Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1450 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Released on: 2007-11-23
• Rating: To Be Announced
• Platform: Nintendo DS

Manufacturer's Description
The âEurooeMy CoachâEuro series of games will allow players to improve themselves and learn in an interactive and stimulating way. My French Coach âEuro" Level 2 is a game that allows you to improve your French vocabulary & develop your ability to express yourself with confidence & persuasion.

Customer Reviews

Quelle déception!
If you are thinking of buying this to improve your French then you need to be aware of a few shortcomings:

First of all this is Level 2 - make certain this is what you want! This is a French version of My Word Coach which is a vocabulary builder NOT something to teach you the basic mechanics (grammar) of French. If you want to learn French on your DS then you will need to at least start with Level 1 which teaches you how to put French together and build phrases and sentences.

Second, even for what it is, this doesn't work as well as it should. Sure it will build your basic vocabulary with its rather large glossary of words but it has some FATAL flaws. One of the hardest things about French for beginners is that nouns have gender. This is completely left out of this glossary so having learned a word using My French Coach you'll still have to have recourse to an ordinary dictionary to pick up its gender. This could have easily been acheived by using le/la or l' before nouns in glossary or by using colours, eg blue for masculine and red for feminine.

The next major let down here is that My French Coach doesn't help at all with pronounciation - perfectly possible on the DS and, in my opinion absolutely vital for extending vocab in French.

Finally the games themselves won't hold your interest for very long. On the easy modes you'll quickly find yourself getting good marks but move up to the medium level and they are almost impossible to do within the allocated time.

So all in all a major disappointment - could and should have been so much better!

A missed opportunity
I bought this game hoping it would help to improve my spoken french, anticipating the creative use of the multi-media DS platform. I was sadly disappointed.
Firstly, the things I thought were good:
The games were easy to grasp and I appreciated the range of methods used to reinforce the vocabulary (anagrams; selecting a word based on its definition; selecting a definition for a specified word; correcting spelling mistakes etc). I liked the fact that there was a daily goal of the number of words to learn and that progress was rewarded with new tasks and increased levels of difficulty. I also thought the glossary review at the end of each task was valuable to reinforce the correct spelling and definition.
However, as the previous reviewer reports, the fact that there is absolutely no grammar (no gender for nouns, no tenses for verbs - even in the glossary) seriously limits its value, as you cannot confidently use the new words without checking them out first in a conventional dictionary. I was also concerned to find that there were some either highly dubious definitions for a small proportion of the words (eg "pension = boards that have been fastened to each other" instead of board/lodging)or obscure definitions for words that have much more common meanings.
Those were the serious concerns, but I also found it very disappointing that the makers had not made more use of the capabilities of the platform, particularly the use of sound for pronunciation (bizarrely, the only use to which the microphone is put is for you to blow on it to raise letters that have sunk in the pasta soup game!). This is a real shame as it would have made it so much more useful and engaging. I would really love someone to do this again properly.
It's still a lot more fun than reading through a dictionary, but not as much use.

useful entertainment
pity there was no pronunciation, I expect like word coach there will be a spelling 'game' using sound when you have graduated that far but apart from that it is lacking in most of the french principles ie gender and sound. It is useful to see how many words are similar to the english for word recognition but not to learn the language.