The FSI French Basic Course Volume 1 has been designed to help students reach a level of proficiency which will enable them to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations. The dialogues, drills, situations and narrations have been tape-recorded unless otherwise indicated in the text.
For beginning students, the twenty-four units are designed for a six-month intensive training program of six hours of class per day, plus outside preparation. Each unit presents a situational topic introduced in a dialogue, and usually five grammar points. Each grammar point is preceded by grammar notes which generally are expressed in non-technical terms.
The course include materials of the following kinds.
1. A dialogue to provide a body of natural French conversation as a source for subsequent drills and exercises. (At FSI these dialogues are commonly memorized.)
2. Useful words to supplement the vocabulary with a limited number of additional words, usually related to the topic of the dialogue.
3. Vocabulary awareness to enable the student to better identify the elements of the utterances he learned as a whole and to regroup and review vocabulary.
4. Drills of six different kinds, each type designed for a specific purpose.
a. Lexical drills to manipulate already acquired vocabulary and phrases.
b. Learning drills to introduce new grammar points (with reference to the corresponding grammar notes).
c. Practice drills to give the student an opportunity to illustrate in sentences the grammar point he just covered.
d. question
e. Answer drills to prepare the student for normal conversation.
f. Review drills
5. Situations to improve comprehension and serve as a basis for review and elementary conversation.
6. Narrations to provide reading material and introduce a very limited vocabulary items.
7. Written exercises to offer to the student opportunity to relate the spoken language to the writing system.
You can find the next volume of the
FSI French Basic Course here:
FSI - French Basic Course (Volume 2)
French is a Romance language, belonging to the Indo-European family. It descended from the spoken Latin language of the Roman Empire, as did languages such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and others. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl - llanguages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien) has largely supplanted. French was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul like Gallia Belgica and by the (Germanic) Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. Today, owing to France's past overseas expansion, there are numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone.
French is spoken in: France, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Canada, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Bukina Faso, Niger, Senegal, Mali, Rwanda, Belgium, Guinea, Chad, Haiti, Burundi, Benin, Togo, Central African Republic, Gabon, Comoros, Djibouti, Luxembourg, Vanuatu, Se
French is also called: Français, française, la langue française
