The Standard Deviants - French 1 & 2

Rating:
Summary: Poor quality production
Review: Perhaps the DVD would've been easier to follow if it weren't for the poor production quality of the DVD. The colours are way off. First, I thought it had to do with the settings on my PC, but the DVD looks horrible (too much red) also on my new TV.

The pronunciation of some of the French words is off, the scetches are cheesy and the graphics are poor and often incomplete.

All in all, I wouldn't recommend these DVD-series. It's a shame I bought both the DVD's already.

Rating:
Summary: WORST LANGUAGE LESSON EVER!
Review: The Standard Deviants talk down to their viewers and with the shaky camera and jumpy cuts it just gives you a headache! I tried to watch this and other Standard Deviant lessons, but always felt let down in the end. The jumpiness of the show is too distracting & is specially designed for people with absolutely NO attention span. IF YOU ARE SERIOUS ABOUT LEARNING FRENCH, DO YOURSELF A FAVOUR & WATCH FRENCH FILMS INSTEAD (or use French audio on favourite moves, listen to French cds, etc). Classic French language animation, like Asterix & Obelix, Tintin, and Lucky Luke will help you much more. I also recommend listening to Zazie CDs, she is great and always comes w/ lyrics (and she sings slowly enough for you to follow everything). She has at least 6 CDs out currently. Other singers I recommend...Edith Piaf, Les Charlots (funny band similar to The Monkeys), M, Air, etc. There are far more enjoyable ways of learning French!!

Rating:
Summary: Awful Video
Review: The Standard Deviants usually make some interesting and educational videos. The French videos, however, are their worst. Not only do they breeze through topics at an unreal pace, most of the actors do not know French themselves! What a joke. Please, if you want to learn French, even the basics, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to French!
Review: This video was perfect for me. As an individual who wanted to learn the basics, I found it very informative. Not to mention funny! It gave me a brief introduction to the language. Now, I'm going buy the sequals and I'll be speaking basic french in no time!

Rating:
Summary: Too much English
Review: Trying to use it to learn French (I know nothing). Even though I am learning it the pronunciation is tough and the DVD just runs through it too fast! Even though you rewind and repeat they pronounce so fast that you cannot imitate them. On the other hand there is too much English used and too much grammar oriented. One does not care about accents in French when one does not even know how to say Hello!