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French Grammar the Easy Way (Easy Way Series)
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - french grammer
very useful book,simple explanations using a lot of illustrations,suitable also for beginners and also for intermidiate
Rating: - I'd give it 10 stars if I could!
I'm completely amazed by how good this book is. As a writer of technical textbooks, I know how hard it is to get across such material concisely, completely and clearly. This book blows me away.
Most grammar books simply contain descriptions of correct language. This one goes the extra step and explains WHY things are as they are. For just one example: I had been struggling for ages with "ce que" versus "que". I could never seem to figure out why "ce" was sometimes necessary. One read through the single page in this book that deals with the issue and I was sorted out forever!
The book is full of handy tips for remembering things (to be frank, sometimes they do feel a bit contrived, but you're not forced to use all of them, after all) and I just love the nearly 10 pages dealing with negative sentence structures using the concept of a burger with various ingredients! It's so well done that the complexity of dealing with the placements of pronouns and the various negative adverbs becomes totally clear and easy to remember.
A book which explains concepts so clearly might be expected to only deal with beginner concepts, but no...it devotes 43 pages to the conditional and subjunctive moods, again, very clearly explained.
One more bit of praise: the practice exercises come with answers! How rare is that?
Rating: - An Excellent French Grammer Text, not only for college students
This is a surprisingly good book, at a very cheap price. I'm more than twice as old as your typical college student and although I limped through a year of French 30 years ago in college, I'd forgotten virtually all of it until I embarked on a program of study in a language school in France with additional study at home. During the 2 years I've been working on this little project, I've bought just about every French grammer and many of the other French language books available on Amazon. To be honest, most were either useless or more trouble than they were worth. "The Ultimate French Review and Practice" by Stillman and Gordon is but one example of a book I've bought and found of very limited value.
What is great about THIS book is that it is written by a native Frenchwoman who was educated in France but who has lived a long time in the USA where she has taught French language courses to English speakers (e.g. "Anglophones.") As a result, she is personally very familiar with the problems that Anglophones have learning French, both from the experience of working with English speaking students and from her own experience of being a Francophone trying to learn English. The perspective this gives is oh, so much more valuable than when you have native English speakers trying to teach French.
The other book to which I referred above is full of examples of non-idiomatic speach, sentences and word constructions that while technically (maybe) correct, are often non-idiomatic. When I tried to work with that book with a young Frenchman who has been helping me practice French at home, he kept saying, "but that isn't how WE would say it."
On the other hand, when I read the Chauderlot book, I find many explanations of things that I never was able to grasp when it was attempted to teach them to me solely in French. Sometimes it is just easier to have complicated sentence structures, the use of prepositions, and other specific grammatical points explained to you in your own language so that you can actually understand them rather than using them by rote. When you use something by rote you will probably get by with it, but then later when you are faced with a variation of the construction you did not really understand, it is anyone's guess if you will comprehend it.
I have not finished this book but the portions that I have read, dealing with nouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns are very clear and comprehensible. I am taking this book with me to France to use during my upcoming monthlong trip during which I'll spend 3 weeks back in the language school. I am going to give it as a gift to the library of the school when I leave in the hopes it will help other Anglophone students.
Of course, I have ordered a second copy so I'll have one back at home when I return from the trip!
Rating: - An excellent book
I am a college professor and have been using this book for three quarters now - it's excellent.
I have no idea what the gentleman beow is referring to as full of errors... Go ahead and email them to me scolbert56 @ yahoo.com but it sounds like he doesn't have a firm grasp of the language. Possibly he's thinking of French Canadian / Arcadian? Get a clue. Do you really think that Barron's would have allowed three or four proofreaders to miss any major mistakes?
Anyway, as I was saying, we've been using the book in class and even the students whose first choice wasn't French are entertained and immersed into learning the language.
Steven
Rating:  - full of errors
The book covers a lot of material and will undoubtedly be useful to somebody who has already learned the material before (but might have forgotten it). Unfortunately, the book has many many errors, sometimes in crucial places, and many of the summarizing charts are poorly conceived and designed. I suppose it does make one think carefully in order to untangle the correct information from what is written.
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