Reddit mentions of Action Grammaire!: New Advanced French Grammar

Well I've been using Duolingo alongside learning French at school (the teachers aren't great) so it's hard to say. I can definitely understand the gist of some news articles but I have to look up tons of vocab on sites like France24. This site is a great place to start reading news because it's aimed at French children so it's simpler - I can understand about 80% of it.

As for speaking, I don't think Duolingo is particularly useful. I'm sure you could have a very basic conversation about some of the topics taught, but it would peter out pretty quickly.

Duolingo has introduced me to grammar concepts and tenses that I won't be learning at school for a few years so that's been one of the best things about the course. Although, the notes basically stop the further down the tree you get, so this book has been enormously helpful.

I'm a brit who's been in the fortunate position of learning French since age 8 (though I'm far from native level!). However, I can assure that I've never fully mastered the 'r' or the different types of 'u'.

(Trying saying 'la russe rousse était assise dans la rue' without crying...)

Then again, I've met north African native French speakers, and they also pronounce it like shit. They're just difficult sounds.

I would say that, for me, no matter how good my comprehension, the ability to understand something is quite a different skill from being able to form that sentence in the target language.

You need to put yourself in a situation where you're forced to form ideas in French, and can have them corrected.

As others have said, being in a place that speaks that language is really important. Have you asked your university if it has a tandem language learning programme? We have loads of French students who come every year and like to be paired up with native-speakers.
Though being an au pair or a language assistant would also be fantastic. Do you know how the Germans get so good at English? They get shipped off to Britain and America to be au pairs.

As a native English speaker, you'll be in great demand.

I'd recommend using duo linguo until the vocab becomes familiar. Get the wordreference app on your phone if you can.

I used this book during my A-Levels and still do now at uni.

http://www.amazon.com/Action-Grammaire-Advanced-French-Grammar/dp/0340915242/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416777394&sr=1-1&keywords=action+grammaire

Bon courage!

Personally, I really like the Cambridge University Press ones, like this one for Chemistry. I only have them for Chemistry and Physics but they're much better than the Oxford ones in my opinion. I also like it because my school use the Oxford IB Diploma Programme Textbooks to teach the course in the first place, and having a study guide with a different brand to the textbook has been really useful for me to find extra examples of questions or different ways of explaining topics that I may not have wholly understood in the main textbook.



For Geography, I use this study guide, though I don't really know if it's the best one because we got lent them by the school. I think it's pretty good, but maybe there is a better one out there.


I don't think you really need them for the other subjects - you can always buy individual study guides for the books you study for English or, if you have to buy the books themselves, try and get the 'Methuen Student Edition' because it has lots of information at the beginning of the book. For French, you could buy a vocabulary book like this or a grammar book, like this, but there's loads on the internet anyway so I wouldn't worry about it too much.



And for Maths, I don't think a study guide will be that useful, as I think the main thing is practice, practice, practice!




Oh, and maybe hold off on buying anything just yet (especially for Chemistry and Physics) - the IB really like messing around with the syllabus and it won't be that useful to have an outdated version of a study guide