HUGO in 3 Months: French

Rating: 6/10
Publisher: Dorling Kindersley

Pros
Comprehensive instruction using book and audio CDs.
Covers vocab, grammar, verb conjugation and interactive questions etc.
Uses interesting structures, such as (listen to answer and reply with the appropriate question) and following conversations between native speakers.

Cons
Tries to cover a lot of ground in a short time, so only superficial.
CDs almost useless without the book. Audio content is not intuitively structured.

Conclusion
This series is a comprehensive look at the French language for complete beginners, and moves apace through the content. It certainly covers all of the required structures, verb conjugations and tenses, with vocab lists, but by the end of the course, it would be hard to retain a lot of the material without substantial repetition. Interesting practice exercises and great native speakers.

Have you tried Hugo in 3 Months: French?
What did you think?


You can purchase Hugo in 3 Months: French at Amazon.

Further Comments
Hugo in 3 Months has interesting practice methods, such as responding with a question after listening to an answer. This made me think in ways that other systems didn't. I tried the audio without the book and found it incredibly confusing. I couldn't make out the structure of the lessons.

It is certainly a comprehensive course, offering practice with listening to short conversations, repetitive reading of verb tables, structures of sentences etc. Having to do all this in such a short audio presentation means skipping over material and not being able to delve in depth in any particular area, nor repeat earlier material for consolidation. Revisions provided are useful for this purpose, however.

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