Reddit Reddit reviews Essential French Grammar (Dover Language Guides Essential Grammar)

We found 8 Reddit comments about Essential French Grammar (Dover Language Guides Essential Grammar). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Essential French Grammar (Dover Language Guides Essential Grammar)
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8 Reddit comments about Essential French Grammar (Dover Language Guides Essential Grammar):

u/Strakh · 21 pointsr/languagelearning

I mean, as long as you are having fun - that's the most important part! =)

But for what it is worth, my advice is to not worry so much about finding the perfect book. Working through a mediocre book from beginning to end will typically put you further ahead than reading a chapter here and there in other, possibly better, books.

When I start a new language I look for a few resources:

  1. A nice grammar that I can use for reference.
  2. A frequency dictionary.
  3. A graded reader (or any good selection of shorter texts).
  4. A "course book" (possibly both textbook and workbook) that gives me some kind of structure.

    I only need one of each. It's not necessary to have the perfect books, as long as the books are decent and easy to understand. For example, this is my selection for French:

  5. https://www.amazon.com/Essential-French-Grammar-Language-Guides/dp/0486204197
  6. https://www.amazon.com/Frequency-Dictionary-French-Vocabulary-Dictionaries-ebook/dp/B0025CTGV0/
  7. http://www.mondesenvf.fr/la-collection/
  8. https://www.langenscheidt.com/franzoesisch/selbstlernen-sprachkurs/langenscheidt-franzoesisch-mit-system-set
u/emk · 3 pointsr/languagelearning

How much study time do you have available per day? Have you ever learned a foreign language successfully before? Do you speak any other Romance languages fluently?

Assuming you can study at least two hours per day, I would recommend:

  1. Get Assimil's New French with Ease with the CD, and do two lessons per day. Spend 30 minutes on each lesson, following whatever variation of the Assimil Dutch instructions pleases you. In 25 days, this will give you a good, basic intuition for how French works, and teach you some useful vocabulary. The nice thing about Assimil is that if you follow the instructions, it works well for almost everybody, and it produces solid results. If you want a grammar overview to go with Assimil, get Essential French Grammar, which is dirt cheap, focused only on the essentials, and an excellent complement to Assimil.
  2. Since you need to speak very soon, get Benny Lewis's book, which has some good advice on efficiently mastering survival stuff and polite conversation starting very early on.
  3. A week or two before you leave, skim How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately, which is the bible of dirty tricks for faking a better level than you have. Definitely do his "islands" exercise, and prepare 10 or so islands, getting them corrected on lang-8.

    If you think of yourself as a hardcore geek, and you're generally good with languages, there are also a couple of ways to boost your listening comprehension substantially in 30–100 hours.

    Total cost: Less than $100, plus some money for iTalki tutors if you follow Benny's advice. But expect to work really, really hard—faking intermediate French after 30 days is a bit like sprinting straight up a steep mountain with a heavy pack. You're trying to compress 350 classroom hours into a month, which means working very hard and efficiently.

    Anyway, if you can spend an hour a day on Assimil, and an hour a day on Benny's speaking advice, then you'll get some pretty useful survival French under your belt by the end of the month. Going further than that will probably require studying obsessively.
u/Moobs_like_Jagger · 3 pointsr/French

I have Essential French Grammar and McGraw Hill's Complete French Grammar. I find them both to be great, but Essential French Grammar is very cheap via Amazon.

u/ecnad · 2 pointsr/French

The most concise, efficient, and easy to read grammar book I've found is by far Essential French Grammar by Seymour Resnick. There's a great cheat sheet in the back to help you remember specific grammatical terms, a list of cognates, and the book is easy to read in short doses.

u/ttchoubs · 2 pointsr/learnfrench

Buy a copy of Essential French Grammar.

This book always gets recommended and for good reason. It has been such a fantastic reference for me while learning. Everything is simple and very to the point.

Plus this shit is only like $2. Well worth it.

u/azzikid · 1 pointr/languagelearning
u/woppinger · 1 pointr/French

This is a nice basic little grammar book to have on hand, only 2 bucks from Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-French-Grammar-Language-Guides/dp/0486204197

I also find the "Coffee Break French" podcast very helpful, it starts out with your basic greetings and phrases to use while travelling etc. but moves on to cover fundamental grammar in a more systematic way in approx. episodes 40-70.