Access French : A First Course for Adults

Rating:
Summary: Completely unhelpful.
Review: This book takes immersion technique way too far -- it plops you down right in the middle of the French language and makes little effort to actually teach you anything, expecting you to instead just pick things up as it goes along. It contains dialogues which are way beyond a beginner's level, very sparse and incomplete vocabulary lists (which are located AFTER the exercises, so you have to flip ahead just to learn the words), and very few pronunciation guides. One exercise in unit 2 (I didn't get much farther than that) instructs you to translate sentences full of words that the book hasn't taught, many of which aren't even in the glossary, let alone the vocab lists -- I had to look in a dictionary just to complete the exercise. I kept re-checking the cover to make sure that this was supposed to be a beginner's course. By the time I finished the second unit, I was exhausted, frustrated, and angry; I shortly gave up and got a Berlitz book, which was like a breath of fresh air. Now I'm happily making progress in my French studies, no thanks to "Access French." I don't know what the authors of this book were thinking. What a waste of money.