Plongée: French by Immersion: A Complete Beginner's Course for English Speakers — Learn to Speak It, Not Just Recognise It (Volume One: Arrivée)

Most French books teach you to recognise French. This one is built to make you speak it. You are going to France. Not for a holiday - to live. You need to open a bank account, argue with a landlord, explain a symptom to a pharmacist, and be understood the first time. A numbered list of phrases will not get you there. Plongée is a complete-beginner French course for adult English speakers, built on what the research on language acquisition actually says: that you learn from input you can almost understand, met again and again at expanding intervals, with your mouth involved from the first page. What is inside - A full pronunciation chapter that uses the International Phonetic Alphabet instead of pretending French can be spelled in English letters. The four nasal vowels, the uvular R, tu against tout - the sounds that decide whether you are understood. - 625 of the most frequent word families, introduced in the order a corpus says they matter, never at random. - Twenty-five chapters carrying one continuous story: you arrive, you find a room, you deal with money, a doctor, paperwork, a neighbour, a problem. - Every phrase returns on a schedule set before the book was written - in a new mouth, a new place, a new tense. - An English gloss rail in the margin that narrows as you go. By chapter 23 the questions, the definitions and the instructions are all in French, and you will not have noticed them change. - The evidence behind the method, footnoted - and a protocol at the back for testing whether it worked on you, including the sentence you sign that says what would count as failure. Volume One of three. Complete beginner to A1. Illustrated throughout with diagrams drawn for teaching rather than decoration. Note: the recorded audio programme referred to inside is in production and is not yet released. Page iii explains how to work the method without it.