Review: Berlitz French Premier
- Article 74 of 89
- MacFormat, October 2009
Probably the best language training system available for a computer
Berlitz has an impressive reputation as a language school, so you’d expect any language software bearing their name to be equally impressive. You won’t be disappointed.
Berlitz Premier is an incredibly good language tutoring system aimed at everyone from complete beginners to reasonably fluent speakers who want to brush up. For £29.35, you get the Mac and the Windows tutoring programs, PocketPC and Palm programs, four audio CDs and some exercises for your iPod/MP3 player. When you consider that a decent beginners book with one or two CDs can set you back about £25, that’s excellent value for money.
The tutorial system aims to provide as many ways for you to learn as possible. It provides four “immersion” videos: the basic videos show native speakers giving simple words and phrases for survival in France, complete with gestures; the more advanced videos depict dramas, such as a surprise birthday party and conversations between friends, in reasonably informal French.
How you use these videos is up to you: you can try to listen along; or you can go through the transcript, getting advice on words and grammar. There are games that test you on the words used, and a pronunciation system that records what you say and compares it with a native speaker’s pronunciation. There’s even a role-play centre where you can take either part in a conversation and have to provide the right line at the right time. Slightly separate from all these is a set of flash cards for memorising vocabulary and grammar reference tools.
If you finish everything provided, while you won’t be able to cope with a cool Parisian at speed, you really will have learnt a surprising amount. Niggles are that there’s no real grammar training, only a complicated reference system, and the pronunciation trainer will only help with pronunciation and not quite match a real-life teacher.
But compared to other computer trainers, such as Rosetta Stone, this is far and away the best available – the biggest complaint is that it’s not available in more languages!