Easy French Step-by-Step 1st Edition

I really stress the word WRITTEN fluency in recommending this book and NOT for VERBAL fluency. You will have to get Cd's like Pimsleur in order to grasp the basic PHONETICS of French. Easy French, an oxymoron if I ever heard one, was a great buy. I am pretty methodical and went through the chapters one by one and will be finishing the final chapter soon. I got it in February of 2013. It is now the end of August and I can chat with my French friend on Whatsapp! I still make a lot of mistakes and she corrects me all the time, but she was shocked at how much I learned from just one book. So that should tell you something.However, I still have a hard time understanding French verbally. I have now finished Pimsleur French 1: sample size that was around 55$. With the knowledge I received from Easy French, coupled with a sample of Pimsleur really increased my verbal fluency. When I was depending on what I learned from Easy French, I would still struggle with phonetic French. Because of the great increase in my understanding of verbal French from the Pimsleur sample, I will buy the whole pack. But you have to understand that you have to couple Pimsleur with Easy French. There is NO WAY I would have breezed through the Pimsleur sample without having done the Easy French exercises first .Together they make a great combo!If you have a talent to pick up languages by ear, then I recommend you go through the Pimsleur French first and Easy French second. If you are like me, in which I do not pick up a language by ear and I am more fluent in the written language even in English and just learn better through grammar exercises, then do the Easy French first, complete it and then go to Pimsleur.I have always had french classes in my youth and somehow I retained a lot of the basic grammar, which helped in the easy way I swept through the first couple of chapters in Easy French. A big chunk of the chapters are dedicated to the present tense conjugations and a lot of introductions to many verbs and their conjugations. When they titled this book: STEP BY STEP, they really meant it. Which is great for beginners. I used IPHONE translator when I needed to know better pronunciations/meanings.The later chapters then give you the conjugations of the two past tenses, then future, conditional, past conditional, and finally the subjunctive. The in-between chapters deal with negatives, question set ups, reflexive verbs, use of prepositions etc. Each chapter ends with a list of nouns/adjectives and a small article written in the tense you just learned in that chapter, as well as follow-up exercises for your comprehension.If you have no idea where to start in order to start the process of learning the ever so difficult French language then look no further than Easy French Step-by Step for Written Fluency. Follow it up with Pimsleur French 1, 2, and 3 for Verbal Fluency. For further written fluency, The Ultimate French Review and Practice is a great way to keep increasing your knowledge. I also bought this and I already love it. It has an interactive CD where it has a diagnostic test, more exercises and verbal comprehension.Click on the links to direct you the additional material I bought and recommend with Easy French: French, Conversational: Learn to Speak and Understand French with Pimsleur Language ProgramsThe Ultimate French Review and Practice

This book is great for French learning. I’m using this book with a few other resources, including the Basic French workbook, which has audio. So the issue that this book has is that even though it was published in 2008, they still haven’t added audio through the app like this publisher has for many of their other books (like Basic French). However, if you’re someone who’s learning to speak any language, it is best for you to use multiple resources anyway. So those other resources can be the ones for listening to audio and getting familiar with the sounds of real speech by using programs like Glossika for sentence mining or other online/app courses. So to be honest, unless you were only using this book and nothing else for speaking practice, I don’t think the lack of audio is really that big of a problem, although it would make it better. Also it clearly doesn’t have audio, so I’m not sure why people buy it and then give it a bad rating on here for not having audio? That’s kind of odd.Other than that, this book makes learning the grammar and general ins and outs of French easy, and overall has been a great tool to create a foundation for further learning. Everything is in a logical order and it has a lot of great, realistic exercises and high frequency vocabulary. After just the first two chapters you’ll be able to read and speak basic sentences, and I would imagine the book can take you to a low-mid intermediate level, which is about what the average beginner level book does. No one method/app/book will work for everyone, but if you aren’t sure which book to buy on Amazon, this has been a great one for me

This book is serious work. Buy this if you really want to speed up your French skills, like I wanted to do. It has worked well for me, but I had 4 years of French in high school that made this much easier to navigate. It moves way too fast for an absolute beginner.My small complaints: 1) it's hard to use as a reference because new words are introduced or inserted with no background, and there's no way to locate them again because there's no index. 2) I'd like more help with the answers to the exercises (especially where English speakers may make common mistakes).C'est tout. J'aime ce livre. Et maintenant, j'étudie le français.

Systematic and easy to understand approach to French. Great lessons and good excerxises. Instructions are easy to follow.

I've been teaching French for 25 years and have used an extensive array of textbooks, manuals, teaching websites, instagram postings, countless worksheets, videos and more throughout the years. In the end, I always come back to this book for its clarity, simplicity, and acuracy. The lesson are explicit, the exercices (with answer keys in the back) the perfect introduction to a new point prior to meeting with a student and elaborate on the topic. I have recommended it to many of my students as well as gifted it and continue to do so. I also appreciate the spiral bound version since I refer to it so often. Merci beaucoup :-)