Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

After reading some of these reviews you may be expecting some kind of miracle. You will be disappointed. I give this course five stars, however, because it provides a great deal of information painlessly, in a short period of time. After eight hours with Michel Thomas you will have a fairly solid command of the present tense and personal pronouns. Possesive pronouns are briefly touched upon, with others receiving even less attention or none at all. You will be able to speak in the future tense using aller: to go. "I am GOING TO buy it tomorrow." He briefly touches upon the real future tense - "I WILL buy it tomorrow" - though the coverage is lacking. His coverage of the past tense is bad, at best. He very briefly discusees the imperfect, but not the passe compose. Without getting into grammar, lets just say you'll need the latter in every day speach, i.e., "I SAW him yesterday." Michel Thomas likes to say "Don't say it, think it" which happens to be the exact opposite philosophy of the Pimsleur program. With Pimsleur you learn how to speak without having to think out sentence structure, which is exactly how we speak our native tounges. This course is perfect for what it is, however. No other program, Pimsleur included, will have a total beginer speaking so much in so little time. If you are starting with Pimsleur or another program this course is definitely worth buying. After all, we all want to be able to speak the language we're trying to learn, and this will get you off the ground in a short period of time. I must complain that little emphasis is placed on pronounciation. In fact, no one on the CD is a native speaker. I also have to add that anyone with any experience with the Romance languages - a few years of Spanish, a semester or two of Latin - could probably learn all the grammar taught in this course in about an hour. Don't expect all the complexities of the French language to be made clear after 8 hours. This course is a GREAT introduction, but an introduction is all it is.