A Reference Grammar of French (Reference Grammars)

Great reference

The book rarely bothers to explain anything--it just offers examples as though you might figure them out for yourself. For example, with units of time (years, months, days, etc.) there is a distinction between masculine (which conceptualizes them as points in time) and feminine (which conceptualizes then as durations). There is a parallel between the imperfect and the simple past. But you won't lean any of that from Batchelor et al. They just say the masculine is "more precise" and then proceed to offer half a dozen French sentences with no English translations.For pronunciation, it simply advises you to try a couple of Google searches, and then it gives pages and pages of words that have "similar" pronunciations, without bothering to tell you much, if anything, about what makes them similar.This pattern--large blocks of untranslated French, long lists of words or phrases without explanations, and vague, hand-waving statements of grammatical principles--applies to all parts of the book. It is as though someone put together the raw material for a reference grammar but then never got around to finishing it--and yet it got published somehow.The only value I could imagine that it might have is for a reader who was a very advanced student of French who might find it entertaining to flip through. But the serious student who wants to read authentic novels or the would-be translator who needs help with grammatical corner cases will find this book to be of no value whatsoever. It should never have been published in the first place.

When I received it I could not take my hands off of it! So much to read, very interesting comments and examples. Perfect to teach an advanced grammar class that focuses on the importance of language variation.

It would be hard to overstate how terrible this book is -- a horribly executed reference grammar by two authors who appear to have no linguistics training at all.The information is poorly organized, with rule after rule appearing in successive paragraphs, with minimal use of headers and very little organization by theme. It is rife with ramblings that have no place in a reference grammar.Worst of all, it is full of inaccuracies and misinformation -- on one page the authors breathlessly write that the French language is descended, via Latin, from Greek! That was when I shut the book and returned it.An absolute atrocity.