Learn French with Paul Noble for Beginners – Complete Course: French Made Easy with Your Bestselling Language Coach Audio CD – Unabridged, 13 Sept. 2012

I know a little French, half it bad school French, the rest learnt from "Needs Must" exchanges holidaying in France - barbaric at best. Learning languages is hard work, very hard work but some learning systems make it twice as difficult, very boring and before you've made any real progress you give up.Noble's approach is novel in that he has a series of shortcuts (I'm halfway through disc 2 in about three weeks) to help you along. For example half the English language is based on French, so he steals all the common words for a start. Then similar words, with slightly different endings which then explains. The constant mantra of don't worry about remembering phrases because you'll know by the end of the course. He constantly repeats phrases, repeats them with variants (ie: I, he, she, you, they) and then builds them into a usable sentence.He then adds new words to show how they can used with different subjects before breaking them down again and rebuilding for example a negative version (ie: I can, he can, you can becomes I can't, he can't, you can't).He constantly introduces new subject sentences and vocabulary to stop you getting bored and he pushes you to keep learning at a fast pace. He also has a native French speaker to hand so you can pick up the pronunciation correctly. There are plenty of spaces to repeat the phrases in answer to verbal questions after his example.Personally, I might listen from 2 to 4 tracks in a session for about half an hour and then move on when I feel comfortable that I have the pronunciation down and can recall exactly what each word means. He specifically advises against this but it works for me. (I used this techniques when trying to learn Japanese and it was the only effective method for me - but everyone is different).For the £25 or so investment these CD's are a bargain. It teaches you to builds useful sentence of conversational French and I feel confident no matter how hard it gets I'll stick with it. It's not a walk in the park but it's easier than anything else I've come across. Rosetta Stone can wait until I've finished this ( I don't actually believe I'd finish RS at five Levels I think I'd run out of gas before I got there). So there you go, buy a copy, stick with it, do half an hour a day, every day and I think you'll crack it.Just remember French wasn't constructed in a day, so don't expect to learn it in a day either!

I did GCSE French so bought this years later as I had forgotten nearly everything. This is brilliant and gets you up to a high GCSE standard again, but much much more than that. It sticks in your head for much longer than it did when I learnt it at school, and you have an excellent understanding of the French language. Paul Noble teaches you French how a child born in France would learn to speak it; by learning how to construct all the basic sentences. By the end of the 12 CDs (12 hours) you have an extremely firm understanding of a huge amount of French-all the basics I would say-that you can build on by learning new words, practice, and listening to French TV programmes etc. If you listened to this before you went on a French holiday you could order anything you want very easily and have a conversation with a French person (if it wasn't too long). You don't have to put in ANY effort, you can just download the CDs onto your iPod and listen to it on the train or when jogging etc. and he repeats things and leaves gaps for you to say things so that you are always engaged and it all just goes in magically. He has a pleasant voice, not to posh and not too broad, and very clear. Also he uses a French lady for the French speaking parts so you get really good at proper pronunciation. I think I will be getting the German and Spanish ones as well, although I'm not sure if I'd get on as well because I didn't learn these at school beforehand. I got this for £25 but it would be more than worth it at full price.

I've tried a few others, so thought I might as well give this a bash as well. My first impression is that it was like a more bearable version of Michel Thomas. For those who don't know, MT had something of a unique accent anyway, being Polish, and he also used the dumbest, most hesitant and most irritating students humanly possible to give examples (or maybe that was the German version?).Anyway, this is much simpler, clearer and he uses a real French person for the speaking. You do seem to get into the swing of it quite quickly, although having a little background knowledge probably makes that a bit easier.Once you've plodded through the 10 learning discs, there are two revision ones, and these will be what I come back to in the future, as they seem to cover pretty much everything in the other 10 discs, but so much quicker. By the end, I was answering the questions pretty quickly and almost naturally, although I haven't used them in a real world situation yet.I'd say this is definitely a good start, from a conversational point of view, but clearly it's limited and there's no written element.A more advanced version would be a good idea, but in the meantime, I'm moving on to Hugo Complete French: Complete CD language course - from beginner to fluency (Hugo Complete CD Language Course) to get some written examples and also takes things further.