Street French 1: The Best of French Slang

I bought this book before I trotted off to Paris a couple years ago. I'd taken French in high school and college, and I bought this book to refresh my French a bit. I'm so glad I did! This book teaches you the way that the French really speak, dropping letters and words just the way we do when we speak English. None of my French teachers prepared me for Paris. I would've thought I'd learned the wrong language. This book will help you take the French that you were taught and turn it into the language that the French actually speak. I'd recommend that most people have had at least a year of high school French to make the most use of this book. If you haven't had any French, or at least a Romance language, and you're going to France in a hurry, you might want to get a phrase book and memorize it. This isn't the right book for an emergency. TK Kenyon Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel

This is a really good book, I must say. It's not the book that I originally wanted to like, thinking that it was just going to teach me basic vocabulary, but it goes much deeper than that. Mr. Burke teaches you many important things such as the contractions that the French commonly use and also the way Fench ask questions, etc. These ideas are what seperate this book from just a basic slang vocabulary book.Mr. Burke will teach you how to sound like a native French speaker. The contractions section is a great example of how this works. He teaches you that instead of saying something like 'Je ne peux pas' (the English equivalent of "I am not able to") you should say something more along the lines of 'Je'n peux'pa' (sounds more like "I can't.") These are the essentials that will keep you from sounding just like a French student (and speaking Scholarly French) to sounding like a native speaker who has lived in France for years (something much better).If you are interested in learning French beyond what a typical academic setting can bring to you, this is definitely a book and a series I recommend. For anyone who wishes to go to France and speak a more natural and believable French, this is the book for you. I would recommend this to anyone and would even be willin to buy it as a gift for any one of my friends.

From Paris, France, and a teacher of French at at all levels, (including adult courses),I think I am qualified to grade this book.This is exactly the pronounciation that I try to have my students understand. Even if they cannot pronounce correctly, at least they are able to understand the French when they speak!Many of the non-native teachers of French can, more or less, speak academic French (some can't!), but faced with a native French speaking person, they can't understand most of the conversation.I am definitely going to use this booklet as part of my teaching material,along with some other ones.

There is one great thing about the "Street French" series that has been neglected: it is not only a great introduction to "slangy" French, but to conversational French in general. Most of the material in books and tapes that purport to teach conversational French is usually quite stilted. The vocabulary is usually not very large, and diction is much more precise than is actually spoken by the French themselves. "Street French" includes a lot of information that does not even deal with slang. For instance, there is a lot of material about contractions and colloquial constructions that one rarely encounters in college textbooks, even those that take a conversational approach. There are tapes available (must haves) from the publisher that include all the dialogue in the series--in *real* conversational style. They are spoken very quickly, and are difficult to master at first. But the hard work will pay off !! After using these books and tapes, I can finally understand a lot of dialogue in French movies that I could just never figure out, since I didn't know about the constructions unique to the spoken language.

This is a wonderful guidebook for anyone trying to make the transition from "academic" French to the way the language is really spoken. We laugh at yuppies in a current beer ad in part because their "How are you doing?" sounds so stilted and phony. We would be more likely to say something like "Howya doin?" French is filled with similar contractions and shortcuts in everyday usage, and this book gives you a fighting chance to get an ear for them. It solved a lot of mysteries for me. Mr. Haley's complaint that the book provides no phonetic pronunciation guide is rather strange since French pronunciation, unlike English, is almost completely regular.