Whether you are embarking on self-study or a private tuition course in French, The French Experience 1 is worth considering. Writing and grammar are not over-emphasised, but if you wish to speak, understand and read texts, there is a wealth of material here. Each unit focuses on a particular topic such as health, travel, food and drink, professions, holidays and so on, providing useful vocabulary for tourists as well as residents. The CDs contain authentic dialogues and interviews recorded in France; within each unit the recordings concentrate initially on listening and recognising vocabulary, and then on the learner producing similar language through role-play.

Danièle Bourdais, French grammar, Marie-Thérèse Bougard

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I’ve said this before and I’m sure I will say it again: anyone taking up the study of a foreign language seriously needs to have a thorough understanding of its grammar. I love using ‘La Grammaire en Clair’ workbook with its accompanying cartoons and generous helpings of humour running through the exercises, and it is fine for GCSE and probably AS Level French. But it doesn’t cover absolutely everything. Schaum’s French Grammar, on the other hand, leaves no stone unturned.
A glance at the back-cover blurb reveals that this book contains more than 4,000 test items as well as exercises to help with communication activities. It is divided into chapters that make information easy to find. When introducing a particular aspect of grammar, an explanation is given, followed by examples that use bold for the words that this grammar point focuses on, and a translation of each example into English in italics.

French grammar, Mary E. Coffman Crocker

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If you are looking for a workbook for verbs, French Verb Drills by R. de Roussy de Sales would be an excellent choice. The book is divided into two main sections, Part 1 being on regular verbs and part 2 on irregular verbs. Part 1 has twenty-seven subsections dealing with the various tenses and moods; several of them are devoted to regular -er verbs that have idiosyncratic changes in spelling such as ‘Verbs ending in -yer that change -y- into -i-’. It does make for clarity when such subtleties are singled out and given a page or half a page to themselves. Etre and avoir are in actual fact included in Part 1 although they are irregular verbs; this is presumably because they need to be learned in order to form compound tenses (such as the passe compose or perfect tense) of regular verbs.

French grammar, R. de Roussy de Sales

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Grammar has long been out of fashion and is considered boring, but it gives us the bricks with which to build our own sentences in a language. La Grammaire en Clair by Paul Rogers and Jeremy Long is the only book I have come across so far that brings an element of humour into the learning and practice of grammar.

Each grammar point is afforded either one or two pages, depending on its complexity. The book’s particular appeal stems in part from its use of comic strips for each topic, where the grammar being taught is used in context, often in several different ways.

French grammar, Jeremy Long, Paul Rogers

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