Reviews

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501 Essential French Verbs, from Dover

4 French, Books

This nicely designed book from Dover Publications consists primarily of verb tables. It is hard to get overly excited about verb tables, which simply involve listing all possible conjugations for a given verb, and then all the conjugations for another…

Oops! I Forgot to Hide It!

4 French, Books

I’ll be blunt: this French book is a little dirty. Which is fine. Smutty stuff has a place in a French student’s library. Especially a college-age student, but the contents of Hide This French Book<…

One of Many Options on French-Flashcards.com: Study Words by Topic!

5 French, Audio Lessons, Flashcards, Multimedia, Vocabulary, Websites, Kids

You know a language website is good when you and your husband spend date night (though I confess I have a visceral aversion to that odd expression) playing around on it. French-Flashcards.com is French flashcards on steroids! This is…

A Petite French Grammar with a Very High Grammar-to-Dollar Ratio

5 French, Books

This small old-fashioned French book has a high grammar density. It is not a workbook; it is a concise summary of the basic principles of French grammar, populated with numerous helpful examples. The cover promises that it is “All the…

Multilingual Motivation

4 French, General, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Vocabulary

Can’t commit to a single language? Go for five at a time, then, with this daily tweet translating an English word into five languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Today’s word was “train.”  Portuguese:

Schoenhof's Website Is a Window to the World

5 Arabic, Dutch, English, French, General, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Websites, Bookstores/Libraries, Kids

Founded in 1856, Schoenhof’s claims to have the “largest collection of foreign books in North America.” As a student at Harvard, I used to shop at their main store in Harvard Square for my language and literature course materials. I…

The Keys to French?

4 French, Books

This book by Annie Heminway contains lots of grammar drills, offering excellent opportunities for practice to people seeking to refine their skills. I’ve used Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar twice. Right after I went through it…

iPod Nano with Pimsleur French

5 French, Audio Lessons, Multimedia

Pimsleur is my favorite self-study language-learning product to date. It offers a series of interactive audio lessons, roughly half an hour each, in which the student is cajoled, prodded, encouraged, etc., to speak a foreign language in response to brilliantly…

This Advanced French Grammar Is Not Always the Easiest Book to Follow, But It Has Lots of Exercises

3-5 French, Books

This book by Véronique Mazet is full of grammar exercises, and I love grammar exercises. I also usually love grammar explanations, but Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced French Grammar wore me out. The sentences explaining grammar in this…

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