Böcker av Graham Bishop

A dictionary is a book of choices not answers. This applies particularly to bilingual dictionaries. This short skills course will enable learners of French to make the best use of the resources which a French-English dictionary provides. The course is easily worked through and provides fascinating and creative ideas for enriching and expanding your French vocabulary with no pain! This is a valuable tool for any language learner, providing sound advice on how to avoid classic dictionary pitfalls.

During a violent storm off the Greek island of Kythira in 1802 disaster struck the brig HMS Mentor. 17 crates of priceless sculptures hacked off the Parthenon on the orders of Lord Elgin and on their way to England crashed to the bottom of the sea.Two years later after a long and difficult operation, all the scuptures were salvaged and taken to England. Or were they? Did the islanders themselves all those years ago rescue some of the precious sculptures and conceal them in caves on the island desperate to save a small part of their proud heritage from the plundering English aristocrat? Rumours persist and now a suspicious group of Italian divers has suddenly arrived to search the wreck. Who gave them permission and what are they looking for? Commissaire Pierre Rousseau and his Greek colleagues investigate. Returning a hoard of lost sculptures from the Parthenon to the new Acropolis Museum in Athens would create a sensation. Or is it all just a massive publicity stunt to attract more tourists to the island?

Writing regularly in French helps to keep your language skills fresh, so what better way than to make a diary entry each day in your Journal Intime, as the French put it. Writing should be thought of as practice for speaking with a lot more time to think! The more often you write a phrase, the more embedded in your brain it will become and the easier it will be to say it without hesitating. Language learning is all about training the electrical paths memory of your brain, just as muscle memory works for physical activities.

British Cabinet Minister David Raffo asks to see the file the British Secret Service MI5 kept on him when he was a student radical in late 1960s Britain. Immediately he receives threatening emails signed by The Joker. The closer he gets to unmasking the identities of the informers who spied on him in the past, the more threatening the emails from The Joker become. He realises there is a traitor in MI5 who is desperate not to be flushed out. The minister's flat is broken into, an MI5 agent is murdered and Raffo fears for the safety of his research assistant, Anna Farrow. The answer must lie in the then Czechoslovakia where Raffo led a British student delegation shortly before the Russian invasion to snuff out the Prague Spring. The dramatic end game, revealing cynical CIA involvement, is played out in the beautiful but dangerous city of Prague with tragic consequences for the informers and the agents.

In this third course book in the Learn French series I explore in more detail how you can use positive self marking to analyse and increase the quality and accuracy of the language you produce. In short, how to be more stylish. I also show you how to use self marking to create a sophisticated feedback report on your personal progress, which will in turn will help you to make even further progress.