emk wrote:A few drawbacks:
- Some important points of French grammar, including the subjunctive and the concordance des temps, appeared surprisingly late in the course IIRC. This is all material that you should have at least partially internalized for a B2 exam.
- The course spends, in my opinion, too much time drilling the conjugation of less useful irregular verbs like coître too soon. Most native French speakers replace these with easier-to-conjugate verbs like grandir when speaking. Sure, if you're at C1 or C2, some of these verbs are very useful for writing. But there's no need to drill them heavily at B1 or B2 IMO. (I just checked with my wife and she agreed that these were extremely formal for ordinary speech.) An important part of intermediate spoken French is knowing what irregularities are best avoided. The -er verbs are your friends.
FSI French:
"During this introductory phase, the authors are more interested in the student's ability to perform in multi-phrasal and multi-clausal sentences using the proper connectors and relators than in his stockpiling of vocabulary items. Subsequent units will develop the remaining verb morphology and expand the vocabulary."
In this sense, FSI is ahead of the modern courses and self-learners chasing "word power" and pouring over grammar books to "finally learn the subjunctive". This is from a 2014 study:
"Areas of relatively late acquisition in L2 French morphosyntax, for example, include, tense, aspect and mood (Bartning & Schlyter, 2004).
In terms of acquisition, second language acquisition (SLA) researchers have suggested that
the subjunctive is late-acquired because “learners need to be at a point in their development where they reliably produce subordinate clauses” (Collentine, 2010: 41) because,as Bartning (forthcoming, p. 24) argues, “complex syntax has to be acquired as a prerequisite.”
If productive subjunctive use is characterized by the interfacing of different types of knowledge such as knowledge of form (i.e., subjunctive inflections), complex syntax, and semantics, then performance differences between learners at different proficiency levels would be expected..."
Exploring the acquisition of the French subjunctive: local syntactic context or oral proficiency?
The study's findings suggest that "L2 proficiency significantly affects the acquisition of the French subjunctive."
While this study explores "The Acquisition and Teaching of the Spanish Subjunctive" I find this paragraph very much relevant:
"
Even though the literature contains a good amount of research on the subjunctive in first (L1), second (L2) and foreign language (FL) contexts suggesting it is acquired late, contemporary textbooks still give teachers and learners the impression that the subjunctive is so important to communicative goals that its study deserves large proportions of textbook pages and class time."
I didn't find croître in the pdfs (I don't doubt it's there since emk heard it) but I did find grandir and agrandir. I think the point of the conjugation drills is to automatize the verbs (including irregular verbs) and thus shake off all the crutches.
Re: tu... An interesting point.
"...when Richard studied French at FSI, he learned mainly the polite vous form of verbs— which is what he needed to use at work. At one point, however, a friend he'd made in Niger said that his continued use of the formal vous instead of the informal tu made him feel that Richard was maintaining a wall between them. Richard, however, did not know the tu form of verbs very well, so he was forced to use vous. Although using vous made Richard sound professional at work, he was unaware that he came across ..."
Becoming Fluent: How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language
By Richard Roberts, Roger Kreuz
First of all, I am amazed at how far FSI can actually take you. Secondly, unless you're studying in an isolated bubble, this FSI peculiarity could be a blessing in disguise in our modern, impolite world. The handbook does include sentences like:
1. On prend quelque chose?
2. Tu prends quelque chose?
Est-ce que tu me comprends?
2. Me comprends-tu?
etc.
Multitracking... A succession of lightweight courses will stop your language learning train dead in its tracks. FSI is a monorail train. If you finish it, you've earned the right to not have to look at another audio course in your life. If you wish, you can attach a car to this train in the form of a more modern audio course. You can keep coursing around by adding a written course. A good follow-up to FSI would be Mauger's "Cours de Langue et de Civilisation Françaises". That's a monorail train in its own right that needs a good audio add-on. Book 1 is full of tu forms and my book is from 1953. Why isn't there something modern and substantial like Mauger or FSI? I think the answer is hiding in the title of this thread. Few people actually finish the darn thing. Also, the FSI students who used these materials were required to do a lot more than simply repeat after the prompts.
