Learn French in the car

What better time to learn french than in the car! Instead of filling your head with mindless commercial radio, you can instead fill it with a new language, and make the most of all that time spent zipping up the highway or cooling your heels at traffic lights.

(And for all those of you who are too afraid to speak your French out loud... your car is the perfect sound booth for rounding those vowels and perfecting your French RRRRRR.)

In order to best learn French in your car, you need a course that is broken into journey-sized portions. This saves you having to hit the pause button in the middle of a lesson, work eight hours, then come back to it!

Here are a few French courses that I recommend you check out. All offer interactive audio courses, and come either as CDs or as MP3 downloads.

1) Rocket French

The interactive audio course part of this product is simply wonderful. The 20 minute lessons are just long enough to teach you a short conversation between the two characters, while explaining all the finer points of the language as you encounter them in context.

They go slow enough that you'll pick it all up, and by the end of the 20 minute lesson you'll be amazed how much you've learned. That confusing-sounding conversation at the start of the lesson will now be clear as day. Note that this product is available as a download, while all the other products I'm going to mention will have to be ordered from Amazon, or purchased from the store. For more info you should read my full Rocket French review.

2) Michel Thomas Method French For Beginners:

This one isn't designed to be an "in your car" course as such, but you can just hit the pause button and resume it later. Michel Thomas is quite famous for his methods of teaching that don't really involve "memorizing" new information, but builds on the material you've learned earlier.

3) Michel Thomas Vocabulary Builder — French:

Yes, this elderly gentleman gets two mentions! This course is designed to build on the earlier courses, but I found that I could mostly follow it with just my existing knowledge — I just had to hold on tightly as he built basic sentences into much more complicated ones. In a short space of time I could say "I don't want to go to Luxembourg, it's too far from here. You can't walk there, you have to take a taxi." I thought that was pretty special. Although I preferred the pick-up lines that Rocket French taught me!

4)Learn in Your Car French:

Well, the title has it right. You can certainly listen to these in your car! Unfortunately you might forget what you just learned as soon as you step out of the car, because these courses appear to be little more than vocabulary and memorization, with little focus on how to actually hold a conversation. Good if you just want to learn how to pronounce words (the course is voiced by a native French speaker) but not so good if you actually want to string words together.

4) Pimsleur French:

The old staple French course is still doing it's job: Plug these lessons into your car stereo and repeat, repeat, repeat. These lessons tend to be nice and bite-sized for car journeys. Just don't listen to them late at night on a dark deserted highway: You might fall asleep!

I'll be adding more courses here as I become familiar with them. For now my favorite is Rocket French, followed by the Michel Thomas products.

I find Rocket French to be a more pleasant driving companion because the lessons are quite entertaining as well as educational, and I enjoy Michel Thomas for his ability to cram more vocabulary into me than my brain can actually hold. He doesn't explain it... but he taught me how to demand a taxi to Luxembourg!