Please note this is on the INTERMEDIATE version of the game.

I bought this a while ago as my boyfriend is French and I wanted to kickstart my learning to go to a French school. The concept of the game is that you have a coach, which you choose from a selection of characters, and this person encourages you to play games that help you improve your French and your progress is recorded. This sounds like an excellent theory but in practice I found it was not so useful.

Having been in France prior to when I bought this (I bought the Intermediate version), I had a basic concept of vocabulary but I wanted to be able to speak rather than just know words. This game is great for learning vocabulary but sometimes the vocabulary was really irrelevant and without proper grammatical knowledge it was not possible to really construct a sentence as the verbs were only shown in the inifinitive so you needed knowledge of the different ways to use a verb. For example "avoir" is a verb that is commonly used but if you had no knowledge of French would you recognise the verb when it is in its "eus" or "auraient" form? Maybe as I bought intermediate I was expected to know this already.

I also thought some of the games were a little easy, like the building blocks game where you had to spell the word on the blackboard with blocks of letters. Yes it helped me spell some words but I didn't really learn the vocabulary. Plus the nouns have no gender so if you want to put them into a sentence it is really a guessing game.

The progress section is good because it shows charts on how many words you know, but as a previous reviewer said, I did not feel that I knew that many words, when it said I knew thousands. I may have known them for one game but forgot them very quickly.

The one game that was useful was the split decision game which gave you a choice of two definitions for a word and you had choose the correct one. Similarly word shuffle gave you a list of words to match to a list of definitions, which i found did help me to at least recognise words. At the end of the games they also give you a list of the words and definitions and I wrote down my newly-learned (relevant!) words in a vocabulary book.

There is also a pasta game, where you have to spell the word in the soup and on intermediate the letters disappear quite quickly. Then there is the game where you unlock the safe by guessing the word and spelling it faster than your opponent. Another game makes you blow balloons to the correct or incorrect pin to pop them (this is very fast paced!). The games help you feel more at ease with the language, seeing how things are spelled and you automatically pick up a feel for what is right and wrong after a while, which is a good aspect of the game.

There is also a dictionary, which is useful if you are going to France to translate words into English.

You will not become fluent with this game and if you have no knowledge of French grammar you may be able to string the words together in the wrong tense, in the wrong order but at least its a start! As long as you don't have the expectation of learning to speak and write French well its fine as a learning aid. The games are entertaining but it tells you to stop after 15 minutes, which is annoying when you get enthused and are on a roll!

Overall it is a good learning tool but should not be your only source for learning French. It helps on the basics but to speak French you need to get something else to assist you.