The best French I ever learned was from a Scotsman

Review: Coffee Break French (CBF) audio podcasts from Radio Lingua Network

Contains: 80 lessons (15-20 minutes), with 40 new ones starting Oct. 18!

Affordability: All 80 podcasts are free to download. Bonus materials aren't - see CBF website for pricing.

My approach:

CBF, hosted by Mark Pentleton from fair Scotland, is for beginners through to the intermediate level. Since I’ve tackled Michel Thomas, I chose podcasts that focused on areas of the language in which I felt I was lacking: verbs, or more specifically, verb tenses.

I’ve been meeting once a month with my high school French teacher who’s helping monitor my progress. One of the first things she told me was the importance of being able speak in the future and past tenses, as well as the present – key markers in determining how advanced your language skills are.

CBF podcasts are well organized so I could easily choose to download only the episodes that dealt specifically with verbs (21) before listening to the vocab-oriented lessons and radio plays.

Effectiveness: Learning

a) Situational & Structural: as I explained in my Michel Thomas review, there is a crucial difference between the two. CBF offers both.

The first 40 lessons are great for beginners. You develop basic vocab and can speak simple, context-based sentences which boost learner confidence.

Then comes the technical stuff (lessons 41-67) for those interested in taking the language further and crafting their own dialogue. These episodes are well paced so as not to overwhelm listeners with the complications of verb conjugation, but cover a lot of ground in the process (present, future, conditional, passé composé, and imperfect).

b) Pronunciation & Spelling: Unlike some resources which expect the listener to key in on pronunciation indirectly by mimicking the instructor, Mark from CBF frequently calls direct attention to it, which is especially helpful when distinguishing between verb tenses (parlerais, parlerai?).

Spelling is another area Mark focuses on, which may be odd for learning spoken French (Michel Thomas nearly avoids it altogether), but its helpful with pronunciation too, especially when you see a word you don’t know has similar spelling to one you do.

An area I did have issues with was one that I previously mentioned Michel Thomas doing well - the negative (eg. Je ne veux pas, or I don’t want). CBF teaches this pronunciation the textbook way, keeping “je” and “ne” separate, although when talking with a native French speaker, you’ll hear either the two words blended together, or no “ne” at all - something that isn’t addressed in the podcasts, but makes a difference between anglicised and true French.

Effectiveness: Performance & Operation

a) Enthusiasm: if I had to give one reason to listen to CBF, I’d say do it for the cheerful instruction and Scottish accents. Learning a language independently is tough as it is; do yourself a favour and choose a podcast that you’ll want to listen to because the podcasters have great personalities - it’s impossible not to smile when fellow student Anna talks!

CBF also acknowledges the listener. Whereas Michel Thomas gives you a fly-on-the-wall feeling by never acknowledging an outside party, Mark and Anna frequently address “the listener” and bring you into their conversation. This rapport does make a difference - you feel part of a community, rather than someone listening through a crack in the door to the lecture hall.

b) Organization: Here’s the second reason to download CBF: it saves you time by being organized. Because this is my college thesis, I’m on a bit of a tight schedule and need to know if the resources I’ve chosen will teach me what I want to learn.

Each podcast has a text description of the lesson, and Mark and Anna announce what’s coming up at the end of every episode. I felt comfortable skipping ahead, knowing exactly what I was missing and where I could return to if I didn’t understand something.

c) Radio plays: the last 10 lessons develop your listening skills as you try and understand a conversation between two couples. Although Mark breaks the conversation down phrase by phrase, it was a little too-much-too-fast for me, especially trying to keep up with colloquial phrases.

Understanding others, however, is an important skill to grasp. The next step for me will be podcasts focusing on more real-life French conversations.

Bottom Line: Keep your money and download these podcasts. Well organized, entertaining, quality instruction that takes you beyond the “beginner” into thinking out your own conversations.