French Fantastique – A French for Beginners Series – Books 1, 2 & 3.

Hello and welcome to the first two books in a series of 3 that are designed to help you learn French.

Learning how to communicate in another language can feel daunting. First, you need to get to grips with the basics of grammar and pick up some useful vocabulary. Then comes the challenge of putting it all together and actually using it in real-life situations. Easier said than done!

But being able to speak another language is liberating and fun. It can truly enrich your experience of being in a different country, and even change your life.

When I teach French to complete beginners, my goal is simple: to help them reach a point where they can hold a basic conversation and talk about what they are doing today, what they did yesterday, and what they are going to do tomorrow. That means being able to speak in basic French across three tenses.

French Fantastique: A French for Beginners Series reflects this goal and consists of three books:

• Book 1 focuses on the present tense
• Book 2 is all about the past tense
• Book 3 covers the near future tense

…plus lots more! With these three books, and plenty of practice, I hope you’ll be speaking French and having fun in no time.

Each book contains 15 chapters, all loosely structured in the same way:

1. A short grammar lesson with examples
2. Vocabulary
3. Useful everyday bits and pieces
4. A sample conversation between Rémy and Rupert (starting in Lesson 5)
5. Interesting snippets of information relating to French culture

There are also appendices with helpful reference material.

A condensed version of each grammar page can be found on my blog in the French Fantastique section: www.dordogne-life.com

About me as a French teacher

People have always asked me to help them learn French. Teaching wasn’t something I initially set out to do, and for a long time, I wasn’t sure I could.

After giving a few one-to-one lessons to friends who were complete beginners, I was told that I made them feel at ease. I provided a space where they could make mistakes without embarrassment. They told me they felt comfortable “being an idiot” with someone like me and that for the first time, they really felt like they were learning French.

It was incredibly rewarding to see them grow in confidence and reach the point where they could hold a conversation with me. As a result, I’ve come to love teaching French to beginners.

In my experience, one of the biggest hurdles people face when learning French is the overwhelming amount of information presented all at once. Traditional grammar books can be intimidating, they’re just too dense.

I also believe that in today’s fast-paced world, where our attention spans are shorter than ever, bite-sized learning is the way forward.

That’s why I began writing French lessons for my blog, www.dordogne-life.com. And that’s what inspired me to turn those lessons into this book. And here we are!

I’ve had plenty of experience with languages. I worked as a language assistant (French and Spanish) in a UK secondary school and regularly took over the French classes there. I’ve also taught English as a foreign language to nurses in Bordeaux.