Hi all, don’t know if i’m posting in the wrong folder here, if so please move me mods.
Okay, I need to know a good French language course, preferably with CD’s, that I can learn from home.
I last did French at school some umpteen years ago, and still remember a few of the basics, but probably best to treat me as a beginner.
This leads me to another question, has anybody actually learnt enough French to be fluent from a homestudy course before?
I’m natively speaking french and let me tell you one thing: it’s hard. i mean, the grammar is.
i say it should be possible to learn enough french from a homestudy course to have a conversation with someone, but writing say…a letter with minimal mistakes, i wish you good luck
although, i’ve never heard of courses that are on CD’s [and frankly, i’ve never looked for them], but if you find something, let me know, i’m very interested in learning german 
Well, the gold standard in conversational language courses is the Pimsleur series. They have CDs for many different languages and levels. Supposedly, Pimsleur perfected the learning technique so words are introduced at certain intervals and repeated after certain lengths of time so the vocabulary is easy to learn. This page talks about the process. (admittedly, it’s fromn a site that sells Pimsleur tapes.
I’ve used the Japanese Level I and I think it’s pretty impressive. I’ve recalled a lot of the vocabularly. There’s not a lot of grammar included (the course kinda lets you figure it out on your own) and I think it might be best supplemented with a textbook. And the downside is that the CDs are very expensive. The unabridged Level I runs around $300. That’s for 30 half hour lessons.
Since you’re looking more for advice than hard facts, I’ll move this thread to the In Our Humble Opinion forum.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Let me tell you two things about French: 1) Nobody can write it correctly, including people who grew up speaking French. It’s excessively convoluted and complicated, even compared to English.
- When you forget number 1, and are getting stressed, you want to pick up The Anglo Guide to Survival to Quebec
I almost learned enough to get by on a 2-week vacation to Paris.
What I did was check out a tape from the library. you might want to look into that, check them all out, see what you like, don’t like about each of them. When you do decide to buy, you might have a better idea what will and won’t work.
Bon Chance!! (See, it worked!)