The Learning Company PowerMac 7100 Fearn to Speak French Reviewed by David Leinbach "Learn to Speak French" is one product from The Learning Company's line of "Learn to Speak" products. This product helps the person who doesn't know how to speak French, learn enough to help them navigate a French speaking region. The program is organized into chapters which lead the user from the basics (the verb "to be", etc.) to more advanced topics such as future tense and more. Each chapter acts out as if it is part of a story. Gameplay When you first start up this program, you can go through a slide show type presentation of French culture including art, food, architecture, and more. You can press a key or click the mouse button to finish the presentation and go to a menu where you can select a chapter. Once you choose a chapter it will give you a brief description of what you will learn in that chapter and then take you into the first section, Vocabulary. In this section you can select the different words that are going to be used in that chapter learn what they mean, and how they sound. You can then record your own voice and listen to the proper pronunciation in comparison to yours. You can use this to learn the vocabulary but I think they could have created a better way to learn it like giving you a word and then showing you how it can be used in an example or two. You can then continue onto the next section which is The Story. This gives you the story of what happens to you in this chapter. This, as with all of the other sections, allows you to record your pronunciation and compare it to the recorded one. This is neat because it allows you to see the vocabulary in use but if you donít understand something, you have to go searching through the text/workbook to find what it means in English. This, however, isnít all that bad because if you are serious about learning French then you should have the text/workbook with you and opened to the right section anyway. The next section is The Action. This is similar to The Story section but this one has video so it is more appealing. Other than the video, it is pretty much the same as The Story section. We now come along to some exercises. First is Listening Skills. In this exercise, you listen to a spoken word from The Action section and then find the correct place for it. You then have to type it in correctly in that space. Next we have Drag and Match in which you have to drag a particular word from the center and drop it on its matching word based on grammatical and syntax rules. There may be more than one Drag and Match screen depending on the chapter. The next exercise is Word Jumble in which you must re-arrange words into the correct order using sentence structure and syntax rules. The last exercise is Communication Skills. In this section you must respond to sentences with either a voice or written response. If you do a voice response then you must listen to the correct answer and indicate if that is what you said. Enfin (Finally), the last section is the Games section. This includes different games which are well known but with a twist. They have been changed so that you must use French to play them. This helps you review what you have learned while having some fun. In addition, some of the ways they have implemented these games makes they very enjoyable because of the characters in some of the games and the thought put into the objective of some of the made up games. This game includes lots of sound and video clips which make it much more inviting to learn the language as well as an easy to learn and use interface. Conclusion If you are looking for a program that will help you learn to speak French or just reinforce up on your skills that you may have learned in school and have basically forgotten then you should consider this program a good choice. I didnít encounter any bugs and if you are also a Windows user then you may like the fact that the CDs have both a Macintosh version and a Windows version on them. Overall, this is a good choice for a program to help you learn French.