Customer Rating: 

This is French without tears! In the beginning of the book Michel Thomas tells us we are not aware of the amount of French we know already, how right he is, we are using the French language almost daily. I found his method very easy to follow. Some reviewers have said they find the students annoying, I didn't, I found that when they made a mistake or wrong pronunciation this helped to show me I was not dumb for getting a word wrong, just normal. Although this is basic level French it will help you to get by on holiday and maybe encourage you to go to the next stage. I thoroughly enjoyed this cd and feel I can go back to it at any time especially prior to the next trip to France.

Customer Rating: 

Prior to purchasing these CDs I could not speak one word of French. Now, after two weeks, I can construct a sentence in the French language. For someone who is new to the language this is a good product to introduce you to a language and give you the confidence to progress into learning the language in-depth.

For absolute beginners this product can be highly recommended.

Customer Rating: 

I always struggled with French at school; it seemed so fussy and I just got lost in the grammar. After numerous holidays in France I was prepared to give it one last go. Michel Thomas' method is different to how French is taught in school. There is no reading, note-taking or even trying to memorise anything! I must say that I was surprised at how quickly the material seemed to stick in my head. Right from the first CD you learn some useful materials.

NB: this method is different, so you will learn to say something like "Will you come to have dinner at the house with me tonight because I would like to speak with you. It is very important for me and I would like to know what time you are going to be here..." BUT you will not learn how to count from 1 to 10 - or any numbers, days of the week, months etc for that matter. Some people may find this a bit odd.

The learning setting is amongst two other students who I must say are very annoying. You have the stammering Englishman who has sudden memory lapses, and an even more annoying American woman who can't pronounce anything consistently. These two very nearly wreck the whole thing because they can irritate you the whole time. However, if you sit back and go through the process, joining in by using the pause button, the method does work. The method starts to fall apart a little bit as you get into the more complex grammatical constructs and you may find yourself having to write things down. However, I don't think that is a bad thing as it helped me.

The 2 revision CDs at the end are extremely helpful, especially as the two other students are not included on those.

I have enjoyed working my way through this course and it has taken me only 2 weeks to do it. Next on the list is the vocab course, which I will review as well.

Customer Rating: 

OK I have read the negative reviews and maybe there are some points but personnally I love it. I am already able to say so much more than i thought possible in just a couple of hours. c'est tres bon

Customer Rating: 

I must agree with Dan.Starr's review and all of the other negative reviews, completely and wholeheartedly. I listened to the cd's for longer than I should have tolerated, just to ensure that I had been fair to listen for as long as I could bare before making judgement. I was listening with a native French speaker who had very kindly bought the cd's for a friend of his and wanted to open them to check how they sounded before giving them and asked me to listen as I am English and have a good ear for the French language (due to spending my childhood around native speakers and having studied at school from an English learning perspective.) The first thing that surprises and disappoints is that the "teacher" (professor of languages etc etc as you have all raved about above) is not a native French speaker. He has an accent that sounds rather like German and his French pronunciation is (in my personal opinion and that of my native French speaking friend too) extremely poor, bad and awful combined. The fact that you have to hear English sentences with a French word badly pronounced thrown in here and there is extremely confusing and frustrating. You then hear the pupils (pupils who appear to speak French with far better pronunciation than the teacher) deliberately making mistakes. This means that when you are concentrating and listening intently you are taking in the mistakes and hearing English mixed with French rather than hearing good full sentences of French without interruption and without mistakes. Also you are not learning the phrases in full as they are within the French grammatical language structure, instead you are being encouraged to learn words as a direct translation for the words separately and then encouraged to create the sentence (which should not be done) ie rather than learning J'ai froid which directly translates as I have cold, you are being taught to translate literally from the English; which if you were to do this, would be Je suis froid which is incorrect. This example is not literally in the cd, however time and time again he is encouraging learning separate words and building a sentence rather than learning grammatically correct phrases. I would greatly recommend for anyone at any level learning FRENCH that you learn by listening to FRENCH from a NATIVE FRENCH SPEAKER. This cd was in my opinion and that of my French friend a complete waste of time and money. We are sending this to the charity shop and shall be buying any other course available, that is spoken by one of more native FRENCH speakers. I should also add that when the "teacher" on the cd speaks English alone, he is mind numbingly dull and the mental energy that you enthusiastically start with when you put the cd into the player is lost as this is sooooo soporific that you feel like someone has injected you before a general anesthetic and that you have no control over remaining conscious!!!! PERSONALLY (as everyone is indeed entitled to their opinions) I have to say DO NOT BUY this cd for anyone that you like or that you wish to enjoy learning a foreign language as it was painfully disappointing. May I also finally add that this is the very first time after having bought an item from Amazon (I buy items from here all of the time and have done so over many years) that I have gone straight to the site and read the reviews and have then strongly felt the need to comment to save others from making a similar mistake. Very best wishes to you all :)