Workbook to Accompany Rendez-Vous: An Invitation to French

This workbook is really a credit to the series as a whole-- textbook, lab manual, and CDs. The only way to become fluent at any language is to practice regularly, and this workbook combined with the exercises in the text provides more than enough opportunities to do just that. In fact, there's more practice here per chapter than anyone with other courses and work would even want to do in one sitting. If you're taking a course where your work will be checked all at once, you should know that there are at least a couple of hours of exercises for each chapter in this book. That said, this book makes it worth your time to work along with the text [instead of practicing just at the end] because the answers are all in the back. If you've just completed a lesson you're not sure you understand, you can immediately go home, practice, and check to see if you understood the concepts. If you're not sure what the directions are asking for or how closely you should follow the model, looking up one or two answers before you go on can save you a lot of wasted effort completing the exercise the wrong way. My course required us to check and correct our own work for this reason. Of course, not everyone has the patience to do this volume of work for a beginning French course, knowing the answers are in the back-- if that's the case for you, this book won't help you much right away. It's worth getting used to, though. The opportunity to self-check this way after every lesson is really very helpful.

This is a very decent book that will most definitely help one with their written vocabulary/grammar skills. As mentioned, it does waste a lot of space with huge drawings. Furthermore, it also occasionally use words that have not yet been introduced. It is necessary to either be willing on occasion to figure things out based on context or have a French->English dictionary handy. However, exercise caution if using a dictionary since that foreign word could be something introduced in a previous chapter but simply wasn't stressed.

Considering the many books available for beginning French, this one is rather good. Although it contains the usual cutesy drawings, it presents the material in a well organized way, and has cultural tidbits that are of interest.