Course description
For the adult beginning and intermediate classes, we use "Ultimate French Basic-Intermediate" by Living Language. There is also an optional eight cassette or CD package that accompanies the book. For the advanced classes, we provide handouts at no charge.
Beginning A (chapters 1-6)
Topics - Introductions, describing people and things, filling out forms, making a date, household objects, and expressing likes and dislikes.
Grammar and usage - Pronunciation, subject pronouns, "to be" and "to have", the present tense of regular verbs, gender, articles, plural, adjective agreement, numbers, prepositions, negation, adjectives, some irregular verbs, etc.
Beginning B (chapters 7-12)
Topics - At the train station, at a restaurant, at the pharmacy, the weekend, family, and asking for directions.
Grammar and usage - "There is/are", question words, time, additional irregular verbs, begin comparatives, quantity expressions, the imperative form, impersonal verbs, etc.
Beginning C (chapters 13-19)
Topics - Everyday life, at work, department store, telephone, at the bank, the market, and housing.
Grammar and usage - Reflexive verbs, exclamations, the immediate past, location pronoun, direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns, reciprocal verbs, prices and paying, comparatives, superlatives, ordinal numbers, etc.
Intermediate A (chapters 20-26)
Topics - At the hotel, health, automobiles, cafés and restaurants, sports, on the street, and computer science.
Grammar and usage - Past tense, reflexive verbs in the past tense, additional irregular verbs, the imperfect tense, possessive pronouns, direct object pronouns in the past tense, adverbs, late/early/on time, additional idiomatic expressions, etc.
Intermediate B (chapters 27-33)
Topics - At the dentist's, movies, tourism, household items, at the airport, at the museum, and exercising.
Grammar and usage - Relative pronouns, additional irregular verbs, the pluperfect, telling or asking someone to do something, indefinite pronouns, future tense, present conditional tense, professions, past conditional tense, parts of the body, etc.
Intermediate C (chapters 34-40)
Topics - Vacation, media, at the flea market, politics, professions, schools and universities, and literature.
Grammar and usage - Present participle, usage of the infinitive, sequence of tenses, reported speech, the subjunctive, past subjunctive, additional irregular verbs, additional idiomatic expressions, written versus spoken French, etc.
Advanced Classes
Topics - Discussion of articles, issues, literature, etc.
Grammar and usage - As appropriate related to conversation topics.
