French Made Simple

French Made Simple by Pamela Rose Haze. Made Simple Books.

French Made Simple is a textbook that I bought in a bookstore in Montréal when I was there last summer.

The first chapter lists some statistics about French and its speakers and some reasons why you might want to learn it. The second provides detailed pronunciation information (which I would do well to revisit) — as detailed as I think you can get in a book without using overly technical vocabulary that only people trained in linguistics would understand.

Each chapter from the third on starts off with a short reading. At first, the readings are divided into two columns; the left has French text and the right has an English translation. Later chapters’ readings are French-only. After the readings come vocabulary related to and grammar introduced in the text. Then an exercise or two, some more grammatical information, and then a few more exercises. After every few chapters, there’s a review-only section which lists vocabulary and has more exercises and a reading for practice.

The readings are based on an ongoing story. Monsieur Brown, a New York based importer of French objets d’art, plans to visit France to meet his representative in Paris and, time permitting, check out the French countryside. He doesn’t speak French and his agent doesn’t speak English (how they’ve managed to do business is never explained), so M. Brown decides to learn French. He is taught by Monsieur Picard, a Frenchman who lives in New York. M. Brown eventually travels to France and gets on and along fine.

I can’t remember exactly when I started this book; it was after I started working from home; I generally read it and did the exercises while eating lunch. I did all the exercises except for those that were translations into English. That’s because I was writing out the exercises in a notebook. Writing in French is, for now, slow enough that I can keep up with myself. When I write in English, my hand can’t keep up with my mind, and it’s frustrating. I did usually speak what I would have written, sotto voce, however.

I was pleased with this book; its descriptions and explanations were generally clear and, as far as I can tell, correct. If I didn’t already know Spanish (and if I hadn’t already gone through some other, incredibly crappy, and poorly and inaccurately translated into Spanish books about French), my impression might be different. Certainly knowing English and another Romance language helps with learning French immensely.

There are other books in the same series that appear to be equally good, although without having read them nor done their exercises I can’t be sure.