French Berlitz Essential (Berlitz Handbooks)

click here for more details, find new or used items	Berlitz Guides Our price £5.24 (£6.99) New from £2.51 Used from £2.00 Pages: 282 (Paperback) ISBN: 9812465294 Pub: Berlitz Publishing Pub date: 2005-01-28 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 210679

Reader Reviews:

Berlitz - Essential French (4/4 people found this helpful)

For me, this is a thorough well structured user-friendly paper back, and I've learned a lot from it.

Language textbooks used to be dull. They gave you far too much info to be of use to a person learning on his/her own at home.

Nowadays some language books try too hard to be 'cool'. They assume the reader has the attention span of a hyperactive gnat, so they flic and flac from one tiny bite of info to another.

This book is neither dull nor 'cool'. It's useful.

It has 20 lessons covering all of the basics. ( It goes as far as use of the future, past perfect, imperfect, and conditional tenses. )

The lessons start with a dialogue scene, then vocab, key points of usage (grammar), then exercises ( with answers at the back.)

All the way through, you get dual text, sentence by sentence, French with the English underneath, so you don't have to keep looking up words in the vocab.

The vocab lists all have a pronunciation guide, but you can ignore it if you don't need it.

There are no glossy photos, or multi coloured printing. Each lesson has a few line drawings to illustrate it, and key learning points appear in grey shaded boxes. The general layout is good.

It's a well structured book without being too cramped. There's enough white space on most pages for a few scribbled notes.

Lessons 6, 12, 16 and 20 are all 'review' lessons, which help you consolidate what you've learned so far. At the end there is a French to English glossary of all words used in the book.

I've learned the basics of German and Italian using self-learn books at home, but learning French has given me the most trouble because the spoken sound is so different to the written words, so I found the pronunciation guide in this book a real help. ( It's not one of those 'academic' phonetic guides full of heiroglyphs you can never understand. It just uses an approximate sound based on the nearest English, eg 'hier soir' is 'ee-air swar'. It's not rocket science but it's enough. )

To sum up, I'd say this is a good user-friendly French book, ideal for the self-learner.

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