Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

In addition, if what you want to know is just a few sentences to get by for your next trip to France, you need our SmartFrench for Travelers book.
We hope you will enjoy learning French with SmartFrench.

Average Customer Rating:

Oui tres smart!

Customer Rating:

We are Americans that just moved to Paris, and SmartFrench was critical in us quickly learning French to be prepared to live here. The emphasis on real world communication was so valuable. "Street" pronunciations not "formal", immediate conversational learning, the emphasis on immediate usability, all these elements accelerated our learning curve. We find ourselves more functional in Paris than we would have with other learning systems. Thank you SmartFrench!!!! :)

Good way to start French lessons	Customer Rating:
While I have enjoyed listening and trying to learn from these audio cd's, I do feel that personal lessons are inevitable. Christian speaks really fast on some of these and makes it very difficult to try to repeat at times. I get a little frustrated and turn it off, ha! He is good though and very nice to listen to.

A Great Help to Me!	Customer Rating:
I got this program to help me along in my college french class. It worked very well, especially since I'm one of those people who has a hard time with foreign languages. This was like having a tutor at home to help me. My french professor was impressed with how 'quickly' I was learning, little did she know I had another teacher on the side ; )

The best foreign language method -- and I've tried a few

Customer Rating:

SmartFrench and SmartSpanish at first glance may appear unorthodox. Their method is so different from the "standard" foreign language teaching techniques that most Americans are accustomed to, that some people may be put off because it's not what they expected. But if you have an open mind and are willing to try a new approach, you will be rewarded. For a motivated adult who wants to not just go through the motions, but really learn a language and get to the point of actually being able to converse and function in a foreign language, the SmartFrench series is vastly superior to Berlitz and most every other audio CD method I have seen. I am a native English speaker who learned French and Spanish as an adult (in my twenties). I can now say that I am fluent in both those languages, but I also spent a lot of time and sweat in inefficient study that, looking back, could have been much accelerated. I only wish SmartFrench and SmartSpanish had existed then. I've tried a wide range of methods, including traditional in-person language schools. I took five years of German in high school and college, and while I got excellent grades and my grasp of vocabulary and grammar was good on paper, if you drop me into a German beer hall I have no idea what people are saying -- and that's the problem with the way most foreign language is taught. I "know" German, but I can't speak it. If that's your goal, SmartFrench may not be for you. But if your goal is to get quickly to the point where you can actually converse in a foreign language, then I can't recommend this audio product highly enough. SmartFrench doesn't follow the traditional academic pattern. If you judge it by that expectation, you'll be disappointed, and I think this accounts for the negative reviews. It does something much more valuable -- teaches language the way the brain is actually wired to learn language. It may feel unfamiliar at first, but if you stick with it, you'll see results that will actually pay off, and probably quicker than you expect.

The best for learning French

Customer Rating:

The SmartFrench conversations are, in my opinion, the best way to learn the language short of being in France around native speakers. Christian Aubert has recorded conversations with French natives and they are speaking naturally, i.e. with run-on words, dropped endings, etc. (Not like a perfectly speaking textbook teacher) The real way to learn any language is to listen to the way it is really spoken, to let it penetrate the psyche, and eventually to jump in and try to speak. (Of course, you can read the translations ahead of time to know the meanings). I think listening to these wonderful CDs or tapes in the car would be most helpful for developing an ear for French, and eventually the ability to participate. I also highly recommend the CD-ROM because it has the videos of these conversations where you can see facial expressions and hand gestures, which is very helpful. You can also arrange your learning to suit yourself (view, listen, read, all three, etc), and the CD-ROM has beginner through advanced, plus extra material.