French: First Year

I bought the book to supplement my semi-private French lessons. I love doing all the exercises and having to look up words in order to understand the questions - that's what makes it a great memorizing tool. Call me old (I'm 61), but I want to check my answers - there are NO ANSWERS in the back of the book. I find that very frustrating!

I have been homeschooling my daughter for several years and I was on the hunt for a decent French book that didn't break our budget. The AMSCO School Publishing group is a good source for homeschoolers searching for solid textbooks, especially their foreign language texts. This book has black and white drawings and concentrates heavily on grammar, but also has some interesting chapters about French culture in the back. Student can write their answers in this book, which my daughter really liked. As mentioned, this is a great workbook if you are learning along with an instructor, rather than on your own. As homeschoolers, we used this book while taking French classes at the Alliance Française, one of the world's largest schools of French language, which has chapters in most metropolitan cities, including our city of Toledo.

I decided to start to study French on my own after studying Spanish in school for four years. I used the second level book of the Spanish edition of this book in my third year of spanish and decided to try this book. I like it a lot because it gives you a lot of practice on every grammar point and allows you to improve your comprehension. Plus it improves your vocabulary by constantly repeating the same vocabulary words over and over. It also has a very good beginner vocab chapter with about 1000 vocabulary words altogether roughly, which can take you up the intermediate level. It explains each grammar point very well. I would also recommend following this book up with the second and third levels.

This is the workbook we are now using in my second year of French, and it is almost exactly like the first we used, French is Fun, last year. (I'm a freshman in high school) Except this book uses less pictures and more words. It doesn't define the vocabulary words with pictures anymore! It gives the background and history of France, maps, and vocabulary. It conjugates verbs in chapters for each set, such as -er, -ir, -re and irregular verbs in present and past tense. It gives you many examples to work on and sometimes my teacher even reverses the rules so instead of re-conjugating the verb back into the sentence, she makes us translate it instead. All of the words are listed in the back (except for some easy ones) and there's a handy index too. All exercises in the book can be used in lots of ways instead of just what they say. Let me just say that I have a 98% in this class, that's how good the book works.

I use this book in teaching French to some Junior-High age children. This is an excellent book for covering grammar basics and providing a foundation to the language. The book contains a decent French/English and English/French dictionary at the back of the book, as well as lessons on French culture and history (which are written in English). Exercise directions and grammar lessons are clear and written in English. The book is intended to be a first year text book and therefore, there are no pronounciation guide lines. The book would best be used with a teacher, and is probably not appropriate for someone who is trying to learn without an instructor.