Reddit reviews New French With Ease (Assimil Method Books - Book and CD Edition))

I'll say this. As someone who wears the hat of both a torrenter and a language learner, I find that there is such a wild abundance of free (or cheap) learning material that you don't need to search to the ends of the Earth to shake a few dollars out of a small company like RadioLingua. Not putting you down, because I've looked for it also.

So, what I'd like to suggest to you are free resources that would be similar to the paid content of Coffee Break French

• FSI Basic French course A little dated and tedious, but incredibly comprehensive audio / written course. Enough material for months of learning.
  
• LingQ Native content (phone calls, tv shows, articles) with transcripts
  
• News in Slow French App Daily news, read slowly. A couple free transcripts with each installment.
  
  If you're willing to shell out a few bucks, there's this:
  
• Assimil French With Ease course (more comprehensive and formal than CBF)
  
  Not to mention that Coffee Break French serves perfectly well as an Audio-Only course. It's how I got started.
  
  If you need any help, let me know.
  
  Edit: Added links and explanations.

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.

The assimil books are like that - French on one page with English translation on the facing page.

Also if you just want to read stories, then there are the Penguin Parallel texts.

http://www.amazon.com/French-With-Assimil-Method-Books/dp/2700520130

Try Assimil's French With Ease. This one comes with audio CDs, but you can find it without audio support if you're tight on budget.

Here's a link to Assimil. You can find the book + the audio easily on torrents. And I think you should read the reviews on amazon, and generally reviews about assimil about what makes it so great. They probably word it better than I do, however even though assimil claims to take you to B1, I think A2 level is more likely, and after finishing the book, you can immediately continue with their advanced book which should take you above B1 called "Assimil Using French".

The best way to do that is supplement your "going around and talking to just about anyone you see" with some Assimil French exercises.

You're going to do great, just don't be afraid of sounding like an idiot at first. Another French curriculum that many people praise is the Pimsleur method. I loved the Pimsleur Vietnamese course I took, and it worked out great; I'm sure French is much better, being an easy language to learn.

Remember, you can "buy" these from the internet for an extremely low "price".

> I'd like to learn French this year, but I have less time to commit than I have in previous years. Is it possible to work language learning into a situation where you're short on time?

Most definitely. What matters most is consistency. Coincidentally, this is one of my favourite language courses ever, for French. The Assimil method in particular is built upon the "day-to-day method", meaning you work on one lesson a day, for 15 minutes to an hour. If you do that for a few months (I believe that course is 115 lessons), your French will be WELL on it's way. There's more to the Assimil method in particular, but that is mostly covered in the Amazon reviews if you're curious.

> Also, how do you feel about high school/college language courses?

They can be great with an enthusiastic teacher. But students in general don't tend to care about them enough, and as a result learn nothing.

Is this the Assimil you are referring to? I've noticed there are a lot of different versions.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/French-Ease-Assimil-Method-Books/dp/2700520130/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1482105425&sr=1-2&keywords=french+assimil

When something doesn't seem to be working, I suggest you to give it a change. For learning French, Assimil French with Ease is popular due to its interesting content and effectiveness.