Customer Reviews
Excellent grammar book - By: G. Mansford, 24 Dec 2007 
This is the best French grammar book I've found. Ideal for A level students. Packs a huge amount in. Printed on high quality glossy paper & not an inch wasted. Lots of exercises with a couple of pages of learning between. Covers a lot of ground & very thoroughly. Not a textbook of grammar but ideal for those with GCSE level who wish to progress to A level standard. The exercises are very up to date & don't have that dated feeling that so many grammar books have. Excellent value for what it contains.
Fantastique - By: J. SCARROTT, 16 Sep 2007 I have this book to help me with my A level French grammar & I think it is well worthwhile. Each section has a quiz at the beginning to see how much you know before reading the chapter yourself. Each chapter is split into smaller chunks which make the grammar really easy to learn & so that you can learn it at your own pace. I always find highlighting the bits I don't understand useful so that when I look at it again I can re-read those bits. Also all the answers arein the back notin another booklet which I find a lot easier to use than other grammar books that I have usedin the past. No cheating though!!!! Allin all, a fantastic teach it yourself book but you may need help from another person who has a knowledge to explain the more difficult bits.
brilliant - By: cindy, 31 Aug 2006 Really helped me with my grammar for A level. Definitely would recommend it to A level students who struggle with grammar or just want some brushing up on it.
Very well organised - By: , 13 Nov 2001 Definitely the best French grammar book on the market. Thoroughly organisedin easy stages with excercises at every stage. This book is not for beginnersin French: you need to know have a reasonable groundingin French to understand what is taught but has definitely filledin all that I needed to reach A Level standard. The diagnostics at the beginning of each chapter are a brilliant idea as they enable you to know where improvement is needed. The subject material is also current & up to date & the examples given cover all aspects.
DOT COM OR POINT AFFAIRES - By: , 25 May 2000 Book Review by Charlie Mansfield 23 May 12000
Mireille Ribiere & Thalia Marriott (1998) Help Yourself to Advanced French Grammar - Second Edition, Harlow, Longman ISBN 0582 329450 Pbk 281pp.
Electronic commerce reached the English-speaking world with the dot com flotationsin the Spring of 2000 but the point fr revolution (with its pun on the French word for business) had been a potent indicator to francophonie since the mid-nineties that Internet products & services available from those .fr pages were documentedin a readable language & availablein mainland Europe. While dot com meant 'subject to postal delays' .fr meant local. In European e-commerce .com means 'on the shelf', .fr means 'help yourself'.
Higher educationin England started to feel the demands from UK businessesin early 2000 to provide graduates with that new mix of skills for the electronic global marketplace; that is with excellent web design skills coupled with high standards of literacyin a second major European language & culture. These skills were presented as the new future by Lyotard as long ago as 1979in his famous Report on Knowledge for anyone who could read French.
With 2001 earmarked as a year-long celebration of Europe's languages what can undergraduatesin English universities do to prepare for a professional lifein the global e-world & multi-lingual information society? They could help themselves to Ribiere & Marriott's Help Yourself to French Grammarin its new second edition since its example material draws on the concerns of the early twenty-first century. This new workbook engages the student with such ideas as 'L'entreprise et le client' (117) where students work on mature texts explaining principles of modifying the product to meet the customer's needs, with socio-economic trends (ch. 23) & the book even manages to integrate an extract from France's data protection law: 'L'Informatique doit etre au service de chaque citoyen.'
However, the grammar exercises do not restrict themselves to technological futures but offer up texts on social issuesin contemporary society, for example, by using a description of the open familyin an exercise on the use of direct & indirect object pronouns (18) & by looking at 'La banlieue s'enflamme'in chapter 14 (85-90) to introduce the subjunctive (very cleverly demonstrating that the subjunctive is relevantin everyday speech & is not just to be viewed through Gide's 'porte etroite'. The passage represents an interview between a journalist & a social worker, the reader of the grammar book, or rather, the user of the self-study manual, being encouraged to underline the verb or expression which the subjunctive follows: 'En fait, tous les jours on s'attend a ce qu'il se produise un incident' (85).
It's worth pausing here a moment to look at the purpose of the book. It's made as a functional object for serious self-study even going as far as providing removable answer pages at the back. The authors have created an object lessonin excellent Open Learning design, with diagnostic exercises to generate needs-driven learningin the user before delivering the new piece of grammar under consideration.
Ever since Barthes' RB par RB (Paris, Seuil 1975) it's been impossible to read a collection of lexia or textual fragments without allowing a complex narrative weave its way into the book to somehow make coherent the disparate characters that inhabit the fragments. I still have a clear image of Toto & the Duponts from Point de Depart, my first French textbook of the sixties. I remember, too, the surprise on my first arrivalin West Berlinin the early eighties to find that the billboards werein colour, unlike the photographsin my copy of the workbook, Menschen und Maschinen.
What country does this help yourself workbook paint? It's a land where you can now do your shopping on the Internet, 'Maintenant on peut faire ses courses a domicile grace a Internet' (147). It is a place where Fauvet & Fils have doubled their turnoverin less than a year (96) thanks to effective teamwork, where Thomas is the unwitting object of premier amour (21), where train fares have fallen by fifteen per cent (20), where Lola & Gabriel use the future tense of some of those tricky irregular verbs like falloir & aller to plan un grand repas de fete (12) & where 'L'image (traditionnel) des Francais ne correspond plus a la realite (quotidien)': A. Make the adjectivesin brackets agree with the nouns they refer to. Answers on page 225.
This is a very pleasing collaboration on French grammar & one wonders how biographical,in the Barthesian sense, is their dialogue on page 111 between Agnes & Macha, co-authors of a roman policier.
(Note: accented characters have not been usedin this review article because of the recent problemsin the new versions of American web browsers)
© 2000 Charlie Mansfield
