problem with this old TEACH YOURSELF FRENCH isn't that it teaches rote learning and impractical translation exercises instead of real conversation (though it does that too), but rather that the authors try to be overly helpful in their presentation of grammar, to the point that the picture is actually more muddled. There's also zero discussion of punctuation and little presentation of greetings and everyday formalities.

I already known a decent amount of French, as I've traveled in the French-speaking world and I read French literature reguarly. I did find this volume useful in doing the English-French translation exercises, as there is a key in the back. This exercises are meant to produce French at a highly intellectual and upper-class level, even if it does all sound a bit quaint, so in that regard the book offers something that most contemporary French textbooks do not. But I'd seriously warn anyone against trying to take their first steps with the French language with this book.

N. Scarlyn Wilson's "Teach Yourself French" was written (if I recall correctly) before WWII, and thus does not come with a CD, or indeed any audio aids.

I cannot therefore recommend it (as I did his Teach Yourself Spanish) to a complete beginner, or at least not by itself: it's simply not possible to learn to make noises intelligible to a Frenchman from a book alone.

As might be expected, it used the the grammar-translation method of teaching. This is how I learnt French and German in school, and it works for me. It did not, though, work for about 60% of my classmates, who at the end of four years were able to recite tables of German verbs, but not to put a sentence together. Which is no doubt the reason for the modern revision in methodology.

This book does, however, make the perfect revision tool, as I now find after years of disuse. Indeed, I've learnt things I never knew before. Being intended as a tutorial, it progresses logically and systematically, and is even fairly interesting; whereas a mere grammar book is intended as a reference, and is about as interesting as the telephone directory.

It's easy to poke fun at some of the sentences for translation (e.g. 'The children of the emperor speak to the sentry'); but they're not as stupid as they seem. "Sentinelle" is given as an example of a word that is always feminine even though one would expect it to be masculine; and similarly 'empereur' is masculine even though words ending in 'eur' are usually feminine.

I thoroughly recommend this book, then, to anyone whose French is rusty.

N.B. The pronunciation guide is based on UK English, and may be misleading for US readers.

I needed to learn French for research purposes, which means I needed to know how to READ French more than speak it. When I tried to use more recent publications for learning French by the makers of the current Teach Yourself series, among others, I found that their approach was inadequate for my needs. I'm the kind of person who learns better with the early-to-mid 20th century pedagogical grammars that included verb paradigms, vocabulary lists, and end-of-lesson exercises; Norman Scarlyn Wilson's (NSW) approach largely satisfied my needs. In fact, his presentation of French in this 32-lesson text "Teach Yourself French" has enabled me to make real progress in learning and understanding French grammar.

I prefer straightforward grammatical descriptions and explanations, and NSW's at times meanders a bit for my taste, but, along with his otherwise serviceable descriptions, he has provided graduated lessons complete with bilingual examples, lesson vocabularies, French-English and English-French exercises, extra Translation exercises (starting with Lesson 15) designed to get the learner used to using a dictionary, and a mostly complete French-English vocabulary list for his text at the end of the book -- for the few missed words, I recommend the Larousse Concise French dictionary.

Aside from the aforementioned meandering explanations, my only other beefs are with the text's lack of an index -- though the table of contents largely compensates for that -- and with NSW's bilingual examples, where he often presents the English translation first, then the grammatical example in French (he also does this in his "Teach Yourself Spanish"); it's admittedly a minor point that I can live with, but I prefer to puzzle out the meaning of the target-language examples first before I read the English translation.

That being said, if you're looking for a text that will enable you to quickly begin to speak French, this text isn't for you; you'd be better off with more recent material that includes formulaic presentations of dialogs and recordings. I'm not knocking this latter kind of approach, as it is useful for many people who want to learn to SPEAK a foreign language. But if you're really hungering for a sound introductory graduated presentation of grammar with paradigms, exercises, etc., that will give you a strong READING knowledge of French, this could be the book for you.

Teach Yourself French is obviously an old book and hence teaches the language in a method that most would call old fashion, simply meaning the idea that to learn a language a person must memorize vocabulary and paradigms. There is nothing wrong with this approach as long as your goal is simply to read and write the language. This particular book is of little use to a person who wishes to speak the language, but is an excellent reading and composition manual. I took my very first steps in the French language with this book and through much diligent work it allowed me to begin reading french literature.

The first version of TEACH YOURSELF FRENCH, by Sir John Adams with revisions by Norman Scarlyn Wilson, first appeared in 1939 and then was inexplicably kept in print for decades even as French society, the French language, and the practice of teaching French shifted radically. The version I have dates from the mid-1970s. Unlike many old textbooks, the problem with this old TEACH YOURSELF FRENCH isn't that it teaches rote learning and impractical translation exercises instead of real conversation (though it does that too), but rather that the authors try to be overly helpful in their presentation of grammar, to the point that the picture is actually more muddled. There's also zero discussion of punctuation and little presentation of greetings and everyday formalities.

I already known a decent amount of French, as I've traveled in the French-speaking world and I read French literature reguarly. I did find this volume useful in doing the English-French translation exercises, as there is a key in the back. This exercises are meant to produce French at a highly intellectual and upper-class level, even if it does all sound a bit quaint, so in that regard the book offers something that most contemporary French textbooks do not. But I'd seriously warn anyone against trying to take their first steps with the French language with this book.