Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable French Review and Refresher
Review: As a person who studied French in school but never mastered it, I loved the Standard Deviants' French 1 tape. It gave a brief but comprehensive review of all the basic important parts of speech. It also emphasized pronunciation, an aspect of French not properly represented in the classes I'd taken in high school and collage. The tape says it can't be used to learn French. It's correct. It really needs to be used with a French course, or some other method of learning the language. As a resource to aid in learning comprehension, or as a refresher course for folks like me, however, I give it full marks. Most of the actors and graphics are engaging. A few things were overly corny. I could have done without the weird, old-fashion cowboy guy yelling at me, or the girl talking out of her passport picture. But, these were minor momentary irritants that didn't take away from the effectiveness of the tape...besides the cowboy guy sort of grew on me after a while. The Standard Deviants' tape did one thing I really liked. Learning a foreign language requires repetition. Most tapes I've seen in the past either offered too much repetition for me, which left me bored and uninterested in continuing, or not enough repetition, which left me confused. The Standard Deviants' found a solution to this dilemma. At first, I was surprised at how quickly they covered each subject. Then, I realized why. It's a video tape. One can rewind it as often as one desires. They covered each thing once with nearly no review and then urged the viewer to rewind the section as many times as they needed. This left it up to each individual viewer to decide how much repetition they wanted. A very clever idea! Overall, I found the tape helpful and enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable French Review and Refresher
Review: As a person who studied French in school but never mastered it, I loved the Standard Deviants' French 1 tape. It gave a brief but comprehensive review of all the basic important parts of speech. It also emphasized pronunciation, an aspect of French not properly represented in the classes I'd taken in high school and collage. The tape says it can't be used to learn French. It's correct. It really needs to be used with a French course, or some other method of learning the language. As a resource to aid in learning comprehension, or as a refresher course for folks like me, however, I give it full marks. Most of the actors and graphics are engaging. A few things were overly corny. I could have done without the weird, old-fashion cowboy guy yelling at me, or the girl talking out of her passport picture. But, these were minor momentary irritants that didn't take away from the effectiveness of the tape...besides the cowboy guy sort of grew on me after a while. The Standard Deviants' tape did one thing I really liked. Learning a foreign language requires repetition. Most tapes I've seen in the past either offered too much repetition for me, which left me bored and uninterested in continuing, or not enough repetition, which left me confused. The Standard Deviants' found a solution to this dilemma. At first, I was surprised at how quickly they covered each subject. Then, I realized why. It's a video tape. One can rewind it as often as one desires. They covered each thing once with nearly no review and then urged the viewer to rewind the section as many times as they needed. This left it up to each individual viewer to decide how much repetition they wanted. A very clever idea! Overall, I found the tape helpful and enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: Great Stuff
Review: I bought this tape as a review before a vacation to France and found it both usefull and enjoyable. Though I have never taken a French class, the tape, and the actors, were helpful for me in learning some key phrases. I also thought the skits and humor were very entertaining and made the whole process more fun than sitting through a class.
Rating: 
Summary: You will learn NOTHING from this lousy video-BEWARE!
Review: I don't know how this video got any good reviews (they're probably from someone over at "standard deviants"). This video is absolutely horrible. The video's entire emphasis is on presentation. They try to make it "interesting" or "entertaining" or whatever, but it's actually so distracting that it's annoying to watch. They jump around about every 3 to 5 seconds to present every single little item with a different person, background, visual, etc. It is so distracting that I think it screwed up any concept of French I already had. If you don't know any French than this video will just give you a headache. I don't write many reviews, but I felt like it was my civic duty to warn people out there not to buy this stupid video. I checked it out from the public library, and boy am I glad that I didn't pay any money for this piece of crap. This is so bad, you'll feel like you just lost an hour of your time that you'll never get back after you watch it. Be warned.
Rating: 
Summary: Too annoying to be helpful
Review: I fortunately rented this dvd before purchasing and I would highly recommend that others do this as well. Some reasons I would not recommend purchasing this DVD:
1. Non-native speakers. They do speak slowly & clearly, but it's with a non-native accent, that's not going to help much if you plan to actually go to France.
2. Too much grammar instruction. Explaining the grammar rules to me doesn't help nearly as much as hearing it used in context. Too much explanation not enough repetition.
3. Lame lame lame attempts at humor & conversation. It didn't bother me that much the first time through, but in order to actually learn the material one needs to rewind and go over the same sections repeatedly. I couldn't stand it. Humor is absolutely a personal-preference thing, so you'll have to see for yourself if you find it annoying.
4. Not enough conversation, not enough French. There are only a handful of conversations in French to listen to & repeat. They do a LOT of talking in English. I would prefer much more exposure to the actual language.
Overall, I didn't find this DVD very helpful. I second the suggestion to watch DVDs you already own using the French language options (if available). You'll pick things up in context.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb for relearners as well as neophytes
Review: I learned French fluently when I was young. But that was more than 40 years ago, and my French has gotten very rusty. I've been struggling to relearn the language for a year, including a two week visit to France last Fall. I took a brief class before the trip, and have tried a variety of tools, including online instruction and tapes. All helped, but none were fully satisfying. Until now. This Standard Deviants program has by far the best pedagogical method I've ever seen for learning French. It is thorough without being monotonous or pedantic. The humor turns some people off, but I found most of it imaginative and helpful. For example, the tape illustrates the importance of accents by noting that the phrases for "Please repeat" and "Please pass gas again" differ by only one accent over the first "e". I have researched this, and they are strictly correct, but their example is far from obvious. My wife, who has little French experience, also enjoyed and profited from the tape.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Content - Poor delivery
Review: I purchased the DVD to bring with me to learn French while in France (unplanned extended trip). The content is more useful than the audio CD I purchased, however the delivery makes it very difficult to learn. The "humor" noted in other reviews is annoying, but could be overlooked if it were easy to rewind and review - but on a PC, viewing the DVD you cannot rewind in short segments as you can with a remote control/TV DVD setup. There is almost no repetion and the words flash across too quickly to absorb without rewinding. If you have the patience to rewind rewind rewind, there is useful information to be learned.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't help
Review: I saw this in the bookstore and bought it, hoping that maybe my French skills could improve. I was taking French 101 in college and needed some help (if being tutored by a female, I'd get no work done). The humor was so distracting and dumb. Ah, Standard Devients, you're breakin my balls. If you search the web for free French lessons, you'll find tons of em. The Standard Deviants breeze through their lessons, leaving a French-Canadian like myself cross-eyed in the dust. Maybe foreign languages aren't my thing, but I watched the DVD twice (with a twitchy eye the second time) and still got a C in the class, and I paid complete attention. I went to class everyday and did the workbook, too. Maybe some good-looking actresses would help this video, and perhaps somebody who knows about proper video lighting/coloring, or maybe better content organization. It goes over the bare-minimum basics, and unless you're five years old and/or can learn a foreign language easily, I'd stick with searching the Internet and/or buying cassette tapes. As they stated at the beginning of the video, it's just a supplement; you should go to class and blah blah blah. You'd be better off watching some French foreign films-- or maybe watch movies that have French audio-tracks with French & English subtitles. Memorize the movie in English, then re-watch it in French. I learned more using that method than by watching 10 people jack around in a plotless video for 90 minutes.And yes, I'm Canuckian.
Rating:
Summary: Great for those who know zero french
Review: I strongly reccomend this DVD for those who are just starting to learn French. This DVD covers the very basics that will be needed to understand anything French. It introduces the viewer to understanding that a verb in French (like "go" in english, "aller" in French) is different based on who is doing the action. If I "go", then "go" is written "vais"; if we "go", then it is written "allons" and pronounced differently. I found this element of learning French painful at the start, that instead of learning one word for "go" I had to learn six. But once I became accostumed to it, learning became much easier. You can also expect to learn a little about numbers and colors, and a few verbs and nouns. This DVD in no way will leave you knowing enough French to go and speak it. This DVD, and part II, leaves the student with enough basic information so that learning will become much easier. For example, I used the TV series "French in Action". At the start of my studies with lessons 1-6, I had a great deal of trouble understanding what was going on. After watching the Standard Deviants DVD it became much easeir. One more thing about this DVD. It was entertaining and enjoyable to watch. I did not feel like I was working to learn, rather I felt more like I was watching a show and everything was sticking, that I was remembering what they taught. I highly recommend this for the absolute begenner.
Rating:
Summary: informative funny, not for learning accent
Review: Its two videotapes each about 80 minutes, progressing in both difficulty and knowledge.
They clearly teach you how to pronounce and conjugate verbs paying attention to tricky verbs ( nous mangeons, vous appelez, teach about adjectives, adverbs, reflexive verbs (to wash), how "the" is complex in French, such as le-la-les, ce-cet-ces, Etc,. each chapter was followed by review conversation that were all excellent. Also each tape came with very handy useful informative insert card.
I used this course to refresh my French, and recalled and regained good information, especially with humorous examples. Unfortunately some times as the other reviewer mentioned was "overly corny".
I did not at all like the idea of learning French from non native speaker, the French accent and pronunciation is difficult with those nasal voices and different "e, eaux..",. Despite the actor great effort but they remain far away from real French. This what force me to give it only three stars, rather it will be four, this is my only take on this informative fun to watch course.
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