Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One, Premium Third Edition Paperback – 30 Nov. 2022

A very strange book. You cannot follow the book from start to finish as a text book but must jump around to find the bits which are relevant to what you are learning at the time. This would be fine except there is no 'how to use this book' at the beginning and the contents and index are less than helpful.The weirdest thing is the level of the exercises are completely out of kilter with the things you are supposed to be practicing. For example, the section on the usage of accents (which is week one of any French course) is followed by an exercise in which you have to restore accents to a passage of text and select between multiple conjugations of verbs across several tenses. To do this you would be in about week 50 of a French course. Put it this way, if you can conjugate the past simple tense of ranger, you don't need a lesson on the importance of accents.There are other strange things. Why are there vocabulary blocks scattered throughout the book? And why do they bear no relevance to the sections they are in and are so left field (the first one in the book is just geography terms)?Finally, there are a couple of printing errors, In my edition chapters 23 and 24 are transposed. I have seen this mentioned elsewhere but am not sure if it is universal.All in all, there are better courses than this out there. if you have time and patience to work this into whatever course you are doing it probably serves as quite a good exercise book but unless you have been at it for a while you are going to find yourself often out of your depth.

I went for this book because I found it recommended by a professional French tutor as the best book he’d found and uses in his courses. Well all I can say is I’m pleased I’m not on his courses. The book says it’s a complete course but starts on the first few pages blowing your brain with various complicated grammar and then giving you exercises of complete French sentences using words you’ve never been introduced to. It’s as though it expects you to already be at intermediate level when you start the book. I’d say this book is really for intermediate/advanced students who want a complete course on French grammar and I use the word ‘course’ lightly as it’s really a reference book. I sent it straight back for a refund.

This is definitely not a "total language study programme". This is for the intermediate learner at the very minimum. I'm not quite intermediate and I made it through chapters 1-6 but now it's just too much. There are appendices that would have been better suited at the beginning of the book to give some context as to what's coming in the rest of the book. A lot of it is just like reading dictionary entries - a long list of English words and their french counterparts, which no one is realistically going to remember the vast majority of. The book does not reference the app at all.

If you want a book to learn from yourself, or to support Babbel or Duolingo, this is not the book for you. I'm not sure who it's for, and I feel pretty ripped off by the good reviews. It does explain why so many Americans think French is impossible to learn, though. It's bizarrely disorganised and only usable if you already understand French syntax and grammar. eg Why have an exercise which teaches people to use le and la in front of a vowel? There's another well-known long-standing book/system which I'm going to get instead for the person who needs it. Shouldn't have wasted money on this odd thing.