French in Action (полный курс) [VHSRip]

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1. "Orientation"
2–4. "Genesis"
5. "Families"
6–7. "Portraits"
8. "Genealogy"
9–10. "Vacation in Brittany"
11–13. "Encounters"
14–16. "Getting Underway"
17–18. "In All Labor There Is Profit"
19–21. "Entering School Zone"
22–23. "Fishing for an Invitation"
24–26. "Bills of Fare"
27–31. "All Manner of Transportation"
32–35. "Residences"
36–40. "Entertainment"
41–42. "A Matter of Chance"
43–45. "Think Vacation"
46. "Getting Away"
47. "What Variety!"
48. "What Riches!"
49. "What a Nightmare!"
50. "More Variety, More Riches"
51. "Parade and Review"
52. "All's Well That Ends Well"

French In Action is a video-based course created by Pierre Capretz of Yale University. This course is so excellent it almost justifies the invention of television. I know of no better way to so rapidly obtain a knowledge of day-to-day French.
French in Action is focused around 52 half-hour video lessons which assume no prior knowledge of the language. The course starts in French from the first instant, and is built around a story that involves the kinds of day to day activities that are often neglected in literary-oriented language courses. Don't expect to find a lot of verb conjugation and noun-adjective agreement exercises here; the goal is developing an instinct for what "sounds right", just as children do as they learn their first language. You may feel like an idiot when you bungle such details, but the fact is you can mess up genders, adjectival forms, and much of verb conjugation and still be understood perfectly well on the street.

French In Action plunges right into colloquial Parisian French, spoken full speed. The first time through you'll probably miss about 90% at first hearing. The second time, you'll get about half, and by the third time you'll understand almost everything. Your very progress provides strong reinforcement as you follow the course.

The course consists of the 52 video segments, a textbook which consists largely of transcripts of the videos with explanations, and a workbook and set of audio cassettes that focus on structure, grammar, and pronunciation skills.

If you're too busy to work through the more schooldays-like components, you can misuse French In Action to build your skills almost painlessly. Just pick a 30 minute time period every day and work your way through the videos from number 1 through number 52, one per day. When you get to the end, go back to the beginning and start over again. Repeat until you understand perfectly and have ceased to improve. (Mustn't leave you like the programmer found starved in the shower clutching a bottle of shampoo with instructions: "Lather, rinse, repeat".)

French In Action is published by the organisations listed at the end of this section. The textbook, study guides, audio cassettes, and other student material are available in many college bookstores; the last time I checked, San Francisco area residents could obtain them at the College of San Mateo bookstore. The video cassettes are distributed separately by the Annenberg/CPB project, in a dumb format (two half-hour segments per VHS cassette--if you insist on standard play you could fit four per tape and twelve in six-hour mode, which would reduce the number of cassettes from twenty-six to five) at a mindboggling price: more than US$600. This notwithstanding the fact that French In Action has been broadcast by numerous Public Broadcasting System stations in the US for years, and anybody with an antenna and a VCR is perfectly free to make their own tapes of the video portion of the course. In fact, some PBS stations have held all-night taping marathons of French In Action, aimed entirely at folks who want to make their own set of tapes. Now while you're perfectly free to tape anything broadcast on TV for your own use, it's still probably a federal crime to run off a copy for a friend. Go figure.