Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Readers can tune up their conversation skills with Tune Up guides--the next best thing to a year abroad!
Getting beyond sounding like a beginner is more than just a matter of learning more vocabulary and grammar. It's also about understanding the culture and developing the right mind set for thinking, listening, and talking like a native.
The next best thing to a year abroad, the books in this exciting new series offer language learners an entertaining and practical way to hone their foreign-language conversation skills. Tune Up books are structured around 10 key areas for improvement, covering everything from tricky grammatical structures to gestures, slang, and humor. In each area, key phrases are presented in "Top Ten" lists, including everyday expressions for filling pauses, icebreakers, and more. An excellent brushup for learners returning to a language they studied in high school or college, Tune Up books feature:
Practical advice on improving conversation skills
Valuable insights into how difficult verbs and structures work
Tips on how to avoid taboos and common faux pas
A 60-minute audio CD with key phrase lists and exercises
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Excellent Practical Advice on How to Speak French
Customer Rating:
Tune Up Your French is the kind of book I have long waited to see and use. It is original, non-traditional, and gets down to the heart of the French language in an easy-to-understand fashion. For this, I give it five stars. One caveat however. While the one hour CD (which is included) is nice, it by no means can teach you how to speak French. To accomplish that feat, you need an entire program that will provide you with the techniques and the practice necessary to become functionally fluent. For this I recommend you buy Behind the Wheel French 8 CDs and book. Behind the Wheel - French 1
for those who want to live french, not just speak it
Customer Rating:
I think the hardest language books to find are intermediate ones. You can find beginners' books and cds and mp3s. And if you are advanced, you can buy actual novels or music in the target language. But intermediate books are often disappointing. They teach more grammar -- like most of us care about MORE GRAMMAR. What most of us want is MORE LIFE.
That's why I like this book. It teaches intermediate living French. How to express yourself AS THE FRENCH DO. This helps us learn how to think more like the French which leads to more real life when we are in France or with the French anywhere. The book covers all sorts of practical situations (travel, dining, etc.) and has plenty of more general help to offer in thinking and speaking in French.
I wish there were a book like this --of this quality-- for Arabic, Russian, and Turkish. For those of you studying Spanish, Italian, or German there ARE more books in this series. Lucky you.
Fast, and Perfect
Customer Rating:
This book, came extremely fast, and in perfect condition. I am very happy, with it, and recommend this seller to everyone.
This book will untie your tongue
Customer Rating:
This is a book for people who have taken formal French classes for years and go totally deaf and mute when confronted with a real French person. The approach is so well presented, and I've gone back and reread some sections over and over. It's especially helpful if you've realized that when French people talk to you, you just can't hold up your end of the conversation with all the every day idiomatic filler phrases that you've never learned.
Spoken French is also full of very common phrases that sound like they mean one thing, but actually mean something totally different: je t'en veux does not mean I want you! My college literature classes did not teach me that one either.
The section on French manners is extremely helpful for breaking the code of daily protocol -- very different from this side of the Atlantic, and you feel it right away. I wish I had read this book years ago. It took me 3 trips to figure out how to get water in a restaurant!
The CD is okay, it doesn't cover as much as the book does, but it's good practice for having a few key phrases ready in common situations.
Get this book before you go!
The Little Book That Could
Customer Rating:
Very useful book for the student of intermediate level French. But firstly, I'd like to recommend Amazon's deal at near the top of the page for this plus the Stillman French grammar book as a twofer. I have studied both cover to cover and they are thorough, interesting, and they complement each other.
This doesn't cover much grammar per se, and the Stillman doesn't go deeply into the many, many ways you can express yourself in French. Both of these are really for someone who has a decent grasp of elementary French. If you have to struggle to read each sentence in Tune Up, you'll never get through it because there is, despite its mildly flip title, a lot of meat dans cette torte française.
This isn't simply a book of phrases - I have a few of them and they bore me sick. This keeps up your interest with highly focused one or two page coverage on limited topics, e.g. How To Describe Jerks In French. Sounds useful to me.
Very useful, too, is the many times Ms. Schorr points out the cultural differences enshrined in language which an intermediate student should begin to understand, or else. Using a Faux Amis word can get you in big trouble, e.g. baiser(the verb) and un baiser(the noun).
These, most of them anyhow, aren't lines you want to try to memorize - although there are a few gems worth the trouble. Ne t'en fais pas. Débrouille-toi! Ecrasons l'infâme. And let's not forget the inimical French irony as in Mes Complements! (it doesn't mean what you think).
Let's face it, French is tricky. They've had around two thousand years, ever since meeting up with people who had an even trickier language, the Romans, to conjure up countless ways of twisting phrases around so as to be incomprehensible to the speaker of American - we say we speak English, but they say nous parlons l'américain. I suspect they wish to distinguish us from those wonderful, properly educated, well-behaved English tourists who nip over to Paris on that handy train that goes under the English Channel. Hmmmm.
Now that American money isn't worth much vis-a-vis the Euro, they will fortunately see fewer of us. Ça alors! Quelle chance.
So, I highly recommend Tune Up Your French for the intermediate learner.
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