With a French Student visiting, I needed a quick simple approach to communication. I found enough phasing to be immediately useful. I am now using this book to enable my beginners attempt at writing my French acquaitance in French. Having learned just enough French in school to have some basic understanding, I needed the linguistic support this book offers. The phaseology is simple, but not pedantic with minor effort. I would imagine this will come in handy when we travel to France. Au revoir.

If you were to rip this book in half and just keep the reference grammar section, you'd still have a bargain. The twenty lessons are excellent and are also a bargain on their own. Compare this book to everything else on the shelves at your favorite bookstore, compare its price to the prices of the others, and you'll soon learn that by that scale any Cortina "20 lessons in Conversational (whatever language)..." is worth four times what it costs. The free tape they offer is merely a promo and not overly helpful, but the book is top notch. In short: the best bang for the buck out there, period.

The Cortina series are awesome. I have the French nad the German books in this series. I have always thought French was beyond my abilities. I love languages but French always seemed heard. But with the Cortina it was easy to sound the words out and once I got the free tape that they include a postage paid card for, I had French down pat. Eventually I want to learn 10 languages plus my native English! I highly recommend this book.