I found this tape set to be a very useful refresher. I have paid much more for language instructional materials that weren't nearly as good. The speech sounds natural, and the drills are really quite useful. I would purchase other materials from this company. Two small peeves: (1) the (native-speaker-of-English) narrator occasionally illustrates points of grammar, and his French seemed to me to have a strong American accent. (2) a written script of the dialogues would be handy.

I like these tapes! I have tried some other tape courses, and finally find these tapes which truly worth with their prices! I am always poor in listening, so these tapes give me a good opportunity to practise. These tapes combine verb conjugations with listening and oral skills; therefore, you don't only get verb skills improved, but also oral skills brushed up. As you know, speaking and writing are completely two different things. I studied English and Spanish before, and made terrible mistakes of concentrating too much on written but forgetting spoken. So these tapes give me a good start to listen to what native speaker actually speak in the conversation.

Another thing I like these tapes was that the conversation part is suitable for intermediate level of students: not too fast and not too slow. The dialogues really made a good introduction to French conversations.

I did not give 5 stars because first, there are few faults between the book and the tapes. Sometimes the dialogues in the book do not completely match with those on the tapes. The second thing is that I feel the author should make more exercises on the tape for us to practise verb conjugations, a great part contributing to conversational fluency. The third thing is that the pause should be placed between the English translations and the French sentences, not after the English and the French sentences speaking right one after the other.

Anyway, these tapes are great bargin! The most important part of the language is to speak and listen, and these tapes does both! As I have tried some other tapes before, they are either not satisfactorily made, or does not worth their prices.

In a world of very expensive French audio and book courses, for example Pimsleur French at over $200.00 a section, almost $700.00 or more for the entire course, and a huge number of mid priced sets, many of them excellent, the Living Language French Verbs Skill Builder is absolutely the best $25.00 you will ever spend on ANY French learning tool.

It covers all essential topics, has a friendly conversational style, using many of the same voice actors as Pimsleur and Barron's courses, and employs realistic real world statements and dialogs to highlight and explain the use of verbs in ALL tenses. The only drawback is that it is still on cassette tape, not CD Audio, but hopefully Living Language will remedy this soon.

If you're beginning with French this is an invaluable asset, much more realistically useable than the massive "every French verb on earth" books of conjugation tables. If you already have some basic French skills you could use this set alone to significantly improve your speaking and conversational skills.

Having tried several other methods, I found this course the absolute best for reviewing French verb forms in a non-boring fashion. The tapes are well-organized and intelligently done. They do move on at a swift pace but that is exactly what one needs to brush up on a prior knowledge of any language. Normally I resist hearing anything but the foreign language on an audiotape course (the constant interruptions into English usually tend to confuse more than they clarify). In this case, case, however, the English is non-intrusive and allows one to use the tapes without necessarily consulting the written guide. I use it while I'm cleaning thehouse, driving, or doing some mundane chore. Highly recommended. Hope they create a CD version of these tapes soon. (For a more sit-down mode of learning, check out the spectacularly interesting, interactive Learn French Now! software available for both Macs and PCs. Innovative and intelligently-done software that is also fun- in short, a great companion to this series.)

Around my neck of the woods, in eastern Massachusetts, on any Saturday morning except in winter, you can visit an endless number of yard sales. At malls or in specialty shops, you know what you are going to find---in fact you select a particular store to get what you need. Yard sales are different. You never know what you will find; you rummage around and maybe come up with a treasure. At least you can see what weird and wonderful items people have accumulated over a lifetime. Mildred Cable's book on the Gobi Desert reminded me of a yard sale---and I like yard sales.

After many years as missionaries in Shansi province, where they learned fluent Chinese and absorbed the majority culture, Cable and her two female companions, all three Englishwomen, received permission to venture into the deserts of northwestern Kansu and eastern Xinjiang, then still known as Chinese Turkestan. They spent around 13 years, from 1923 to 1936, wandering up and down the rutted desert tracks of this remote area, spreading Bibles and the word of God as known to Christians (and were not excessively denominational about it either). THE GOBI DESERT then, does not exactly cover the whole Gobi Desert, for most of that vast area lies in Mongolia, where the ladies never set foot. It is about the ancient civilizations and mixed ethnic groups (Chinese, Hui, Mongol, Kazakh, Uighur, Manchu, Russian) found in the territory between Suzhou and Urumchi, a breadth of country some 600 miles long, but much narrower due to the lack of water in most of it. The "yard sale" quality of the book lies in the fact that everything is mixed together, but it's all interesting. There are many photographs, but I must say that in my edition (Virago paperback), they were mostly of poor quality. From the history of Hsüan Tsang, who brought the Buddhist scriptures from India to China in the 7th century, to the art of hiring a proper carter, from the fantastic cavesful of Buddhist art at Dunhwang to a detailed description of the Muslim rebellion of 1930, it's all here. The ladies fought scorpions, heat, duststorms, thirst, and exhaustion. They met innkeepers, bandits, deserters, Muslim generals, abbots, princes, Russian refugees, nomads, lamas, and prostitutes. They visited the many fertile oases, remote valleys, mountain strongholds, and salt lakes of a region that has changed dramatically since those days. Though a committed missionary, Cable keeps preaching to a minimum in her book, which is a grab bag of impressions, adventures, and information that will keep your interest to the end. THE GOBI DESERT is the kind of travel book not often seen anymore. It is not an account of a "trip", but rather the winnowed result of thirteen years continuous travel in a particular region. Most of all it is an account of a now-vanished world, a world erased by roads, wars, Communism, and massive Chinese immigration. Read it.

A serious and very readable account of the travels of two very observant (missionary) ladies in the early part of this century in the Gobi region. This book, illustrated by some fine photos in its early 1940s editions (to which I refer), pays extraordinary and quite sensitive attention to the practices, customs, people and places of this (even now) little known region and it is most creditably written, especially as the writers are Christian missionaries. It is hard to believe that the language and style of this book is over 60 years old. As a (Buddhist) traveller in Central Asia and reader of several books on the region, I would wholeheartedly reccommend this book to anyone interested in this fascinating part of the world.

I don't know how well this book would hold up in more advanced French courses, but it got me through my first year of French. There are a few words that I wasn't able to find in this dictionary, but I did perfectly fine with the words that it does have. The list of irregular verbs is nice, too.

The Random House Basic Dictionary of French was a great book. I highly recomend this book. There were only a few words not in it.

I find that to learn a language, I need to to do more than repeat. I need to listen and respond. These tapes have a lot of material to repeat, but spend only a little time on exercises requiring responses.

I bought this product after having finished LEARN IN YOUR CAR FRENCH 2 and 3. Both courses covered about the same material. This course stressed verbs, but also includes dialogues and some on-tape drill. (A large paperback book accompanies the course.) Wheras the LEARN IN YOUR CAR course repeated everything twice (once fast, then once slow) this course only said things one time. They figured you can rewind the tape as often as you wish.

It is nice that the tapes include several dialogues and even little "lectures". This gives the tapes a fair amount of variety. The cassettes themselves are not stereo. They sound best on a simple, mono player.

All in all, a pretty good value for the money. Sad to say, FRENCH 3 went downhill from here.

I bought this dictionary to have handy while reading Willy Voet's book that alleges performance-enhancing drug use in European professional cycling. Voet's book, "Massacre à la chaîne," presents two notable challenges. First, it contains some ten-dollar words. Second, it contains a variety of idioms and slang.

Unfortunately, this dictionary proved virtually useless. When I didn't know a word or an expression, I rarely found it in the dictionary either. That proved true both for the unusual and the idiomatic or slang language.

The dictionary is suitable for casual use by tourists who need a quick reference, or for beginning and intermediate students of French.

Random House publishes an excellent Portuguese-English dictionary in the same series. It should be able to improve this one in the next edition.