French

Rating:
Summary: Effective and easy to follow.
Review: I've tried every home-study device out there -- basic instruction books with tapes, grammar handbooks, interactive CD-ROMs, flash cards, children's books, even those French magnetic poetry words, and got practically nowhere. With the Pimsleur CDs, I am finally making progress. No, I'm not claiming I can carry on a detailed conversation, but I am speaking French aloud without fear or embarrassment, and am comprehending elementary phrases at the speed and fluency of everyday conversation. And yes, this method does make you an *illiterate* French speaker, but reading and writing French doesn't do much good in real life if you cannot spontaneously speak and understand it at a fluent speed.

At first I was annoyed that the lessons crawled at such a slow pace... after all, like everyone else I want to be fluent in a foreign language by next week. However, I find that my retention of what I learned is much better in these smaller chunks of information. It seems to help enormously to have a solid grasp of manipulating a few fundamental words and phrases, rather than fleeting knowledge of many.

Rating:
Summary: A breakthrough
Review: I've tried every home-study device out there -- basic instruction books with tapes, grammar handbooks, interactive CD-ROMs, flash cards, children's books, even those French magnetic poetry words, and got practically nowhere. With the Pimsleur CDs, I am finally making progress. No, I'm not claiming I can carry on a detailed conversation, but I am speaking French aloud without fear or embarrassment, and am comprehending elementary phrases at the speed and fluency of everyday conversation. And yes, this method does make you an *illiterate* French speaker, but reading and writing French doesn't do much good in real life if you cannot spontaneously speak and understand it at a fluent speed.

At first I was annoyed that the lessons crawled at such a slow pace... after all, like everyone else I want to be fluent in a foreign language by next week. However, I find that my retention of what I learned is much better in these smaller chunks of information. It seems to help enormously to have a solid grasp of manipulating a few fundamental words and phrases, rather than fleeting knowledge of many.

Rating:
Summary: Great learning method
Review: I've tried other courses to learn French. The Pimsleur method is far better. No rewinding the tape and listening again. Builds on what you know. Highly recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Program. Pimsleur is da bom.
Review: I, too have tried many different types of 'teach yourself' french and the program is the only one that actually sticks in my head. I'm trying to save enough to move onto the expensive comprehensive program which I don't think should include the first 8 of the basic. The pricing of these products is at issue but the quality of them is not. Very good product!

Rating:
Summary: Minimally useful
Review: It's true that the amount of French you learn is very limited. But, it's the only language course that I've ever done where you can learn stricly by listening. Other language courses cover much more material but require that you have a book and that you constantly have your hand on the rewind button. This course is effective because the queries constantly prompt you to respond, forcing you to create sentences in your head. So if your want to study from a book and use the audio only as a guide for pronounciation, buy a different course.

Rating:
Summary: Very effective
Review: It's true that the amount of French you learn is very limited. But, it's the only language course that I've ever done where you can learn stricly by listening. Other language courses cover much more material but require that you have a book and that you constantly have your hand on the rewind button. This course is effective because the queries constantly prompt you to respond, forcing you to create sentences in your head. So if your want to study from a book and use the audio only as a guide for pronounciation, buy a different course.

Rating:
Summary: An ambitious and impressive approach
Review: The Pimsleur method takes relatively small amounts of information and really "works it" - getting you to use the vocabulary and grammatical skills you've learned in and out of sequence, and with varying inflections and authentic French mannerisms. The lessons are scrupulously cumulative, and always give the student an adequate base of review and support before going into new territory. That Pimsleur has managed to design such a comprehsive method that fits into such a nice, tight little high-intensity 30-minute daily package - and be so effective - is to me very impressive.

By comparison, it seems virtually all the other audio courses out there (I have personally tried Living Language, Barrons and Berlitz) focus on giving you lots of vocabulary and formal grammar, with nowhere near as much foundational support. With these other methods, there is an inherent assumption you will have the discipline and motivation to work all this "raw information" up to a usable speed of performance and recall-something which I suspect few people ever manage to do successfully on their own. Information like that is free now-just go to WannaLearn.com or some such place and you will find free materials that rival the methods just mentioned. If you want to learn how to _use_ this information in a thorough and meaningful way, I suggest you at least sample this 8-lesson, "abridged" version.

The three "complete" versions (40 half-hour lessons each) are considerably more expensive - out-pricing every other method on the market. They each work out to being approximately the same price as a college- or university-level course with as good or perhaps even better results, so I suppose it's not as unreasonable a price as it appears, especially considering you have greater overall flexibility and the ability to retake the course or any part of it as often as you wish.

The inherent weakness in all of these audio methods is of course their rigidity. Because they necessarily must be a pre-planned, one-size-fits-all system, there may well be areas where you need a greater or lesser degree of detail and support based on your background and abilities. Likewise, there are no opportunities to deviate from the method to attend to matters of your own culture, interests or personal oddities. Despite this, the Pimsleur method, out of all the ones available, gives the most solid framework on which to build for future learning - and of course learning any language properly (including one's first language!) is a lifelong process.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent program! It really works!
Review: This program is fun and teaches you all the essential elements of the French language in a relatively short time. It gives the student all the basic frameworks that one needs to engage in a French conversation. This set contains the first 8 lessons from the comphrehensive program. They are fun and easy to learn. Don't even think about it, just go and get it, it really works. I can't wait to get the comphrehensive program.

Rating:
Summary: Minimally useful
Review: This set of tapes is essentially a drill in repetition and memorization. For example, in the first lesson (out of eight lessons), spend 1/2 and hour learning a handful of phrases by listening to the french and english translation being repeated over and over again. Each tape is like that: handful of phrases, lots of repetition. The benefit is that you won't forget these phrases; also you will get a good sense of what the language should sound like. The downside is much more: you won't learn anything about grammer, or the written language... in fact, you won't learn much at all. Over all, I would not recommend this.