Oxford take off in French Book

I wouldn't recommend this course except as revision material. It is designed for an absolute beginner, yet does not provide full translations of the French texts. I think this is a terrible trend in language instruction publishing that effectively renders a lot of the thoughtful work that goes into such books as these quite useless, since without full translations the beginner is going to struggle so unduly that his motivation will be threatened.

For an intermediate learner such as myself, the material is good additional practice, but at the same time the book is not very challenging - the first chapters can be skipped - and provides only limited vocabulary growth.

I consider audio material vital to a beginner's study regime, and this book is very scanty in this regard. I have gone through several similar books, and whereas most audio content generates a dozen or so pages of notes, made from "blind" listening, this book's generated only 4. This reflects the low difficult level of the book, which is not a fault, but also the lack of meat here.

Without splicing up the audio material to check, I'll just have to guess that within 4 hours of CD playtime there is perhaps half an hour of French dialogue. It sounds incredible, but most of that playtime is taken up with recapitulations of those same dialogues, broken up into chunks and formulated into drills. The focus in on getting you to speak, rather than expanding your comprehension, so bear my criticism of the listening and vocabulary in this light.

So here I should say that if you love being drilled by a CD, by all means find this book. If you were to use this method, you would improve your speaking skills. However I personally could never make this method the centre of my learning. I also doubt that any fluency in speaking will be of much use when the lack of breadth in the material provided will render any real French conversation mere babble to you.

As obvious as it is to say, no one book - even of the mighty Assimil series - will ever give you more than a stepping-stone's improvement in the language. I don't want to offer the useless criticism that this book does not contain everything needed to learn French. However I think it's necessary to state the obvious, since so much exaggeration abounds in the publishing industry. This particular book would be more honestly titled "French Drills for beginners: find confidence in speaking spontaneously (includes grammar explanations and pronunciation tips)."