learn spoken french Free Helpful Tip

I used this program in conjunction with a non-credit French course taught at my local community college. I think the program is very good because the recordings are obviously of real French speakers in their native situations. It is almost impossible to understand some of them; they speak so fast, the words are all slurred together. But I know that when I travel in France, I will be better prepared to understand native speakers, for having listened to the tapes over and over! Also, I like that they record even small children on the tapes, and that’s encouraging, because they don’t always speak correctly (I am not the only one!). My major complaint about the program is that it uses cassette tapes, which are very outdated! I had a hard time even finding a cassette player in my home, and I only have a CD player in my car. Its very hard to find a place to listen. Then, you have to keep rewinding the tape back to relisten, and its the pits to find the exact spot where the last unit or lesson began. If they put it on CD, it would be great!

This review refers to the CDs: I have about 6 years of junior high/high school French, so I would consider myself intermediate but by no means fluent. The CDs were great in helping me with my pronunciation and listening skills (as an Anglophone my pronunciation is horrible), and I was able to review one lesson a day during my daily car commute. I like the fact that the speakers are actual French speakers, although the background noises were indeed distracting and made it hard to hear at times.

The problem with other CDs I’ve tried were that they repeated boring conjugations that would never stick. At least with learning from this CD if you misconjugate, the listener would at least understand what you mean. This CD was actually fun to listen to.

This is a great kit, a great way to get started on French, but it definatly isn’t thorough. First of all, let me tell you that if you expect to take full advantage of this kit, you should have a partner or at least someone who speaks French. The kit doesn’t let you practice enough with speaking the language yourself.

But, it does help you a lot with understanding the language. The conversations on the tape are authentic, which lets you hear French as it is usually spoken. It can be a little bit fast, but that just helps you to understand French better when you actually listen to a French person.

The kit also teaches you a little about other French speaking countries and their customs, which is great. Additionally, it also teaches you some about grammar, which is a must in any language.

I bought this kit(and the Plus kit, which I will start soon), as a way to get myself ahead in my French class I’ll be taking when I get back to school. So if you’re a student and planning on taking French, then this kit is DEFINATLY for you. It doesn’t make you perfect, but it should make your first year of French much easier, since most of it will be a review…

Indeed you feel like you are learning quite a lot, quite quickly, when you first start this, however there are a couple of things that make this somewhat overrated. Not much focus on pronounciation, which is so important in French. Michel sounds like an old grandpa, who mumbles his english at times, so you will not get crisp pronounciations out of this guy. I really wish there was a French speaker conversing with Michel, instead there are a couple of students sitting along side him and in my opinion they just drag the flow of these lessons. The students constantly make mistakes, which gets quite annoying (and confusing) after a while and you feel like you are starting to pick up bad habits from them. To Michel’s credit, he does have a way of getting a lot of good material across and the lessons are structured well and most importantly you do learn from this, and it’s reasonably priced.

Overall, this program is a great tool for those wishing to learn spoken French. Whether you are a total beginner or you’ve learned French in school with little success and want a new approach, you will find this Michel Thomas’ program useful. Keep in mind, this is only a basic introduction and you will learn only present tense and a little bit of future tense. To go beyond that, I would imagine you’d need to study Michel’s language builder and French Advanced programs.

With this program you WILL learn basic French quickly and easily. Within minutes of starting, you will be constructing basic sentences. Michel Thomas has a unique way of introducing new concepts to you by tying them to information you already know about the French language but don’t know that you know. From there, he slowly adds more and more information and it’s so much fun that you don’t even realize you’re learning.

My only qualm about this program, and hence the four stars, is the female student. Her inability to get it after the eighteenth explanation is extremely frustrating and I found myself finally losing it and shrieking “Voulez VOUS for crying out loud!!!” at her. When you listen to CD #1 you will understand why. Her slowness and confusion wasted a lot of time and caused a lot of tension and impatience for me, the student. If both students were at an average or above intelligence level (such as the other student in the program), then this program would be a lot more fun.

Overall, highly recommended for someone who wants a quick and easy French introduction. But, realistically, if you want to become fluent and well respected by native French speakers, you will need many more programs and courses (not to mention practice, practice, practice!) in order to advance to a much higher level.

I hadn’t done much review of Spanish since I took it in high school. I found it a terrific review of the basics I learned in high school, and I feel like I have even learned more in terms of conversation from this CD than all the classes I took!

I love the in-flight series. They’re subdivided into short sound files that are labeled with titles so that you can repeat the files of only the sections that you want to learn. I find it very helpful especially when I put the sections on repeat on my ipod or in itunes to get the hang of the words. I like how it doesn’t repeat the words over again like some other programs because then you’ll actually remember the words. I have found that other programs will repeat the same phrase so often in such a long file that I wind up losing track of what the person is actually saying, and it takes so long to repeat a file, that I don’t actually learn the phrases from front to back (like continually replaying a one-hour speech over again to catch a 5-minute segment on a specific topic in the middle of the speech). If you need to hear a section over again, the sound files are short enough to repeat individually. You may not learn the whole CD by heart in one flight, but at least it is short enough to play in one flight.

This language CD is a good refresher for those that know a little of the language. It is certainly not realistic to absorb this information on the flight. You will need to listen to it for at least a couple weeks before your trip. I would have liked to see them repeat the phrases a couple of times, but it’s nice to hear the phrases in the native language.

I have been trying (on and off) to learn French for many years. I have never had much luck until I bought this set of tapes. In just a month of driving back and forth to work (15 minutes each way), I have developed a basic proficiency that is useful when I visit Montreal. I think in a year, I’ll truly be “speaking French”. I highly recommend this product.

This series helped me more than any other to recover years of high school and assorted college courses in French. The Level 1 CDs cover easy common phrases, Level II includes strong reviews of verbs and tenses, and Level III reviews everything. Along the way, they include up-to-date computer and Internet vocabulary for the traveler, banking and ATMs, bus travel, social interactions, and shopping. The arrangement of phrases is very carefully designed to give you a natural and intuitive sense of grammar and word gender, and eventually expressions of conditions, time, and other useful expressions such as differences in ‘must, ought, would, should” in the French usage. For those who want to see the language spelled out or review grammar, the PDF and printed booklets are excellent supplements.
This series goes well beyond tourist expressions and teaches the language along the way. The clarity of the French speakers’ pronunciation is extremely helpful in presenting gender and other changes. I enjoyed my sense of accomplishment, rather than confusion, using this series. I have used others over the years for different languages, and strongly recommend this series for those with elementary exposure to any language classes. For those who have no language training, the concepts of tense, gender, conjugation, and so on, are not explained, they are given by example, so those learners may prefer a more tourist-oriented course.

Quote wamut
“Can you imagine your kids being denied the right to learn in their first language at their local school?”

Actually Wamut. I have a small amount of Native Canadian blood. Enough that under the apartheid system set up by the liberals I could use that to my advantage in the job market. Could never lower myself to that level.

If I was to move to Quebec my children would be forced to learn in French. All the non English or French speaking kids in the public schools over here are not taught in there own language. The Chinese, etc., seem to get by just fine.

Your not going to fix discrimination with more discrimination, which of course is the liberal approach.

I am going to learn French fluently in college.