Essential French Grammar: All The Grammar Really Needed For Speech And Comprehension (Dover Language Guides Essential Grammar)

You NEED this book to learn French. There is no ONE perfect medium for learning a language. You need several different tools. Start with a good phrase book (Rick Steve's are the best) to learn enough to be a good tourist (i.e., to have more fun on your trip). Next, use a good computer or online program to learn vocabulary. (The vocabulary comes faster if you have already learned a lot of useful phrases.) These programs are glorified flash cards, but flash cards are actually a very effective way to learn vocabulary, and the best programs (a) teach you the words you will use the most and (b) focus on the words you know the least. The best flash cards also have a combination of written flash cards, spoken flash cards, and picture flash cards. My personal favorite is the free online program is duolingo.com. I like Rosetta Stone, too, but it is expensive. It uses a great combination of written, spoken and picture flash cards. It is also dumb: it doesn't keep track of what you know well and drill you on what you know the least. Still, I think it's a good program if you've got the money. But flash card programs are a TERRIBLE way to try to figure out complicated grammar rules. So, in addition to a phrase book and a flashcard vocabulary program, you need a couple of books on the language that include vocabulary and grammar. I say a couple because reading two books on the subject will teach you much more than reading the same book twice. Vocabulary makes a lot more sense after you've learned a lot of phrases and learned some vocabulary. (You have a lot of "aha" moments about grammar rules if you learn phrases first. If you learn grammar first, it seems like a bunch of capricious rules, and it just won't stick in your head.) THIS is THE BEST little book on grammar, emphasis on the word "little". If you've learned basic tourist phrases, and you've learned some useful vocabulary, NOW you need to learn the ESSENTIAL grammar, and I prefer learning in 125 pages instead of 525 pages. Comprehensive books are too complicated for the beginner. You can't tell the critical from the rare, and there is so much you end up remembering nothing. THIS book teaches you the most important things you need to know, in a logical order, and it is very compact. Perhaps "condensed" is a better word. If you don't know any French grammar, this book can be a little hard to follow. Buy a comprehensive grammar book, too. If you don't understand something in this book, look up the same subject in a second, bigger, more comprehensive book. BUT, as I said, I would much rather learn (a) the most important stuff in (b) the fewest pages than try to learn EVERYTHING in THOUSANDS of pages. So, five stars specifically because this book is NOT comprehensive. (Eventually, in order to learn the language, you also need to speak with other French speakers. There are great sites for this, where you can chat free or cheaply online with native speakers. You will find these sites and other good tips on learning a foreign language efficiently in "Fluent in 3 months".

C'est tres bon, et quel bon marche! Covers lots of ground, various topics. including a list of 2,400 cognates. Very light & easy to carry around, mais il y a un problem - the print is small - but the ink is dark and the paper bright white. If you want to learn French, or various other languages, by far the best resource is the Michel Thomas audio CD sets. I've learned basic functional French and German, and improved my Spanish, with these, and it's been easy and fun. They're better than any other method. However, Michel's method stresses getting up and running FAST, teaching minimal grammar. Quickly skimming through this book has filled in many missing puzzle pieces for me - things Michel didn't want to cover, since they're not absolutely necessary for practical functional use, but after you can just function, you start to want to know, in order to feel really in command of the language. This brief book does that well. The trick is, you have to listen to them while you're driving. Not just the occasional road trip, but, say, half of the time you're driving. Listen to them casually, like entertainment, instead of music. Relax and enjoy. Listen on the 2 minute trip to the store. Each disc many times over a period of months. Also good while working in the kitchen. We spend a lot of time there. Most of the people who set out to learn a language for fun fail. If you follow the above you will succeed. It works best if you talk out loud to yourself about what you're doing at the time. That makes it real, like living in a foreign country (immersion). If someone close to you is willing to let you speak to them in French (things like "I'm going to take out the garbage now" or "These eggs are very tasty") even though they don't know French (you can repeat in English (my wife plays this role, I call it a "context accomplice" - by the context of the situation she knows what I mean if I'm walking out the door with the trash bag in hand, etc.) then you will be AMAZED at how quickly you will learn and remember.

An easy and short read through replete with a lot of the main grammar you'll run into. I really liked how it pointed out the main things you needed to know and said how you could say one thing another way (basically so you don't have to learn 3 different conjugations and the nuances among them, just learning one)

This little book truly is essential. It may be too close to the bare essentials of French grammar for a first-time learner, but for someone who has had previous experience with French, or for an experienced language learner, especially one with familiarity of other Romance languages, it has everything that one needs to get a succinct yet very thorough and very clearly presented précis of French grammar.

Having owned many French grammar books and possessing a high level of French, I can say that this book is a good introduction to French grammar. As the front cover states, it contains grammar needed for conversational speech and I agree. The explanations are good and straight to the point. They do not use very technical grammatical terms to explain the grammar. Even if you don't know what a direct or indirect objects is, the back of the book has a glossary explaining those terms. This book does a good job of trying to make connnections with the English language and has a long list of cognates. If you are interested in learning French and do not know where to start, I recommend buying this book and using it with Duolingo. Once you get to a higher level, it would be best to buy a more comprehensive book.

In the kindle version, some of the text is quite microscopic and, because it is embedded in images, it does not respond to attempts to make the text bigger. You can make the image larger but it will generally expand to exceed the size of the screen. Apparently publishers are idiots.

I had been looking for a good grammar book--not too large, not too small. I believe that grammar is important in learning a language, but it is not extremely necessary on the first stage of such a process. I would recommend you to spend about four months with the Assimil book of you choice (apply Luca Lampariello's "full circle method"), do one lesson a day, six days a week. At the same time try to listen to radio, watch TV, and even read the news in that language. Soon your brain will start to adjust to your new language. It would be helpful to speak to natives of that language just to practice, although it also helps to speak to yourself, and even record and listen to yourself to correct your accent mistakes. Within a year to a year-and-a-half, you will have a great understanding of the language you started learning a while ago. Of course you could use other courses, you just have to have to motivation to learn a language. Most people have to work or go to school, so they don't have a lot of time to spend on language learning. An hour a day would work perfectly. I wouldn't recommend Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur approach; I have tried them both; "you can't say something's not good only because is popular." You must realize that, say, Rosetta Stone is popular because of all the propaganda. You don't believe me? Go ahead and spend $400 on the course and come back within a year telling me how fluent you've become. Too much talk. The "Essential Grammar" book arrive in a great condition.

Great supplement to a more comprehensive language learning system. I am learning French with Babbel and I enjoy that, but at times I need to review some points of grammar. That is where this book shines. You won’t learn enough to be able to speak French just from this book, and to be totally fair the author is clear that is not his purpose. It is to be a supplement. Buy it for that purpose and I think you’ll be as happy as I am.

Extremely good book if you know a bit of French. I wanted to refresh my french and found this book really useful. Worth buying the Kindle version and having it on my smartphone.

more like a crash course where you get introduced to the most important parts of grammer and then get another book to go into details!

Un libro bastante útil, que explica por lecciones la grámatica de forma detallada. Los materiales con que está hecho es de buena calidad

As an additional resource for my french studies it is very useful.

The format is excellent and straight forward, when used in conjunction with phrase a book.