Learn French with Paul Noble for Beginners – Complete Course: French Made Easy with Your Bestselling Language Coach Audio CD – Unabridged, 13 Sept. 2012

I know a little French, half it bad school French, the rest learnt from "Needs Must" exchanges holidaying in France - barbaric at best. Learning languages is hard work, very hard work but some learning systems make it twice as difficult, very boring and before you've made any real progress you give up.Noble's approach is novel in that he has a series of shortcuts (I'm halfway through disc 2 in about three weeks) to help you along. For example half the English language is based on French, so he steals all the common words for a start. Then similar words, with slightly different endings which then explains. The constant mantra of don't worry about remembering phrases because you'll know by the end of the course. He constantly repeats phrases, repeats them with variants (ie: I, he, she, you, they) and then builds them into a usable sentence.He then adds new words to show how they can used with different subjects before breaking them down again and rebuilding for example a negative version (ie: I can, he can, you can becomes I can't, he can't, you can't).He constantly introduces new subject sentences and vocabulary to stop you getting bored and he pushes you to keep learning at a fast pace. He also has a native French speaker to hand so you can pick up the pronunciation correctly. There are plenty of spaces to repeat the phrases in answer to verbal questions after his example.Personally, I might listen from 2 to 4 tracks in a session for about half an hour and then move on when I feel comfortable that I have the pronunciation down and can recall exactly what each word means. He specifically advises against this but it works for me. (I used this techniques when trying to learn Japanese and it was the only effective method for me - but everyone is different).For the £25 or so investment these CD's are a bargain. It teaches you to builds useful sentence of conversational French and I feel confident no matter how hard it gets I'll stick with it. It's not a walk in the park but it's easier than anything else I've come across. Rosetta Stone can wait until I've finished this ( I don't actually believe I'd finish RS at five Levels I think I'd run out of gas before I got there). So there you go, buy a copy, stick with it, do half an hour a day, every day and I think you'll crack it.Just remember French wasn't constructed in a day, so don't expect to learn it in a day either!

[[ASIN:0007363958 Learn French with Paul NobleI have had this Paul Noble French Course for a few weeks now and am so glad I decided to buy it. In my opinion it has to be the best French Course on the market.When I decided to learn French I tried a few of the other well known coures but found them all totally confusing, I thought that learning to speak another language was absolutely beyond me, and was about to give it up when I dicovered the Michel Thomas French Course in the local library.Right from the first Michel Thomas Cd I was able to speak complete sentances in French, and his teaching method really opened the door to the French Language for me.What Paul Noble has done is to take the Michel Thomas teaching method of no taking notes or books to study and improved it 100% Michel Thomas has two students ( One bright and one thick) learning French with him from scratch. This seems like a good idea at first, but when you have repeated the Cd a few times it becomes a bit annoying to say the least. Also Michel Thomas uses learning tools that are sometimes really confusing.Michel Thomas is Polish, so you end up speaking French with his Polish accent!Paul Noble uses a French speaking assistant to say the words or sentances for you with a perfect French accent. For me, comimg from the Michel Thomas course, the first impression with The Paul Noble course is how everything is really slowed down in the pace of each lesson, at no time during any of the lessons have I ever felt stressed out, Paul has a really relaxing way of speaking, and you feel as relaxed at the end of each Cd as at the start, and he explains things so clearly that you don't have to try to remember things, you will find you will remember what you have learned without all of the stress trying to remember.You will need to know some basic French before starting The Paul Noble Course, a good place to start would be The Michel Thomas Introductary Course which is available at most Public Libraries. I am sure that anyone who has been struggling to learn to speak French will be blown away the amazing teaching method of Paul Noble. Also Amazon sells this course at the lowest price on the planet!

I've tried a few others, so thought I might as well give this a bash as well. My first impression is that it was like a more bearable version of Michel Thomas. For those who don't know, MT had something of a unique accent anyway, being Polish, and he also used the dumbest, most hesitant and most irritating students humanly possible to give examples (or maybe that was the German version?).Anyway, this is much simpler, clearer and he uses a real French person for the speaking. You do seem to get into the swing of it quite quickly, although having a little background knowledge probably makes that a bit easier.Once you've plodded through the 10 learning discs, there are two revision ones, and these will be what I come back to in the future, as they seem to cover pretty much everything in the other 10 discs, but so much quicker. By the end, I was answering the questions pretty quickly and almost naturally, although I haven't used them in a real world situation yet.I'd say this is definitely a good start, from a conversational point of view, but clearly it's limited and there's no written element.A more advanced version would be a good idea, but in the meantime, I'm moving on to Hugo Complete French: Complete CD language course - from beginner to fluency (Hugo Complete CD Language Course) to get some written examples and also takes things further.