Easy French Step-by-Step

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 Programs The 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.

Oh this book was amazing! It had everything, vocabulary, grammar, key concepts, readings exercises, answer keys, and I personally believe it was well organized! It helped me clarify some key concepts! The only thing that this book does not help is with pronunciation but if you take a french class on the side, then this book would be perfect! However if you believe you are already a french beginner wanting to advance to the next level, you might want to try a harder book. From one to ten (0 being absolute beginner and 10 being Native Fluent) I mark this book as a 3. This really does help the absolute beginner but I dont think it would really help out someone who is intermediate because it does not cover some essential concepts such as "lequel, laquel etc" le Passe Simple et other important key french concepts! However, these concepts are not easy and as this book suggests, this book is an Easy French step-by step. This book does deliver all it says its going to deliver, Very satisfied with this book. I will buy the Italian version next because I know these series will give me the push I need to get started with the Italian Language!

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 :-)

I took French in HS with a horrible teacher. He pronounced everything very non-French. And I honestly came out of that classing knowing how to say library (very typical). I bought this book in 2020 because my desire to learn French was reignited. I opened this book and gave up because it was just too complex for a beginner. Then, in the year 2021, I decided to take private French lessons with a French native speaker. With about 20 lessons under my name, I decided to open this book again. From reading the first chapter, I can now see this book is for beginners. It actually lays everything out for you to learn. BUT this book is maybe poorly written? Or there should be a CD or some sort of guide to help you more as a beginner. Because I got the basics from an actual French native speaker, I’m more confident with this book. But there are problems with this book. It assumes you know certain vocabulary and you just go into the exercises. Or the author’s learning plan wants you to learn 20+ vocab terms, then wants you to complete exercises. As a teacher myself, I know you can’t expect students to learn than many terms right off the bat and ask them to complete exercises. This book needs a better structure for beginners. But at the same time, it is a helpful tool. Do not rely on this as your only tool.

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

As a teacher myself, this is a very well laid out book in terms of logical sequencing, and I know it will help me get a better grasp of French overall, as well as detailed grammar. It's very similar to the very effective Spanish textbooks I learned from in middle school and high school :-)