Review by Rjmaloy -- Idiom Attack Vol. 1 Everyday Living...

[Rjmaloy]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Idiom Attack Vol. 1 Everyday Living (French Edition)" by Peter Liptak.]

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4 out of 4 stars

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Idiom Attack Vol. 1: Everyday Living (Traditional French Edition) is a short and sweet instructional and practice booklet for native French speakers desperately trying to understand the nuances of the notoriously difficult to master English language. There are actually three authors who contributed to this book—Peter N. Liptak, Matthew Douma, and Jay Douma—as well as a French translator, Marie-Odile Kippen.

Idiom Attack: Everyday Living includes 25 chapters such as Weather Conditions (Le temps qu’il fait), Dining (Les repas), Gone Shopping (Faire les magasins), and Making Conversation (Faire la conversation)—in total, there are nearly 300 different idioms within these pages. The book is formatted to include a bilingual sentence, where the English idiom is inserted into a French sentence, before rewriting the entire sentence in English alone. Next, the idiomatic phrase is defined in English and again in French just below that. Finally, each chapter concludes with fill-in-the-blank exercises and quick stories followed by discussion questions to help solidify the expressions into one’s head more concretely.

Overall, this is a fantastic way to explain English idioms to non-native English speakers. It’s thorough and concise, the organization is clean and easy to read, and it includes all the most useful idioms any parisiens would need to learn to really get a grasp on the English language. I’ve always been taught that the more idioms one knows in their second language, the more fluent they really are. (Now I just need them to write Attaque Idiomatique: Édition Américaine.)

What’s also great about this book is how it can still assist those learning French—in case it wasn’t clear, yours truly speaks more than a fair amount of French, but I’m definitely still learning. So while I may not need to reference this book in order to learn English expressions, it can still help me improve my understanding of both languages, which I consider a win.

In all, I’m giving Idiom Attack 4 out of 4 stars: 2 for the content, 2 for the easy-to-follow formatting, plus a secret bonus star for being offered in multiple languages! That’s right, I may have only read the French edition, but they also offer volumes in Spanish, German, Chinese, and Korean, not to mention that each language has its own Everyday Living volume as well as a volume for business lingo. Basically, the Idiom Attack books are seriously useful, easy to follow, and I recommend them to anybody trying to master a foreign language.

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Idiom Attack Vol. 1 Everyday Living (French Edition)
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