Introduction 1

Book I: Speaking in Everyday Settings 7

Chapter 1: Warming Up with Some French Fundamentals 9

Chapter 2: Un, Deux, Trois: Numbers, Dates, and Times 27

Chapter 3: Greetings, Goodbyes, and Small Talk 45

Chapter 4: Getting Personal: Discussing Your Home, Family, and Daily Routine 63

Chapter 5: Talking Business and Politics 85

Chapter 6: Shopping at a Store and Online 101

Chapter 7: Buying, Preparing, and Tasting Foods 121

Book II: Exploring and Wandering About 143

Chapter 1: Making Plans and Discovering New Places 145

Chapter 2: Enjoying a Night on the Town 179

Chapter 3: Money Matters 201

Chapter 4: Home Is Where Your Suitcase Is: Looking for Accommodations 213

Chapter 5: Getting Around 229

Chapter 6: Dealing with Emergencies 249

Book III: Building the Grammatical Foundation for Communication 265

Chapter 1: Building Strong Sentences with the Parts of Speech 267

Chapter 2: All Agreed? Matching Gender and Number of Nouns and Articles 289

Chapter 3: Dealing with the Here and Now: The Present Tense 305

Chapter 4: Commanding and Instructing with the Imperative Mood 331

Chapter 5: Asking and Answering Questions 349

Chapter 6: Communicating Clearly with Infinitives and Present Participles 369

Book IV: Getting Down to Detail and Precision in Your Communication 379

Chapter 1: Specifying Relationships with Prepositions 381

Chapter 2: Describing with Flair: Adjectives and Adverbs 401

Chapter 3: Taking Shortcuts with Object Pronouns 419

Chapter 4: Tying Ideas Together with Conjunctions and Relative Pronouns 439

Chapter 5: Getting That Subjunctive Feeling 453

Chapter 6: What Lies Ahead and What Could Happen: Simple Future and Present Conditional 471

Book V: Going Back in Time 485

Chapter 1: Been There, Done That: Passe Proche and Passe Compose 487

Chapter 2: How Was It? What Was Going On? The Imparfait 503

Chapter 3: To the Past and Beyond: Other Past Tenses 515

Book VI: Appendixes 529

Appendix A: Verb Tables 531

Appendix B: French-English Mini-Dictionary 587

Appendix C: English-French Mini Dictionary 607

Appendix D: Fun & Games 627

Appendix E: About the CD 665

Index 669