What is the best phrase book for French learning?

Question

I just found a way for me to learn French - Practice phrases.

I found a book called French Visual Phrases. But it only teach me a lot of fruits and goods names.

I'm looking for a phrase book where I can read the French sentence and read the translation and also how it should be pronunced in English.

I'm looking for a phrase book that teaches social conversations such as "sorry? I did not understand her when she said...." or "what ever you say" or "you can't do that! That's awful for the audience!".

And not "Je voudrais..." or "il faut...."

Do you have any recommendation for me?

Answer 1

I suggest using a flashcard French language deck with a spaced repetition tool such as Anki which you can use both on a computer and phone. I sampled the one at the top of the listing. It shows you a phrase and plays the audio, then you try to guess, then you click to show the answer, then you rate the difficulty so that more difficult cards are displayed more often. You also have direct links to Wiktionary etc. to look it up in a dictionary. Here's a capture on my PC with Anki:

Just repeat what you hear and press play as many times as possible and repeat outloud. Having French systematically represented with English language sounds is just a misguided way to learn a language in my opinion. Having lists upon lists of sentences only goes so far, you can learn a few ones, but it's important to focus on what you struggle with and not waste time with the easy stuff you get right away, then increase the complexity of the material you're presented with as you practice, which is why I like the concept of spaced repetition and such a flashcard system.