Book Recommendations?

[Gwenhwyfar]

I'm just about to place an order with Amazon (for 'Harrup's French Verbs' and 'Almost French') - anyone got any other recommendations for me fiction or non-fiction on :

France generally
Brittany particularly
Books on Learning to speak French

Thanks!

[Hoddy]

You don't say what stage you're at. Once I was past the absolute beginners stage I found 'Le Nouveau Bescherelle" useful. Not something you can systematically study, but nice to have by you to look things up.
Hoddy

[Sue56]

LAST EDITED ON 15-Jul-04 AT 09:00 PM (BST)

As someone has already said, BBC French Experience very good, so is the BBC website where you can listen to spoken French as well. When assessing my progress I found On-line Bytesize GCSE revision helpful as well as some revision books from WH Smith, can get these at GCSE and A level. My college course used the Breakthrough French series, various different stages, cd's available - these are very good as they are exactly how French is spoken, not staged, includes "ben" "alors" etc!

As a beginner I read children's French books from my local library, ok not particularly page turning but good basics and some surprises. This time I got an adult book, am getting the idea but not word for word.

Use Collins Easy French dictionary and verb book - like it because it not only gives you the meaning of the word but puts it in context also. It is aimed at school children as only the everyday words are in there but I am found it quite sufficient, say, 99% of the time.

[letrangere]

Try a "search" for in the culture section we've often discussed books on France. When you say general, what sort of thing are you interested in? Tourism, life style, history?

On the subject of learning French, irrespective of your level, a little book I can thorough recommend, and have only just discovered, is Larousse's "Le verificateur d'orthographe". It's a palm size book listing 63,000 mots du francais, comment les ecrire sans fautes. It's invaluable as it saves having to thumb through a large dictionary just to check a spelling. I picked up mine in a small Leclerc.

M

[Luby]

In danger of being drummed out of the Brownies, have a look at the "Library" section on the Total France web site. Lots of recommendations most with reader reviews