Saturday, January 03, 2009

A story about "My French Coach"

by Ubisoft

I’ve been using My French Coach for just over a week. In that time, I’ve progressed from “Pre-Schooler” to “Third Grader”.

Overall, I’m still enjoying this and I do believe that I’m learning. However, I have a few complaints about things that begin to stand out after using it for a while.

1) When displaying French nouns, we are not given the gender (le or la). This is important, and I cannot understand why it was left out. I hope they will start including it in future lessons, but I doubt it.

2) It is too easy to progress to the next level; just a few exposures to a new word in a few games and they claim that you have mastered it and can move on. However, I do not feel like I have actually mastered the words in each lesson unless I’ve already seen them before. I’m wondering how helpful this learning tool will be once/if I get to lessons where I don’t know most of the words already… that has just started to happen.

3) So far, the lessons and games are weak in teaching grammar and sentence construction. I want to know more than just a few nouns and verbs, I want to construct sentences.

Up to the current level, I feel like this is a good motivational tool to keep me studying French. It’s like a very entertaining and interactive set of flash cards. I’d never find it interesting to sit down and study a set of flash cards day after day, but "My French Coach" is effectively helping me to do that. I am curious about how the game works as you advance.

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