SmartFrench Audio CDs Beginner Level

As said before, rather than a French course this is just a complement to your French course, designed to improve your listening and pronunciation skills (don't expect to find any help on grammar, for example). And it does an excellent job at that. To avoid repeating previous reviews, I will focus on describing this product, so you can judge it for yourself.

Starting with the content, this DVD-sized box comes with three audio CDs and a booklet attached inside. The CDs are recorded in standard audio format (not mp3), so you're sure to be able to listen to it in your car. The CDs contain an introduction to the alphabet, the numbers and the French sounds, followed by the recordings of seven one-on-one real-life short interviews, hand-picked to fit the beginner level (not for an absolute beginner, though).

The booklet contains the transcriptions of all that, including also the transcriptions of the nine interviews of the intermediate and advanced levels - whose CDs are sold with the intermediate/advanced box. It's just that they probably ship the same booklet with both products. Sound omissions are marked in red in the text, while "liaisons" are underlined. The booklet also contains the translations of all interviews into English.

After you listen to and repeat the alphabet, the numbers and the French vowel sounds, the first interview begins. Each interview is repeated six times. The first five times are spoken entirely by a male French speaker with clear pronunciation, and the sixth time is the real interview played back for you to listen. The speaker gives his instructions and comments in English.

The first time, the speaker just reads the interview for you to listen, very slowly, in the way French people read. The second time you repeat after him, also very slowly without reading the transcript, but this time with the usual sound omissions and simplifications common in spoken French. The third time you also repeat after him, but this time a little faster and reading along. The fourth time is when the speaker pauses to explain and work on a few pronunciation tricks. The fifth time is when the narrator repeats only one or two common expressions spoken in the interview.

Although I think this product is really effective and helpful, I didn't give it the full five stars because of the following flaws:

(1) The sound chart and recordings don't cover two important vowel sounds that are particularly difficult for foreigners: the sound of OEU in "boeuf" and "soeur", and the sound of UM in "parfum" or UN in "brun";

(2) The recording quality of the real interviews is clearly inferior to that of the studio-recorded French narrator. In the real interviews, not only are there the environment noise and the hissing typical of analog recordings, but also you're forced to increase the volume of your stereo to hear it at the same sound level as the rest of the CD;

(3) The French speaker gives much attention to phonetics and sounds, pronouncing words very slowly and clearly, but gives little attention to intonation, which is an essential part of a language's native accent;

(4) To better train our ear and pronunciation, it would be helpful to also listen to (and repeat after) different native speakers, with varying accents, not just one narrator.

That said, I still strongly recommend this product for improving both your pronunciation and your oral comprehension of French.

If you want to learn French like the French children do, use this product. If you want to start with grammar and vocabulary, try the excellent SmartFrench - Introduction to French, Vol.1 and 2. I use both in combination with this product and I am very satisfied. It's very clear, very efficient and very fast. Thank you.

In my opinion, the lessons contained in both the intermediate AND the beginner levels are not well suited for the person who is not familiar with French already.

That being said, if you have a good amount of French training behind you, such as in college, or independent study, that is, book-learnin', in my opinion this is a good series for putting finishing touches upon your pronunciation and accent. You're not going to learn HOW to speak French with this series (you should already know how, for the most part, before buying this one). But for the person who does have some skill in spoken French, imho, these CDs or tapes are a great way to polish up for conducting conversations with natives. You're going to be exposed to the much more messy version of spoken French than your fancy book-learning taught you, which is good, so that you don't come off sounding like either an American French student or someone who just stepped out of a time machine from back in the day when people paid more attention to the rules.

I am really an intermediate student rather than beginner, but thought I'd start with the beginner CDs in this series. Like most intermediate students of a language, I need to work on listening comprehension. This program does strive for that, but in my opinion offers too few opportunities to listen to native French speakers. Too repetitious--I kept falling asleep, or having trouble paying attention. Can't believe I bought these CDs! The narrator keeps repeating points he had already made...I won't be bothering with the intermediate or advanced versions.

And of course I bought them based on reviews from others, which I consider to be a good indicator...not in this case, though!

I have 2 other sets which I consider better (the "Learn French In Your Car" is especially good for beginners), and a set from the library that is no longer available.

This is an excellent program for learning to speak French the way it's supposed to be spoken. I used to speak as a child in school, but haven't spoken the language for many years. As my kid is learning French, I'm trying to help. School classes teaches the hard stuff, like grammar, etc., and not exactly how to speak/listen to the language. We tried a few other programs and were fairly disappointed until we got SmartFrench. This is an excellent program where you learn to speak, and as importantly, listen to real conversations, at different speeds. There are also text to refer to, as well as the vocabulary list for the CD materials.

One thing to understand though, that this program (Beginner level) does assume some basic knowledge of the language, and therefore not exactly for the absolute beginners. For the absolute beginners who never had any experience with the language, the also excellent SmartFrench - Introduction to French 1 & 2 CDs, also by Christian Aubert are more appropriate to start with.

Finally, this is not a program that teaches you to conjugate verbs and such. There are many books and others for French grammar. This program excels at the one objective, training your listening and speaking skills so that you can speak French like the French do. It's a perfect program if you've had some French in the past and want to brush up on speaking/listening.

Have fun!