Learn French with Paul Noble Audio CD – Unabridged, September 1, 2012

This is exactly the kind of French lessons I was looking for. Not too slow or fast, I'm someone who had some years in school but forgot it all. The author has a wonderful personality and has included some great little tricks for remembering tricky verbs---highly recommend!

This course and the Michel Thomas course take a similar approach to introducing french. Both use spaced repetition, in which they come back to words and concepts already introduced. Both are based around testing (eg. they ask continually "how would you say") and testing like this is shown to be much more effective than simply reading a word list or dialogue over and over. I did the Michel Thomas course and then this one; if doing it again I'd reverse the order. It is still worth getting both; hearing somewhat different versions of the same material helps reinforce it. This course (and Thomas) require concentration; it isn't something you can do while driving.I prefer this course to Michel Thomas because the correct response is given by a native French speaker, instead of Thomas who has an accent. In this course the question is posed, there is a pause, then the correct answer. In Thomas you are in a small class as the 3rd student. They often stumble a bit, and if I was in a live class I'd want the Thomas approach because he fixes it by going back to something they know and working forward. But their mistakes on tape may not be your mistakes. Furthermore your fingers get a workout with Thomas since you need to pause after every question, while this course has pauses built in (although in later CDs they seemed a bit too short).Another plus is this course gives all the verb tenses from the start. The Thomas course standard course only uses some of the verb tenses. And I liked the frequent role-playing ("you are at a market", "you are at a hotel") in which a sample interaction is played out, something you don't find in the Thomas course. One nit is that when Paul prompts for 1st/2nd/3rd person he almost always goes in the same order, so you don't get as much of a testing effect to strengthen your recall as you would if he used a random order.So can you get by in French after this course? Both this and Michel Thomas seem to imply that in just a few hours using their method you can accomplish what hundreds of classroom hours fail to do for most students. After this course you can form some sentences, have a small but useful vocabulary, and understand how to use some of the pronouns. It's a good start, but both Noble and Thomas play a trick to sidestep conjugation. They teach the full present-tense conjugation of "want" and "can" so that any other verb can be used in the infinitive form (eg. "can we X", "they want Y", where X and Y are verbs you don't know how to conjugate). That's great, it gets you talking, but native speakers are going to conjugate verbs in writing and speech and you simply won't recognize them. After using this course I started with Assimil French, which has simple dialogues that use grammar and verbs well covered in the Noble course but with real conjugations. I found I understood little from the early lessons the first time I heard them. I'm not criticizing Thomas & Noble, actually I strongly endorse them, but I think the marketing oversells what you will learn.

The "Learn French with Paul Noble" program lies somewhere in-between Pimsleur (i.e. advanced tourist tapes) and the classroom approach. I was shipped the British version (not sure if there is a USA-specific version) and the DVD is in PAL format that will either play on a computer or a multi-region DVD player. No worries though as the content of the DVD just covers the approach of the program and there isn't any actual French teaching on it. I'm using this program as a bridge between Pimsleur Level 1 and 2. Pimsleur wasn't leaving me as confident as I'd like to be and I'm finding Noble's program covers a lot of what I was questioning while doing Level 1 of Pimsleur. I believe Noble is based in London, and he assumes UK students. For instance, rather than saying that you're from America, as Pimsleur does, Noble will instruct you on how to let the French know you're a Londoner. I guess that's good for Americans who want to be poseurs. Also, more French phrases are evidently used in the UK and Noble assumes that you know them. It's not a problem as he goes over them quickly and Americans like me can just pause and repeat it a couple more times to nail down the meaning. I'm up to disc 6 and the program is working well for me but bear in mind that I already completed Pimsleur Level 1. I'm not sure if this would be the best introduction as neither he nor his native speaker spend anywhere near the time Pimsleur does going over pronunciation, which besides the grammar is one of the most difficult aspects of French for English speakers to master.

Of all the self teaching CD sets available, this is definitely the best. I spent most of adult life living abroad, learning to speak multiple languages. For some, I had an American accent, for others, I was told I had no accent at all. Part of my family is French. I spent a great deal of time with them in Paris, studying at the Alliance Francais and traveling around France. However, I did not like speaking French because I could tell I was not pronouncing words correctly and I had too much of an accent. I also had to think too much about what I was attempting to communicate. The teaching approach by Paul Noble is unique in many ways. He does not go into great detail explaining grammatical structure, such as conjugations of verbs, declensions of nouns and adjectives etc. which is typical of most foreign language instruction which generally requires memorizing pages of words, whether masculine or feminine, endless drilling, memorizing past, present and future tenses of a verb, not to mention more complex grammatical structures. Instead, he assures the listener, not to be concerned about forgetting various words or phrases because they are repeated at different intervals. He explains in understandable terms how French is structured, so that when the listener practices speaking French, one is not all caught up in trying to remember every nuance. There is plenty of time during the intervals in which he introduces new vocabulary or phrases to practice aloud and then a native speaker repeats the words or phrases in French, so that is makes it easier to correct one's pronunciation without being mystified by all the diacritics and spellings. I have made remarkable progress in just a few days time. The beauty of this 12 CD set, is that one can replay sections or replay an entire CD. I highly recommend this distinctly different approach to learning a foreign language.