Berlitz French Premier

reviewed by Mike Hubbartt

For years, people striving to learn new languages had to decide what worked best for them: buy a book or language tapes, or take a class. But time constraints often prevent studying, or the material may not sink in before the trip begins, producing the same results: another traveler toting along a short reference guide and hoping that local people would speak Ôtheir language.Õ

I studied Spanish in school and it made a huge difference when I had an opportunity to visit Spain a few years later. I found that people were quite willing to help me with nuances of their language, as they appreciated that I did not insist they speak Ômy languageÕ to communicate. I felt they respected that I understood I was a visitor and guest in their country, and should at least try to communicate in a way they best understood. When Nova Development announced the release of four language courses, I was eager to try their French course. We plan to visit Paris next year and friends that visited France said the people there expect you to at least try to speak their language, and it seems that you should know some of the language of a country to understand the people that live there.

After receiving the software, I installed it on my 1.8GHz G5 iMac and ran through the tour guide, then went through a lesson and was impressed. The software has the words onscreen and they can be pronounced at normal speaking rate or slowed down, to assist understanding the proper enunciation of words and phrases. Nice, and much better than messing with winding and rewinding audio tapes or CDs. I ran through the basics of greetings and simple conversations. Numbers were part of the practice, not just standalone set aside for rote memorization - useful and easier for me. After several days of practice, I was still a novice but actually felt I learned enough French to at least understand basic sentences and questions, although I knew it would take time and a lot more work to be able to carry on a conversation.

My next step was to use the audio CDs in my car while driving to and from work. The lessons were easy, some were repeating words or phrases and others had you figure out what the speakers said during a typical conversation. Very useful and easy to review as needed - the audio materials bolster the computer software, although they can be used as a standalone learning system as well. A nice addition to the software.

I went back to the iMac and tried some of the activities, basically games intended to help learn without feeling like you are studying. I liked Crosswords and Segment Unscramble best. Crosswords helps vocabulary and spelling skills - fill in the crossword puzzle using the French sentence as a clue. Same deal as English crosswords - you get the number of characters and the positions of crossed words help guess other words. I liked that the software would pronounce the entire sentence or just the missing word. The Segment Unscramble activity uses resorting sentences in a conversation in the correct order - you can look at the sentences in French while listening to them pronounced, or read the sentences in English when first starting a lesson.

Vocabulous and Word Diction activities were more difficult. However, I found both were more useful learning tools. Vocabulous has a sentence and you type in the missing word - you see the meaning of the sentence and the meaning of the missing word in English, and have the grammar explanation as a clue as well. This activity, like Crosswords, will say the entire sentence or the missing word. Very helpful. Word Diction has a word for the displayed sentence (in French) pronounced and it was initially difficult, but a big help with spelling versus enunciation. Overall, the activities made it much easier to immerse myself in French without Ôtrying to learnÕ it. Very nice way to augment the tutorials and help imbed the language elements in your memory, and a feature I heartily encourage people to utilize. One tip - donÕt even think about trying the activities until you start to feel comfortable with French - they are designed to augment, not replace the lessons.

Palm TX

I decided to install the Berlitz software on my Palm TX, so I could use it during the bus ride to and from work, as well as during lunchtime. This is the only time I ran into issues with this package. I have a 2-month-old Palm TX running the most current version of the Palm OS, use Bluetooth to sync with my iMac, and have an external keyboard driver (for a wireless external keyboard not connected during the installation process). The Palm did not have problems before this install, so I did not anticipate one during the installation. The installation went much longer than seemed reasonable and the application seemed to hang, so I did a Force Quit on the iMac, but had to soft-reboot my Palm Pilot. When the Palm TX restarted, the keyboard at the bottom of the Palm screen was missing. I soft-rebooted it twice and no better luck. I had backed up my data, so I did a hard reboot of the Palm, wiping out all data on the handheld, then tried to resync and regain my data, but each time after syncing, the keyboard would disappear from the bottom of the Palm screen. I was able to eventually recover by doing a hard reboot and resyncing a bit at a time, so I didnÕt permanently loose data, but it was a lot of work.

I believe that several factors that together may have been responsible for this problem; the first was the lack for a driver specifically for the Palm TX - I had to chose the Tungsten driver; the second was the use of Bluetooth to sync, as there is a lot of data (> 6 MB) that must be installed on the Palm; the third factor was the wireless keyboard driver. I contacted Nova Development and they are looking into this issue and promised to keep me appraised if they find what caused the problem. My only suggestion for people that buy this product is to be sure your Palm data is backed up, and I would also suggest you use a USB cable to sync the Palm instead of Bluetooth. I did not try to install the software on an iPod nor Pocket PC, as I was unsure whether I might have the same experience as with the Palm, and did not want to take the chance.

Berlitz French Premier ships on eight CDs for the Mac and for Windows operating systems, supports iPod and Palm Pilot and Pocket PC handhelds, and four of the CDs are audio CDs with lessons to use in a car or any CD player. My overall impressions of this application are very good. I liked learning a language without a textbook, the software interface was intuitive, and the word and sentence pronunciation mirrored being in a classroom environment. I would have loved having this application when I was taking a foreign language in school and believe it would be helpful to students in grade school or college. If I hadnÕt had the problem with the Palm Pilot, I would have rated this five stars, but would still encourage people wanting to learn French, Spanish, Italian or German to give it a try.