Reading French in the Arts and Sciences

I used this book to study for a French reading comprehension exam required for my Master's degree and it was invaluable. Because of this book, I passed the exam even though it had been almost a decade since I took a French class. It is incredibly helpful.

As someone who is eyeing a return to grad school (comp lit / post colonialism) I needed to learn how to read French. I went from having little knowledge of French to being able to read with only slight difficulty. (Having to look up only the occasional word or parse the odd construction.) It takes you through vocabulary (make flash cards when you encounter new words!), verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech, all the way through syntactical forms. Many oft-seen idioms are defined in this book, thankfully. My confidence was boosted early on in the reading sections as one is expected to start reading in unit four. If you are digesting the material, this will not be a problem. The book does not have an answer key, but you really won't need one if you are understanding the concepts and memorizing the all-important vocabulary. I am not sure what other books are out there, but this one was a lifesaver for me. I encourage anyone who needs to know how to read French to use it for their studies. A motivated student with a couple of hours a day could complete it in a few months and be reading competently in no time.

I used this book as a textbook for an undergraduate course in Reading French. Not speaking, just reading. Since I already knew Spanish and was familiar with Portuguese, it was not hard for me to understand the language. However, my speaking ability is still non-existent. I just cannot wrap my mouth around French pronunciation. The practices are grouped together very clearly. The vocabulary focuses on technical terms. Therefore, metaphors and literary complexity is not a problem here. Sometimes I wondered if I would ever have the need to describe a steam engine to anyone in French! Our class divided into groups to go over the exercises which were at just the right level for beginners. Several, like me, already knew Spanish. One spoke Italian. One spoke Portuguese, and one spoke German. Others knew English only. We combined our skills to use this book and learned how to read French.