See It and Say It in French: A Beginner's Guide to Learning French the Word-and-Picture Way

Probably my favorite book for learning French, although I think the Berlitz Self-Teacher: French is helpful too.The Berlitz Self-Teacher includes exercises with answer key, as well as the spoken/pronunciation lessons.Both books can be easily used as written exercises, but will not help much with grammar etc.See it & Say it in French is my favorite because I enjoy the spoken parts the most, and I love the pictures.You can easily turn the exercises at the end of each section into written ones by writing the answers as well as speaking them.If you can have both books, I think you should, I've found them both immensely helpful, but if you had to pick, obviously you should go with this one (See it & Say it in French), as the Berlitz Self Teacher French does not include corresponding pictures, & at times the lessons seem like a tome of words (I fix this by drawing my own pictures) and can be confusing.See it & Say it in French is fun & easy! This book has helped the most with both pronunciation & memorization.UPDATE:I have gone through this book a couple times, and I am "fluent" at least in the sense that I have heard it defined (I can think in french, could carry on most basic conversations, and understand most of what is said in a show, film, or children's book. )I will say that although this book was the one that helped me achieve fluency, it was definitely not my only resource. I took 3 years of French, some of which was advanced, and although I could not remember more than a handful of words when I left, I did have 2 great professors who helped me to get a good handle on pronunciation, which I probably would have had a harder &/slower time without.If you need to double check your pronunciation in this book: forvo.com has sound recordings by native speakers.Be careful with using YouTube, any resource with a bad pronunciation can mess you up. A good choice on YT is "Learn French with Alexa."I used to struggle with translating an English word to a word in French/Spanish etc. The pictures help a lot with memorization, but I DO have to ignore the English translations in this book & try to stick to the pictures as much as possible, because otherwise your brain is just translating back to English.I wish they would make more of these See It & Say It In books!! Like Russian, for example.

Like the other excellent "See It and Say It in" books for various languages -- "See It and Say It in French" is an easy way to learn the primary basics of French. This little book has several main virtues that work together to enable learning French quickly and naturally. First of all, the explanations, starting with pronunciation, are very clear. Next, the learning really is progressive -- starting with very basic French AND using English parallels as much as possible. The phrases are learned via clusters of nearly repeated models via simple substitution -- AND many of those phrases are matched precisely to model pictures. These are grouped by topic in modules and by their topic phrase exercises on facing pages -- for easiest reviewing. Because of the easy progression by topic in such natural modules -- it is also fairly easy to jump around from topic to topic -- to eventually review freely as needed or wanted. This whole pattern is very natural -- closely parallel to natural personal language learning. In addition, beyond the grammar learned on-the-side via the progressively changing phrases [matching natural personal language learning] -- the special grammar explanations [and simple grammar diagrams] are as direct and clear as the rest of this fine and fun book +++

I bought this book because I had the Spanish version as a kid. But to my disappointment the pronunciation guide in this French rendition is lacking, which is noticeable on the very next page. I searched for a pronunciation guide online, printed it out, folded it up, and inserted between the cover and first page. Aside from that, I'm still glad I purchased it.1

I give this book to everyone who tells me they are going to visit France. There are too many good things like all the everyday expressions you can begin using immediately when you get there and practice them first over here. Tons of good stuff for the American tourist in France to practice saying.

I've always loved these books for learning languages for traveling. It is so simple, with photos and has all the phrases you would need for various situations. Now with the Google translator app, you may thing you don't need a book, but believe me you do. Books are still the golden standard to learn languages. When you need to hear the pronunciation you can get online and listen to it.

It is an excellent book to keep your French language alive

I traveled down to Mexico in the 1970s and learned Spanish using this book. It was most helpful. Recently I've been learning French and find this book most helpful. I recommend this language book as one of the best books for learning a language. The pictures tell it all. In this book, the pictures make it so much easier to learn a language.

This book is not at all what I thought it was. I apparently confused it with the Berlitz Phrase Book series, which I used diligently years ago during my army days in Germany. The Berlitz book (if it is even still printed) actually has the phonetic pronunciation guides I thought I was getting in this book and they accompany every German phrase throughout the book--every page. This blurry-printed "See It and Say It" piece of junk of a book makes only the feeblest attempt to guide pronunciation on a half page at the beginning, not even employing phonetically spelled words to help you get the pronunciation right. Don't waste your money.