French for Reading

Rating:
Summary: Passed My Language Exam
Review: This book is great for anyone wanting to learn to read french. When I took the french language test for my MA in history, I succeeded easily. If you need to read, that is not speak french, this book is for you!

Rating:
Summary: Passed My Language Exam
Review: This book is great for anyone wanting to learn to read french. When I took the french language test for my MA in history, I succeeded easily. If you need to read, that is not speak french, this book is for you!

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Summary: A life and money saver
Review: This book saved me $2500.00! It was excellent preparation for the rapid reading and translation exam that let me test out of the course. It seemed expensive to me when I bought it but it was worth every penny.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant text for translation exam crammers
Review: This is a brilliant book for anyone who needs to quickly learn enough French to reliably translate from written French to written English.

After one month of working through 15 to 20 pages a day, I passed the translation exam I need for my degree in art history--with NO prior background in French.

In fear and desperation I bought about 15 books: grammars, workbooks, etc. In the end this, and a dictionary, were all I needed. Forget reading a straight grammar; it's useless without exercises. And forget introductory style workbooks. They won't get you far enough fast enough.

If you are like me and can't stand the thought of wrote memorization, this book is particularly good. The exercises are perfectly calculated to repeat the right vocabularly enough times in the right order and contexts so that you learn it through use rather than memorization--as you would in an immersion program for speaking--only much more quickly.

I only wish comparable texts existed for German and Italian.

Rating:
Summary: outstanding format but horrible reading selections
Review: this text is in dire need of revision; the sentence examples and the reading selections are much too outdated..the format is excellent..there are also a few errata which have never been corrected since the book was first published...

Rating:
Summary: Great book if you want to understand French texts.
Review: While this book is geared to graduate students, it could be a useful sharpening tool for anyone who wants to brush up on their French reading skills. If you are interested in reading newspapers and journals, this is an excellent course. If you want to speak French, you'll have to look elsewhere. It is not a particularly interactive course but it works.