Learn French with Paul Noble for Beginners – Complete Course: French Made Easy with Your Bestselling Language Coach

I really enjoyed learning to speak French. This course starts out very simple and become more challenging as you go along.

Ottimo corso introduttivo al francese.Dopo averlo completato ciò che si è appreso resta quasi tutto in memoria.Ovviamente, essendo la lingua in cui sono date le istruzioni l'inglese, presuppone una buona conoscenza di questa lingua.

This course and the Michel Thomas course take a similar approach to introducing french. Both use spaced repetition, in which they come back to words and concepts already introduced. Both are based around testing (eg. they ask continually "how would you say") and testing like this is shown to be much more effective than simply reading a word list or dialogue over and over. I did the Michel Thomas course and then this one; if doing it again I'd reverse the order. It is still worth getting both; hearing somewhat different versions of the same material helps reinforce it. This course (and Thomas) require concentration; it isn't something you can do while driving.I prefer this course to Michel Thomas because the correct response is given by a native French speaker, instead of Thomas who has an accent. In this course the question is posed, there is a pause, then the correct answer. In Thomas you are in a small class as the 3rd student. They often stumble a bit, and if I was in a live class I'd want the Thomas approach because he fixes it by going back to something they know and working forward. But their mistakes on tape may not be your mistakes. Furthermore your fingers get a workout with Thomas since you need to pause after every question, while this course has pauses built in (although in later CDs they seemed a bit too short).Another plus is this course gives all the verb tenses from the start. The Thomas course standard course only uses some of the verb tenses. And I liked the frequent role-playing ("you are at a market", "you are at a hotel") in which a sample interaction is played out, something you don't find in the Thomas course. One nit is that when Paul prompts for 1st/2nd/3rd person he almost always goes in the same order, so you don't get as much of a testing effect to strengthen your recall as you would if he used a random order.So can you get by in French after this course? Both this and Michel Thomas seem to imply that in just a few hours using their method you can accomplish what hundreds of classroom hours fail to do for most students. After this course you can form some sentences, have a small but useful vocabulary, and understand how to use some of the pronouns. It's a good start, but both Noble and Thomas play a trick to sidestep conjugation. They teach the full present-tense conjugation of "want" and "can" so that any other verb can be used in the infinitive form (eg. "can we X", "they want Y", where X and Y are verbs you don't know how to conjugate). That's great, it gets you talking, but native speakers are going to conjugate verbs in writing and speech and you simply won't recognize them. After using this course I started with Assimil French, which has simple dialogues that use grammar and verbs well covered in the Noble course but with real conjugations. I found I understood little from the early lessons the first time I heard them. I'm not criticizing Thomas & Noble, actually I strongly endorse them, but I think the marketing oversells what you will learn.

I know a little French, half it bad school French, the rest learnt from "Needs Must" exchanges holidaying in France - barbaric at best. Learning languages is hard work, very hard work but some learning systems make it twice as difficult, very boring and before you've made any real progress you give up.Noble's approach is novel in that he has a series of shortcuts (I'm halfway through disc 2 in about three weeks) to help you along. For example half the English language is based on French, so he steals all the common words for a start. Then similar words, with slightly different endings which then explains. The constant mantra of don't worry about remembering phrases because you'll know by the end of the course. He constantly repeats phrases, repeats them with variants (ie: I, he, she, you, they) and then builds them into a usable sentence.He then adds new words to show how they can used with different subjects before breaking them down again and rebuilding for example a negative version (ie: I can, he can, you can becomes I can't, he can't, you can't).He constantly introduces new subject sentences and vocabulary to stop you getting bored and he pushes you to keep learning at a fast pace. He also has a native French speaker to hand so you can pick up the pronunciation correctly. There are plenty of spaces to repeat the phrases in answer to verbal questions after his example.Personally, I might listen from 2 to 4 tracks in a session for about half an hour and then move on when I feel comfortable that I have the pronunciation down and can recall exactly what each word means. He specifically advises against this but it works for me. (I used this techniques when trying to learn Japanese and it was the only effective method for me - but everyone is different).For the £25 or so investment these CD's are a bargain. It teaches you to builds useful sentence of conversational French and I feel confident no matter how hard it gets I'll stick with it. It's not a walk in the park but it's easier than anything else I've come across. Rosetta Stone can wait until I've finished this ( I don't actually believe I'd finish RS at five Levels I think I'd run out of gas before I got there). So there you go, buy a copy, stick with it, do half an hour a day, every day and I think you'll crack it.Just remember French wasn't constructed in a day, so don't expect to learn it in a day either!

Of all the self teaching CD sets available, this is definitely the best. I spent most of adult life living abroad, learning to speak multiple languages. For some, I had an American accent, for others, I was told I had no accent at all. Part of my family is French. I spent a great deal of time with them in Paris, studying at the Alliance Francais and traveling around France. However, I did not like speaking French because I could tell I was not pronouncing words correctly and I had too much of an accent. I also had to think too much about what I was attempting to communicate. The teaching approach by Paul Noble is unique in many ways. He does not go into great detail explaining grammatical structure, such as conjugations of verbs, declensions of nouns and adjectives etc. which is typical of most foreign language instruction which generally requires memorizing pages of words, whether masculine or feminine, endless drilling, memorizing past, present and future tenses of a verb, not to mention more complex grammatical structures. Instead, he assures the listener, not to be concerned about forgetting various words or phrases because they are repeated at different intervals. He explains in understandable terms how French is structured, so that when the listener practices speaking French, one is not all caught up in trying to remember every nuance. There is plenty of time during the intervals in which he introduces new vocabulary or phrases to practice aloud and then a native speaker repeats the words or phrases in French, so that is makes it easier to correct one's pronunciation without being mystified by all the diacritics and spellings. I have made remarkable progress in just a few days time. The beauty of this 12 CD set, is that one can replay sections or replay an entire CD. I highly recommend this distinctly different approach to learning a foreign language.