New Assimil French 2020

[jonm]

To me it looks like this new edition has as much content or more as the 1998 edition, aka New French with Ease. I'm quite fond of the 1998 edition and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it, but I think the new edition looks good too, and it doesn't seem any less substantive than its immediate predecessor. (I can't speak to French Without Toil.)

Here are the sample lessons:

1998: text and audio
2020: text and audio

And there's a video comparing the two editions here (or you can scroll down, I'll embed it at the bottom of the post).

The 2020 edition has fewer lessons (100 compared to 113) but about the same number of dialogues, because it includes a dialogue in each week's review lesson, which the 1998 edition doesn't. And according to the video, the review lessons in the 2020 edition are significantly longer.

The Assimil site says that the 2020 edition has 3h40m of audio, whereas the 1998 edition has 3h10m.

The 2020 edition has a shorter and simpler first lesson, which seems to be the trend (one I personally don't mind and indeed appreciate when the target language is totally unfamiliar). But in the later sample lessons, it's the reverse:

1998 lesson 50: 13 lines, 5 notes
2020 lesson 50: 19 lines, 11 notes

1998 final lesson: 13 lines, 4 notes
2020 final lesson: 17 lines, 7 notes

The formatting in the two sample PDFs is similar, and the 1998 edition ends the lessons on p. 484 out of around 600 pages total, whereas the 2020 edition ends the lessons on p. 634 out of 828 pages total.

As I say, I really like the 1998 edition (for one thing, there's a lot of humor), but the new course seems just as substantive, maybe more.

Regarding the CEFR levels, I think the "A1-A2" on the website is meant to refer to the learner's level when they start the course, not when they finish. (But I agree that one "With Ease" course all by itself won't get you to B2.)

[jeffers]

I've had a look at the sample pages from the new version of the French course. The author is still Anthony Bulger, so I thought it may have just been essentially the same course with a few updates, but it looks like the dialogues are all new. Can anyone confirm this?

I've been planning to do a thorough review of the NFWE someday, but actually doing a full review using a new set of dialogues might be more interesting and more useful. Looking at the website, I'm also tempted to try the e-course version. I do like a physical book, but portability and the extra exercises make this an interesting option.

Supposedly the e-course has everything available in the book + audio versions, but in addition has these features (my comments in square brackets):

• you can record your voice and compare your pronunciation to that of the recordings; [maybe good, probably pointless]
• systematic display of all new words learned in each lesson; [Brilliant! Why wasn't this already a thing? Space, I suppose.]
• translation exercises available that can be used in two different ways (multiple-choice questions and fill-in sentences); [potentially useful to have additional review exercises.]
• your results are displayed and assessed; [Some sort of checklist? Could be helpful]
• the pronunciation is displayed for each sentence in the dialogue, along with any special remarks; [An improvement over footnotes, I suppose.]
• systematic referring to the lessons to constantly check what you have learned; [This is a bit vague, but could be good.]
• revision lessons referring back frequently to lessons you have studied; [Additional review? Or is this just the weekly revision lesson?]
• lexicons enhanced with an automatic word search feature providing the translation and references to the lessons for context; [Probably useful.]
• you can practise the active learning phase with a new, “second wave” interactive audio exercise. [Maybe this would help people actually do the active wave.]

This all looks very interesting to me, and I could see using this at some time in the near future. Meanwhile, I have enough to be getting on with, so I'll wait and see if anyone else uses the new course and/or the e-course version and find out what they have to say about it.


Update: I've had a look at the guide to the e-course on the Assimil website: https://monachat.assimil.online/extraits/html_tuto_UK/tutoriel.html, and it is based on the original NFWE (Lesson 1, A Paris, Lesson 2, Au magasin, etc), not the new version. This will be a plus for some people.

One more important point: If you get a book + audio version, you should absolutely get a version with mp3 audio, because the mp3s have the lesson text embedded as "lyrics", so you can read the text while listening even without the textbook. However, the version of the book with a USB seems to be the original NFWE rather than the new edition (based on the sample chapters available). Like with everything Assimil seems to sell, it can be difficult figuring out which one to buy! I think the best option for me would probably be the book + audio download, which is also the cheapest option other than the book alone.

[bolaobo]

Odd how the book still has B2 on it despite being filed under "A1-A2."

You're misinterpreting it. They mean that those levels are suitable for starting the book. If you click on more details, you'll see this:

(A1-A2) Beginner & False beginner > (B2) Intermediate

By the way, I'm not too bothered by these claims. The material goes up to roughly B2, but it's not going to get you to B2 on your own. They just mean that's roughly the level of the final dialogues, but there's enough quantity to get you there without additional study. You need more variety and different contexts.

[sirgregory]

The 2020 edition has fewer lessons (100 compared to 113) but about the same number of dialogues, because it includes a dialogue in each week's review lesson, which the 1998 edition doesn't. And according to the video, the review lessons in the 2020 edition are significantly longer.

That's the same format as the German course I have. There are exactly 100 lessons. The lessons are very short right at the beginning and get longer. Every seventh lesson has a review dialogue with most of the phrases coming from the previous six lessons. Perhaps they are moving to this as a standard format.