The book aims to “demystify” the language by making it clearer, simpler, and less confusing.
I came to French Demystified as a complete beginner to see if the book would help kick-start my French learning experience. According to the introduction, French Demystified “provides a firm foundation in French-language basics” – but will it actually succeed in making the language more accessible?
The book aims to “demystify” the language by making it clearer, simpler, and less confusing. The book starts off with a list of words you already know in French, for example. You also learn that there are many similarities between English and French that makes the language less stressful to learn. There is certainly a lot of information within this book yet the layout and structure of the chapters is simple and clear. The topics follow in a logical order from pronunciation and identifying objects, to asking questions, telling the time, talking about the immediate future and past, using the infinitive and the present participle, and making suggestions, to understanding the subjunctive mood. The book says it has plenty of practice tests and activities but this is not the case – there are a few quizzes after each section of the book but not enough to be entirely satisfying. Plus, there is little variation in the types of questions you answer – multiple choice for deciding on the correct meaning, verb conjugations etc. I would have liked to see a bit more variety. However, the tests at the end of every five chapters are useful benchmarks for discovering how well you understand increasingly difficult aspects of the French language.
"While a true beginner like myself will be a little disappointed that French is not entirely demystified after reading, this is a good text for someone with some French knowledge who wants an overview of the basics and a reminder of aspects they may have forgotten."
You could use these tests as standalone practice for intermediate students if you are a teacher. In the pronunciation section there’s a lot of information packed into the pages without much of a chance to test your understanding until the end of the chapter. If you are a complete beginner you may find your attention drifting after all the difference pronunciation examples. Essential, yes, but it has been done better in other books. By the time I got to omission, liaison and syllable stress I was lost. French Demystified can be used without a teacher and it is designed for this purpose. However, practicing pronunciation by repeating words is all very well but you are not able to check how well you are progressing without a teacher or another French speaker correcting your mistakes.
You can work through the book in a logical order, completing all the exercises and doing the chapters one after the other, or you can use it by looking at the table of contents and picking out the particular areas of French you want to study. This book is not really for complete beginners and working through the book chapter by chapter doesn’t make for an easy learning experience – you often come across vocabulary in the tests that hasn’t been introduced before, and sometimes it seems the topics skip ahead too far and miss out key learning areas. It seems that the user should also have some prior knowledge of the language and of certain linguistic definitions; the book sometimes makes things more complicated by explaining concepts with complicated grammatical terms.
I think the book makes more of an impact as a reference book or a supplementary textbook for someone with a basic knowledge of French who wants to brush up their skills or look up something they’re not sure about. While a true beginner like myself will be a little disappointed that French is not entirely demystified after reading, this is a good text for someone with some French knowledge who wants an overview of the basics and a reminder of aspects they may have forgotten. It is concise, practical and straightforward – use it with students as a side text or keep it on your desk for when you have a doubt about an aspect of the French language.
