French Reference Grammar

Rating:
Summary: Great professor, great book
Review: I had Dr. Calvez for advanced French grammar at Clemson University. He is a great professor and his text lives up to its title as "A Complete Handbook of the French Language."

Rating:
Summary: Good Reference Book
Review: This book is a great reference book to use in conjunction with other French books. It takes each component of the language (articles, verbs, etc.) and presents the grammatical rules in a vey detailed manner. The key is to consider this a reference and not a full-blown French course. The book is very specific and provides good explanations and extensive examples.

Rating:
Summary: Best place to find explanations, but once found...
Review: This is easily the best organized grammar reference among the five I have collected over the years. I guess I keep purchasing grammar books in the hope that one will actually make sense of the subject. In sum, I find I have two other French grammar books in English (Berlitz French Grammar and "The Ultimate French Review & Practice") plus two more texts in French.

The French grammars (Sorbonne, McGraw Hill) are fine, but not if you are in a hurry for an answer.

This book, French Reference Grammar, is thick and comprehensive, with a superb index. It also makes good use of tabular presentations.

If you have a specific problem in mind, you can find the answer fastest in the book. But once you locate the explanation you may find it pretty hard to understand. The text is so utterly codified, such an exercise in verbal algebra, that it is often difficult to follow.

I sometimes wonder why these books do not diagram sentences. Grammar is a machine. Verbal descriptions of machines are often gibberish. A picture might work better.

The most helpful French grammar book in English, in my experience, is "The Ultimate..." perhaps because it does such a good job of integrating examples from everyday speech with formal grammatical rules. But it wouldn't hurt to pick up both of these books.

Berlitz's French Grammar is more compact and very good, full of short cuts and keyword hints, but it uses a few terms peculiar to the Berlitz teaching method, and the organization is not at all clear.

This reference sets an example for logical organization.