In-Flight French: Learn Before You Land

• Audio CD - 19 June, 2001 - Living Language
• Usually ships in 24 hours
• By: Living Language
• ISBN: 0609810669

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Reviews by readers

Good for beginners

I think the in flight CD is a good way to learn the basics of French so that when you are ready to get more advanced it is not as scary. It is true that you can't just pop in the CD on your flight and get off the plan speaking fluently; I had to repeat the CD and read from the pamphlet to really understand.

Great overview of French basics

While this CD and booklet are not going to have you speaking fluent French to Pierre as soon as you land in Paris, it will help you to master some of the basic survival phrases and prounounciations. I also had purchased a phrase book and carried that around on our trip to Paris, which everyone probably needs to do, but being able to hear the words on this CD, "In-Flight French", was very helpful to us.
The title-"In Flight French"-is kind of deceiving though--I would not recommend waiting until you get on the plane to listen to it! There are 18 short (2-5 minute) lessons and I found it helpful to listen and repeat the phrases for just one lesson at a time while in the car, driving to work or whatever. If you run through the CD 3 or 4 times before your trip and really concentrate on the prounounciations and the basic phrases, and take a good phrase book to carry around with you in France, you can have a very enjoyable time on your trip to France and should be able to get around easily.

Has Its Uses

The bad news (which really should be obvious anyway) is that there is no conceivable way that this CD could teach you enough French to sound like anything other than an idiot in the time it takes to fly from New York to Paris... or even (to paraphrase another reviewer) from New York to Mars.

The good news, though, is that this little CD is not without some usefulness if you forget that "in-flight" stuff. I have been using it to back up a solid text on elementary French as a way to check up on my pronunciation and accent, help with training my ear for listening to French, and as general support during car rides, etc. The lessons are quick and painless, easy to navigate through, thus excellent for reviewing while stuck in traffic.

Utterly insufficient for service as the backbone of any independent study of conversational French, this could still prove useful as a supplement and an initial filler for the gaps inherent to text books.

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