First French Reader for Beginners

The book consists of elementary and pre-intermediate courses with parallel french-english texts. the author maintains learnersmotivation with funny stories about real life situations such as meeting people, studying, job searches, working etc. the alarm method (approved learning automatic remembering method) utilize natural human ability to remember words used in texts repeatedly and systematically. the author composed each sentence using only words explained in previous chapters. the second and the following chapters of the elementary course have only 30 or less new words each. audio tracks inclusive on lppbooks/french/firstfrenchreader_audio/en/ review this is the best language book i've ever encountered. in fact, it's the only one that i've ever been able to finish. i had some french lessons a long time ago at school and then forgot more or less everything i had learned, so i'm more or less a complete beginner. this book gives you lists of words which you can read fairly quickly (many of them are similar to english words), then gives you simple stories based on the words you've just read. by referring back to the list occasionally, using google translate and googling for tables of french verbs now and then, you can get through the stories quite quickly. the english translation of each story is also provided. the stories are fairly entertaining too! by the end of the book, when you get to the french-english dictionary, you'll find you've learned a huge number of words and can understand most of what's in the dictionary. ok, this book is only a first step towards actually speaking and using french, but it seems like a very big step for such a painless and entertaining book.what i've been doing is reading the french, and then try and back-translate into french (on paper) using the english version. by "correcting" my work i figure out what i know and what i don't. the reader seems designed to teach you by example using adjacent sentences that are similar but illustrate situations where the same word in english would be translated differently into french depending on usage. it's easy enough to read the french version and think you know it, but the real learning (in my case) i believe comes with the work of translating. i have an old copy of 501 french verbs and that is useful once in a while as a reference. an important thing to understand about this book is that grammar is not explained instead you infer the grammar rules from context by reading the example sentences. so i wonder if this would be a bit difficult if you never had any french before. anyway, i am only about 10 chapters in but i can see that this book has helped me quite a bit. suitable for beginners. the combination of word lists, french and english articles seemingly give good challenge yet with adequate support for understanding processes cognitively as well as linguistically.