Grammatically Speaking...

Bonjour, mes chers lecteurs. Comment ça va aujourd'hui?

Yesterday I was shocked and appalled!  You'll say: Guillaume, cut the melodrama and get on with the post.  Vous avez raison. Je suis désolé.  Still, yesterday's experience was quite an eye-opener.

What I did was drag out some of my old beginner/intermediate French grammar books.  Thinking it would be a breeze, I began to work through some of the exercises, quickly discovering that my French grammar sucks.  No, I'm not saying that I don't have a reasonably good grasp of basic French grammar; I do.  But I did struggle practicing the use of direct and indirect pronouns and made a lot of mistakes with irregular verbs.  

My recent forays into Italian and Spanish have exacerbated this problem.  Now with my hesitant attempts to speak French, I sometimes struggle to find the right word, because it's the Italian or Spanish that comes to mind, a situation made even worse by the fact that the words in all three languages are sometimes quite similar.  That's one reason why I've changed the focus of this blog to French only.  I may go back to the other languages after I feel more confident that I've have a workable grasp of French.

One of the best grammar texts I've found is from the Schaum's Outline series.  For some reason, when you browse for French books on Amazon, these books are way, way down the list of results.  Yet, the user ratings are always nearly perfect.  What I like about the series is that it presents grammar in very small chunks followed by dozens and dozens of exercises.  For me exercises help me solidify my learning.  Schuam's also has a volume for French vocabulary.  I'm not as satisfied with the vocabulary book as I am with the grammar volume, though.  I've yet to find a good book for learning foreign language vocabulary.  Almost all of them just provide huge lists of words on several topics that quickly become overwhelming and impossible to absorb.  A better approach would be to have lists that are divided into most-used words.  The first list would be, say, the top 1000 most frequently used words; the second list the next most-used 1000, etc.  If anyone knows of a book that uses such an system, please comment.