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Jean Gauthier

Auteur de A French Grammar

3 oeuvres 9 utilisateurs 1 Critiques

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A French Grammar — Auteur — 4 exemplaires

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An old and quite obscure textbook, and therefore probably not of great relevance to the prospective learner. But since I have it I figured I might as well review it.

The author's preface describes their approach very well:
"This book combines the Natural with the Grammar method of teaching French....The rules are stated in English, but the classroom exercises are in French, and for the most part oral. Furthermore, all headings are in French, as well as the conversational grammatical summary, Sommaire Grammatical, provided in each lesson. French words and expressions are so constantly repeated in these headings, exercises, and summaries, that the student gradually and naturally acquires a facility in using them in his conversation. The grammar rules are taught by a combination of the inductive and deductive methods. The construction to be explained is indicated in a heading; then its use is shown in examples; and finally the rule itself is stated."

Because of the age of the book, the content of the readings often seems odd in the extreme, bearing testiment to the period it was written:

J'ai reçu une lettre d'un ami dans laquelle il me donne des renseignements sur la situation des ouvriers en France....Les ouvriers reçoivent des salaires plus élevés qu'avant la guerre.
I received a letter from a friend in which he gives me information about the situation of the working-man in France....The working-man receives a higher salary than before the war.

[yes, "ouvrier," as far as I can tell, has just as much of a Socialist overtone in French as the English translation does]

Dans la dernière guerre, beaucoup d'hommes ont reçu des blessures, dont ils portent encore le trace. Il y a des visages sans nez et des yeux qui ont oublié la lumierè du jour et la couleur des cieux.
During the last war, many men received wounds of which they still bear the traces. There are faces without noses and eyes which have forgotten the light of day and the color of the heavens.

Or this example from a section on rules of politeness, which is straight out of another era:

Si vois désirez faire la conaissance de vos nouveaux voisons, vous irez chez aux et vous y déposerez une carte. Si ces personnes désirent faire votre conaissance, elle cois enverront un petit mot pour vous indiquer leur jour de reception.
If you wish to make the acquaintance of some of your new neighbors, you will go to their houses and leave a card. If these people wish to make your acquaintance, they will send a short message to indicate which day they receive [visitors].

Some general notes on the layout and content:
The book is absolutely packed with information, but definitely moved too quickly for me. By lesson 20 they have introduced the present, past indefinite, future, conditional, imperfect, and past definite verb forms, which I found a little too much. If they had provided extensive drills in recognizing and producing the various forms (as would be the case in a Latin book, for example), it would have helped. The other problem with this is that the explanations of how to conjugate different types of verbs were intended to be systematic, but so abbreviated that they were often less than completely clear -- particularly, I think, for someone still struggling with the phonetics of French. I would also have liked a more extensive explanation of when the various tenses are used, but they were introduced so quickly I had trouble telling what form was being used in a given situation, much less why.

Strengths: Very good explanations of the different syntactic transformations (and in French this is crucial). They also include all sorts of information on idiomatic constructions or notable usages of words being taught. For example, when teaching the comparative and superlative, they not only tell you how to create them from the positive form of the adjective, but also how to say "greater than/less than," the usage of comparatives with numbers, when to use "de" instead of "que," other uses of "plus" and so forth. Furthermore, it has a very useful index of grammatical constructions and usages as well as the usual appendices with verb tables and vocabulary. I've been keeping it around so I can look up half-remembered constructions as needed.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
spiphany | Oct 10, 2010 |

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