French in 32 Lessons

This book originally appeared in the 1970s, if I remember correctly. Its author -- Adrienne -- ran a language school in Paris and the book is basically a quick encapsulation of her teaching notes. You can see the "quick" part in its mistakes and omissions and its terse approach to explaining grammar points. It is a not a book that spells everything out for you. This is one reason I keep it; it makes me work at understanding the grammar points. The second and more important reason I use and re-use this book is that Adrienne emphasizes vocabulary. I doubt if any other book this size has so much vocabulary. Maybe the explanations are sparse just to make room for all these words. Adrienne obviously believed that you can't speak French without actually KNOWING a boatload of French words. And she's right. This book makes an excellent review text for someone who already has studied French and a decent first text for the self-sufficient language students out there. It has its faults -- but what book doesn't. Perhaps the worst faults of many language texts is to have too many explanations and examples and too little vocabulary. Real language students need to wrestle the understanding from the language and will appreciate getting all this vocabulary as a bonus.