The disenchanted isle Book

This book has excellent audio material and would make a good supplement to any French learning regime. I say supplement because it has a major weakness: the minimal amount of translation in the book. Not only are the reading/listening texts untranslated, but when translations are provided they are scattered about in unpredictable places: sometimes directly below, sometimes in a grammar section, sometimes in a cultural notes type section, and sometimes scrambled in some kind of matching activity.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the predominant wisdom that translation ought to be avoided and one's own initiative should be used to provide the likeliest contextually-fitting meaning?

In my experience, this sort of inferential learning is something I can only do at an advanced stage of learning; not at that of the ground-floor reader which this book addresses itself to. Even though I am more intermediate than beginner, I still had to waste time working with external sources and getting frustrated, when really the book should be expected to clarify things immediately. If I were a complete beginner I would have gotten very frustrated with it.

For example, I found no answers in the text for these tricky phrases:

"en fait de déprime..."
"comme cela je resterais..."
"dès toute petite..."
"c'est bien cela"

...and so I simply wasted time in finding the answer elsewhere. In the worst cases I just had to guess based on context, which is unsatisfying with no teacher there to confirm your hunch.

There are scores and scores of books which are written entirely in the target language and are meant to be used in conjunction with a teacher in a classroom. For autodidacts there are no teachers to ask when things get confusing. I think Teach Yourself should bear this in mind. Until they change this, Assimil will always be this language learner's first port of call.