French for Beginners: Part 1: Lessons 1 to 13

By: Alexa Polidoro

Narrated by: Alexa Polidoro

This is the first part of Alexa Polidoro's famous French for Beginners course.

After many years of developing and harnessing her language-teaching skills with The French Ecole and Lingomania, Alexa has now created an audio treat for people who wish to learn a new language from scratch, without any pressure, in fun, relaxed and manageable chunks.

Highlights of lessons 1-13: lots of basic vocabulary, introductions, numbers, weather, days, months, basic sentence construction, verb conjugation, conversations, listening practice, describing yourself, quizzes, seasons, songs, important verbs, feminine and masculine, indefinite articles, family members, prepositions, negations, infinitive verb forms, first group verbs, possessive adjectives, and a whole lot more.

© and (P)Lingomania Ltd

Commuter-french beginner-"lingo-maniac"

What made the experience of listening to French for Beginners the most enjoyable?

The structure of it was very easygoing and it did not rely much on grammar or spelling so I could listen to it while I was driving or running on treadmill and that was very enjoyable for me.

What about Alexa Polidoro’s performance did you like?

It was great. The way she did it was not stressful and she talked about everyday needs in French so you felt you can actually practice them everyday in your head. Also it was very important that she didn't bother with grammatical points too much, and also with songs and breaks in the middle of each lesson it was relaxing to listen to them.

Excellent

The presentation by Alexa is very clear, and listening to the audio was a lot of fun.

Very good

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes. Very user friendly. Alexa has a very pleasant voice to listen to and explains very well.

Any additional comments?

Interesting and fun to learn.

Alexa is awesome!!

So well Done by Alexa! She is very engaging! Happy I found her! Worth the expense.
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

Ca va bien.

I love the way Alexa teaches French. I am enjoying the course very much.

It is helpful, but you need more French content

It does gradually build your French skills, but there's too much filler and music added at the end when you wouldn't really understand the song at that level. There are too many jokes in English and repetitive advertising for the teacher. You would have to get through a lot of the lessons to get to the nuggets. If you get through it all, though, it would be useful. I wouldn't dismiss it. It could have been better. That's all.

Helpful and Clearly Presented Tutorials

Any additional comments?

I'm currently studying first semester French in a college level course. I listen to these Alexa French tutorials on my 30 minute bike ride to work every day and find them to be good refreshers. Her explanations and examples are very clear and have helped me with French grammar and usage. I also use the lessons to practice my pronunciation. In particular, I like how she introduces verb conjugations, gender and definite/indefinite articles early in the course and has you composing complete sentences and asking questions. Will you learn to speak French from these lessons? Probably not, but you're unlikely to do so from any online resource alone. However, I think they are very useful as refreshers or supplementary tutorials.

Commercials between every chapter

I got this because I saw and loved Alexa on youtube.

But there was a plug for the website between every short chapter.

Very annoying

too little French, too much English

Where is the abridged version? If one could do a word count of the transcript of these lessons, one would probably find that it's 95% in English and 5% in French. In terms of duration, the French parts in total are only slightly longer than the advertising at the end, and definitely shorter than all the musical episodes. Many English episodes are completely unnecessary, for example, explaining the idea of first, second and third persons, and the idea of conjugation and where one finds that in English.

Waste of time

What disappointed you about French for Beginners?

Mostly advertisements for additional products and music rather than language instruction.

Has French for Beginners turned you off from other books in this genre?

Somewhat because I paid for this and it was well-rated.