Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Learning Solution for Everyone
Review: LearnToSpeak 8.0 is the best language learning tool I've used. I've spent hundreds in books, tapes, and audio CDs to no avail. This ridiculously inexpensive software is unmatched in both quality and value. Anyone with a negative review is purely blaming this awesome product for their difficulty learning the language. ... you can't possibly go wrong with it. My fianceé began a reputable French Course 5 hours a week with French Teachers at the same time I bought the software. I've spent 1 hour a day on it for the past month, and I'm way ahead of her in pronunciantion, comprehension, grammar, vocabulary and conversational skills. And she is a Native Spanish/Greek speaker who also masters English. Believe me, she has no learning problems... her course just does not catch up with this software YET. Let me remind you that I have wasted hundreds of dollars on other books, tapes, and CDs without learning how to even greet someone. Of course you can't expect to be fluent in a few weeks with a handfull of CDs... I am a native Spanish speaker as well and to learn a language, you need to immerse yourself in it. That includes TV, Radio, Friends, Internet, EVERYTHING. Else, and only if you really work hard, you'll be fluent enough to be able to travel to France and communicate freely with natives as a TOURIST. You will definitely not be able to discuss Medicine or Engineering, but you'll have the skills to communicate effectively as you travel. This set features real time dialogs WITH video characters, an extensive grammar library, speech recognition, informational videos in French, talking dictionary, and easy to follow lessons categorized by topics... not to mention a very funny and friendly animated cartoon character that teaches you the grammar used on every chapter you finish. And to respond to the review of the 14-year-old, the program DOES include games and it is VERY FUN to learn, but to get to the games, you need to complete the first 5 basic lessons. However, this is a learning tool, not a game... I recommend everybody to please finish the basic lessons and browse all CDs before wasting your time complaining about this awesome [and inexpensive] learning solution.
Rating: 
Summary: FRUSTRATING
Review: This program was extremely frustrating to use. I found the voice recognition cool until I realized that if I said something that sounded even similar to the word I was supposed to be speaking. it would be "recognized". The online portion of the program where you are supposed to be able to set up study programs, etc., wouldn't work. The website would only load intermittently. This program does not save your work, so after spending 45 minutes going through a lesson and accidentally hitting the "back" key, it was as though I had never done the lesson. I couldn't get back to where I was. I was very unimpressed with this software. There is also no real "guide" to speak of. No handbook on the software, just an outline in the program that doesn't really answer questions. I spent several hours trying to figure this thing out and got nowhere, and I spend my day working on computers. Definitely not recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: Good speech recognition
Review: This program [is pretty inexpensive], and no, it's not going to teach you to speak French fluently. I'm not good with languages, but I've found that making a run at French has required years, lots of reading, different books, spending time with movies, streaming audio over the Internet, and all sorts of things. This one...program isn't going to turn you into a fluent French speaker, no single book, piece of software, or class will. I didn't get much use out of most of the functionality in this product. But I do like the speech recognition very much. The program has a meter that gives you an idea of how well you're pronouncing words. It's hard to get it pegged into the green (at least for me), but when I do, I believe that I'm pronouncing the words pretty well. In fact, I took a level 3 class at Alliance Francaise here in Chicago, and was as good as anyone at pronunciation, and was complimented by my teacher, despite being behind the rest on most other aspects of the language. This was entirely due to working with the speech recognition feature in an earlier version of this product. I think it's particularly helpful in light of the fact that language labs seem to be out of favor -- at least they didn't use them at the Alliance Francaise. There aren't many sources of help available for learning correct pronunciation. If you're expecting this package to teach you French all by itself, you're going to be disappointed. But if you're serious about learning how to pronounce things, this is a great tool, and for [the money], I think it's a fantastic deal. If anyone from The Learning Company reads this, I'd like to suggest that they bring out a new product focusing completely on pronunciation and vocabularly. If they had a product with maybe 10,000 words, and solid tools for learning the subset of the vocabulary you needed, I'd pay a couple of hundred bucks for it, at least.
Rating:
Summary: Good speech recognition
Review: This program [is pretty inexpensive], and no, it's not going to teach you to speak French fluently. I'm not good with languages, but I've found that making a run at French has required years, lots of reading, different books, spending time with movies, streaming audio over the Internet, and all sorts of things. This one...program isn't going to turn you into a fluent French speaker, no single book, piece of software, or class will. I didn't get much use out of most of the functionality in this product. But I do like the speech recognition very much. The program has a meter that gives you an idea of how well you're pronouncing words. It's hard to get it pegged into the green (at least for me), but when I do, I believe that I'm pronouncing the words pretty well. In fact, I took a level 3 class at Alliance Francaise here in Chicago, and was as good as anyone at pronunciation, and was complimented by my teacher, despite being behind the rest on most other aspects of the language. This was entirely due to working with the speech recognition feature in an earlier version of this product. I think it's particularly helpful in light of the fact that language labs seem to be out of favor -- at least they didn't use them at the Alliance Francaise. There aren't many sources of help available for learning correct pronunciation. If you're expecting this package to teach you French all by itself, you're going to be disappointed. But if you're serious about learning how to pronounce things, this is a great tool, and for [the money], I think it's a fantastic deal. If anyone from The Learning Company reads this, I'd like to suggest that they bring out a new product focusing completely on pronunciation and vocabularly. If they had a product with maybe 10,000 words, and solid tools for learning the subset of the vocabulary you needed, I'd pay a couple of hundred bucks for it, at least.
Rating:
Summary: A Big Waste of Money
Review: This would have been a wonderful product if it could be installed on my computer. I have tried to install it using Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Neither system would accept it. When I called the company, they said that they knew about the problem and were working on it...to check back at their web site periodically for an update. That was over a year ago. There have been no updates and I basically wasted my money.
Rating:
Summary: poor rating
Review: Virtually worthless. NO phonetic pronunciation hints! NO introductory slow pronunciations. How are we expected to learn French when starting with Lesson 1 on page 1, the instruction book does not follow the CD? Half of this program consists almost entirely of hundreds of random phases to remember. And these phrases are not the phrases a tourist would ask but rather the phrases a Frenchman would give in response to a question a tourist might ask. We are taught "Tu veux boire quelque chose?" (Would you like something to drink?), but we are not taught the phrase for "I would like something to drink.".. .Where are we supposed to learn how to ask common questions? The remaining half of the book appears to be randomly slapped together grammar quizzes, e.g., what are sixteen Past Participles of Regular Verbs? Learn French? Not with this program.
Rating:
Summary: Worse than worthless
Review: Worse than worthless. NO phonetic pronunciation hints! NO introductory slow pronunciations. How are we expected to learn French when starting with Lesson 1 on page 1, the instruction book does not follow the CD? Half of this program consists almost entirely of hundreds of random phases to remember. And these phrases are not the phrases a tourist would ask but rather the phrases a Frenchman would give in response to a question a tourist might ask. We are taught "Tu veux boire quelque chose?" (Would you like something to drink?), but we are not taught the phrase for "I would like something to drink.".. .Where are we supposed to learn how to ask common questions? The remaining half of the book appears to be randomly slapped together grammar quizzes, e.g., what are sixteen Past Participles of Regular Verbs? Learn French? Not with this program.
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