My French Coach
by UBI Soft
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Our Price: $69.32 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $34.55 (click here) Category: Video Games See more product details |
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Video Game Reviews of My French Coach
Customer Review: Oui, Oui!
Summary: 4 Stars
My husband bought this for Christmas and has enjoyed brushing up on his French. It is an accurate way to help learn your way around the French language if you have no French experience, as well. If you were to do it everyday for fifteen minutes, you would be able to make quite a bit of progress in no time at all. He prefers this way of learning to buying a book and trying to pronounce the words with the right intonation and pronunciation as a true "Frenchie" would. You are truly being coached with this great educational tool!Customer Review: French Coach
Summary: 5 Stars
The game is interesting and you can actually listen to yourself and the "teacher" speak at the same time when you record your voice to make sure that you're pronouncing the words correctly, which I found very helpful. Overall, it's a good learning game.Customer Review: Great!
Summary: 5 Stars
I've learned so much from this game in such a short time! My boyfriend who is relatively fluent in French was amazed at how much I knew. I never thought I could even get a weak grasp on anything but English but I found myself constantly going over what I learned in each lesson and even THINKING in French, which is awesome.Customer Review: Amazing
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this for my 10 year old daughter to practice her French. (Her dad, my husband is French, but I'm American) This software is amazing. Using the earphones... you'll heard separately... the French tutor in one ear, and your voice recorded in the other. You practice lots of skills in a fun way, but the pronunciation practice is so fun. Her friends love it too. I feel like buying a DS for myself so I can have more time on the French Tutor!Customer Review: Pros and cons
Summary: 3 Stars
The fact that the people from Nintendo and Amazon claim that one can become a "pro" at speaking French, or any other foreign language, with just 15-20 minutes practice a day is simply a con. Sorry folks, it just "don't" work like that! But, the program/game is not all bad, so let me start with the pros.
1. It is cheap.
2. It is small and eminently portable.
3. It is entertaining.
Language learning CAN actually be lots of fun, but it takes a lot of work, too. With AT LEAST one year of college-level French, involving daily or nearly-daily practice, and then AT LEAST four months "immersion" in the country speaking and listening only French, most people can expect to attain reasonable fluency. I am sorry to break it to you, but spending $20.00 or $30.00, and 20 minutes a day simply cannot make you fluent enough to simply go to France and then understand and speak the language right away!
"My French Coach" CAN help with learning French, but there are mistakes in the program that, unfortunately, will likely be also learned in this process. Besides the vocabulary mistakes in the program, an even bigger error is the fact that the GENDER of nouns is not taught along with the nouns. We English-speaking people don't understand what the big deal is about nouns with gender because in our world everything or everybody that doesn't have sexual organs is an "it". But most other languages, French included, "things" can be a "he", "she" or "it". Nothing says "foreigner" in the ears of a native faster than gender errors. The gender of each noun MUST be learned at the same time as the noun.
Another problem is that the types of teaching methods used are not the kind that lead to fluency. The exercises rely too heavily on TRANSLATING. You don't really learn a language in terms of fluency if you are translating in your mind from the target language to your own language back and forth. To be fluent French, you must be able to THINK in French. There ARE ways to teach even beginners to think this way, and, of course you have to use only French to do so. Using pictures is one way. A good language teacher or program uses these types of methods.
I don't want to scare you into thinking that learning a language is a hopeless task--too expensive and time-consuming to be worth while. If I thought that I would not be a language teacher (German). Everyone can gain some competence in a foreign language and enjoy doing it. The knowledge gained is never useless, even if you don't go on to learn to speak like a native. We learn to understand a different culture in a way that would be impossible to a tourist or traveler who doesn't bother with the language. And, as a side benefit, we learn more about our own language as a result of foreign language study.
Buy the game if you will, but don't be duped by the "fluency" claim.