Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One, Premium Second Edition 2nd Edition

If you're looking to learn French, Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One, Premium Second Edition is an excellent resource to have. The comprehensive guide covers everything from grammar to vocabulary, and includes exercises to help reinforce what you've learned. Highly recommended for both beginners and those looking to brush up on their French skills!

My mom 😍 loved it

To be fair, nothing as far as I can see on the book markets it as ‘for beginners,’ so I guess it might be my fault as a buyer for not being more cautious.I bought this book as a total beginner to French and I must say that the (pictured) exercises in the first chapter of the book are already seemingly impossible for the already uninitiated in the language.I am having a very unprofitable experience with this book already due to not having enough base knowledge to perform the tasks in each exercise.I already speak three languages, one of which (Korean) I acquired through self-study and living in the country, so this does not come from a position of ignorance on my part in relation to foreign languages.I will save this book for when I approach an intermediate or high-intermediate level as I think it will be an invaluable resource at that point. Until then, this title will be taking a back seat to something a tad more beginner friendly with which I can get my bearings.It is chalk full of topical vocabulary on intermediate to even advanced subjects (geography, nature, and so many more) as well as in depth gramatical breakdowns. It moves well beyond beginner basics (body descriptions, time, colors, etc). This is a strong point of the book.

But that doesn’t make this a bad learning tool. Keep in mind it is basically a composite of parts of a few different books (probably to make some more money) so that may explain the appearance of a lack of cohesiveness. Yes right from the start one is thrown into some non-beginner vocabulary. Had I not had a solid grounding to begin with I would have been angry as well as this is a substantial cost.That being said I’m very happy with this purchase. The lack of cohesiveness is a positive as rather than getting lost in the weeds of a particular grammar point for pages on end, I’m exposed but at the same time challenged to use my knowledge of other parts of speech and vocabulary expansion at the same time. Of course this necessitates a pretty thorough comprehensive understanding to begin with, not necessarily advanced but solidly at an intermediate level with prior exposure to the whole French grammar spectrum.I haven’t jumped around yet, basically started at the beginning and gone from there. It’s possible one could piece together beginner level topics by jumping around but there are much better (and less expensive) alternatives. I purchased the kindle edition and have not experienced any problems other than occasional quirkiness when navigating back and forth between the answer key and the text.

It's detailed, maybe way too detailed for absolute beginners, but it is wholesome, covers everything you need to know in around 650 pages, you definitely should use easier books alongside with this one,so far, I am enjoying it 👍🏻

In theory, this could serve as the basis for effective self-study of the French language. But it is not.Learning anything effectively requires a great teacher—and the author of this book, which she (billed as an "editor") may be very knowledgable about French, does not have the . . . how do you say? . . . 'je ne sais quoi' to make learning so fun it's effortless.Lest you think my suggestion that learning be "fun" means it should be toothless, that's not what I mean at all. But it should not be boring (the first chapter is more than a dozen pages of memorizing the genders of suffixes . . . and their exceptions!), and it should not leave you scratching your head by the time you get to the exercises. This isn't calculus, where you learn by working out the proof yourself. The exercises introduce new words that don't fit the patterns of the lessons, and the whole thing feels like so much more work than it would have been if the writer had chosen to FOCUS the teaching and the exercises.Instead, the book tries to be universal—which no language book can be—and fails to engage.I will suffer through it, because it is the (kind of expensive!) book I bought, and I want to learn French. But Google translate and Forvo-dot-com will be my incessant companions on the journey, instead of the occasional resources of last resort. It's no fun when you have to look up the answers, and then reverse-engineer the exercise just to understand what you were supposed to have "learned" in the first place, because you were never taught it.And, mind you, I'm coming to this book with some good French vocabulary and the ability to get around France with basic expressions and grammatical constructions. A novice straying into this book will be sunk by page 3.Try another book. S'il vous plaît. (And don't discount Duo Lingo; you'll learn no grammar, but you'll be functional in French. This book, sadly, won't easily fill your Duo Lingo knowledge gaps.)