French Before You Know It Deluxe

Other products by Transparent Language, Inc.

Product Features

• French Before You Know It Deluxe Edition includes fun and effective activities that really build your French listening, reading, writing, and speaking capabilities.
• Enhance your speaking ability with Pronunciation Practice.
• Test your French knowledge with the multiple choice activities.
• Build your writing and spelling skills with Dictation Practice.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000783D9K
• Item model number: FE-BF35-8-CD
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 22, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #17,341 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #43 in	Software > Education & Reference > Arts & Culture
  #100 in	Software > Education & Reference > Foreign Languages > French

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Product Description

French Learning for Everyone! For beginners to advanced learners, Before You Know It is the simple and effective way to master French with Perfect Recall, guaranteed! Whether for business, travel, school or personal enjoyment, you’ll quickly learn to understand and speak 1,000 common French words and 250 essential phrases. Easy, Fast, and Effective! With Before You Know It, you’ll instantly feel the difference. Advanced technology customizes the learning for you – in a way never before possible. Just decide what you need to know, and Before You Know It handles the rest. Learning is fun because it happens at the perfect speed for you, with less time on what you pick up quickly and more time where you need it. Result – the fastest path to perfect learning! Fun Activities Perfect Your Learning They feel like games, but each activity targets the perfection of a vital language skill, such as pronunciation or listening comprehension. Customize & Share! Expand the power of Before You Know It Deluxe Edition by building your own flash card lists. Great for learning exactly what you need, from specialized vocabulary & phrases to weekly quiz material. www.BeforeYouKnowIt.com provides even more learning and fun. Get additional FREE lists and ideas, plus share your own flash card lists with your friends. Learn on the Go! As a free bonus, this package also includes the Before You Know It system for Pocket PC and Palm PDA. If you have a PDA, you can keep learning, even on the move.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great vocabulary builder., March 7, 2006

By	Erynn Shea Kelly "Erynn Shea Kelly" (USA) - See all my reviews

I have the multi-language version of this software, which includes Spanish, Italian, French and German. So I'm reviewing each single-language version as well so those shopping for language-learning software will know exactly what to expect from this.

Before You Know It uses the flashcard method of teaching vocabulary four ways. Words and phrases are divided into lists by category. User selects a list then goes to the activity of choice to learn the contents of that list. There are a few more activities available in the Deluxe version that the free trial version doesn't have, but both versions use virtual flashcards the following way:

Step 1 - Look at the foreign word and take a guess (out loud or in your head - it doesn't matter because the software trusts you to tell it if you answered correctly). The program will also say the word so you know the proper pronunciation.

Step 2 - Look at the foreign word and type in it in English in the space provided. Here you don't get to cheat, because it can tell if your correct or not. The ones you need work on will repeat more often.

Step 3 - Look at the English word and guess the foreign one. Again, it will trust you to be honest.

Step 4 - Look at the English word and type in the foreign one. This has been the most helpful of all the steps for me, because not only do I have to know the word by now, I have to know how to spell it correctly and include any necessary accent marks.

All of the above you can get with the basic version of Before You Know It that is available to download for free via the internet. Why not try it out before you purchase the deluxe version?

With the deluxe version, you get more four more activities which include multiple choice, pronunciation practice where you can record your voice and compare your pronunciation with a native speaker (warning: software does NOT include a microphone), and dictation (which is just a repeat of step 4 of the flashcard portion).

My favorite thing about this software, though, and what made me go ahead and spend the money for the deluxe version, is the user's ability to customize the program in several different ways:
- User can add a word to any list. You just look up more words you want to know online or in a dictionary and add it to the appropriate category.
- User can delete any word from any list.
- User can copy any word from one list to another.
- User can edit any word in any list. This is handy when studying Spanish because you might want to change the translation from European to Latin American.
- User can create entire lists and categories of their own, add their own pictures and record their own voices to demonstrate the pronunciation of each word. You can create lists for anything you want to learn - not just languages.
- User can download additional, free lists from the Before You Know It website, including state capitals, periodic table of elements (chemistry), multiplication tables, and more. And you can sign up for the free "list of the week." Each week, a new list will be sent to you via email.

This software will help you master your foreign vocabulary and learn helpful phrases, but it does not teach the rules of grammar for these languages. You won't learn conjugation unless you look up the form of each word yourself and add it to their lists or create your own lists.

In other words, the customizing possibilities for this are almost endless if you're willing and able to invest the time to do it. But what it comes with already installed is meant to simply increase your foreign vocabulary and, used alone, will not make anyone a fluent speaker.