Cavesa wrote:If you don't mind me asking:
Why are you using only bilingual sources?
-you are not starting from zero, and you find the bilingual resources for beginners "painfully slow"
-you say you mind too much English in your resources
-most of the best French resources I've ever seen are monolingual
-a lot of your courses are very similar to each other
-when it comes to the monolingual resources, it is not true that everything new is not serious and good enough
Cavesa,
In all honesty, I do not mind answering any questions from people, especially those from certified C2 French sages like you!
To be honest, I am aware that I have 11-year old sedentary high school French in my memory. However, since I intend to get to the C2 level (and not merely plateau at DELF B2 Pro), I want to establish an extremely strong French foundation from which I can ascend the C-level mountain. I do not want to be hubristic and say, "Well, I have photographic memory, so I can teleport to the summit of C2 with no effort and having sole reliance on an inactive French foundation laid over a decade ago." I want the experience of learning a language: from getting blown away by an RFI Le Journal en Francais Facile F-5 tornado and realising that I have a feeling that I am NOT in Kansas anymore, to eating a bowl of chicken soup in a 42C (108F) Mediterranean heatwave to recover from a stubborn cold whilst not quitting, to applauding when I was able to transcribe what I heard from Cortina/NFEW/FWOT/Linguaphone 1950 & 1971/Living Language/DLI Basic courses. These trials and triumphs are what make anything worthwhile.
Another reason is that I was never able to find native French courses from Hachette/CLE/Didier for beginners/false-beginners. Everything that I found was
I am afraid that I would have to disagree with you: ALL contemporary revisions/editions of any series in any* language have become less complex (a euphemism for "dumbed-down"). I have seen this in English and Shona textbooks (made by natives for native speakers) and am confident that this is the case in all languages. I can say, with absolute temerity, that the Czech books that you read in junior school are significantly more complicated than the textbooks in use today. If you picked up the books they are reading today, you would split your sides with laughter.
DISCLAIMER: I would like to believe that outstanding educational systems like those from S. Korea, Japan, Singapore, Finland, Taiwan and Sweden will prove me wrong.