My Knowledge Base

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One (Premium Second Edition)

5 min read

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One

Source type: Textbook (print/eBook) Editor: Annie Heminway Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education Year: 2018 (Premium Second Edition) ISBN (eBook): 978-1-26-012104-9 | ISBN (print): 978-1-26-012103-2 Length: 37 chapters + 4 appendices + answer key (approx. 650+ pages)

Overview

Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One is a consolidation of seven standalone McGraw-Hill titles distilled into a single comprehensive reference and workbook for french-language-learning. The book is aimed at learners at intermediate and above levels who want a systematic map of the “Empire of the French language,” as the preface describes it. It is exercise-heavy throughout, with every concept reinforced by drills drawn from everyday written and spoken French.

The second premium edition adds streaming audio recordings via the McGraw-Hill Education Language Lab App (mhlanguagelab.com) covering answers to numerous exercises, supporting both listening comprehension and pronunciation development.

Structure and Scope

The 37 chapters are organised roughly as seven thematic “provinces,” reflecting the seven source titles:

Part 1 — Nouns and Articles (Ch 1–4)

  • Chapter 1 — Articles: Definite (le, la, l’, les), indefinite (un, une, des), and partitive (du, de la, de l’) articles; contraction with à and de.
  • Chapter 2 — Basic Gender Endings: Rules for assigning masculine/feminine to nouns based on endings and semantic class.
  • Chapter 3 — More French Nouns and Their Gender: Exceptions, dual-gender nouns, detection strategies from contextual clues.
  • Chapter 4 — Numbers: Cardinal, ordinal, arithmetic, and idiomatic numerical expressions.

Part 2 — Vocabulary (Ch 5)

  • Chapter 5 — Thematic Vocabulary: Topics include thoughts, feelings, communication, home, travel, science, leisure, and technology. Vocabulary is structured thematically to exploit semantic clustering.

Part 3 — Sentence Building and Syntax (Ch 6–9)

  • Chapter 6 — Building Sentences: Subject–verb–object structure, negation, word order.
  • Chapter 7 — Asking Questions: Inversion, est-ce que, intonation questions, interrogative pronouns.
  • Chapter 8 — Exclamations and Commands: Imperative forms and interjections.
  • Chapter 9 — Independent and Subordinate Clauses: Relative, noun, and adverbial clauses; connectors.

Part 4 — Present-Tense Verbs (Ch 10–12)

  • Chapter 10 — Present Tense of -er Verbs: Regular conjugation, spelling-change verbs.
  • Chapter 11 — Present of -ir and -re Verbs: Regular and common irregular verbs.
  • Chapter 12 — être, avoir, and Irregular Verbs: The core irregular verbs essential for all compound tenses.

Part 5 — Other Tenses and Moods (Ch 13–25)

This is the largest section of the book, covering the full range of french-verb-tenses:

  • Ch 13 — Immediate future (aller + infinitive), immediate past (venir de + infinitive), causative (faire + infinitive).
  • Ch 14 — Pronominal (reflexive/reciprocal) verbs.
  • Ch 15 — Passé composé (with avoir and être).
  • Ch 16 — Imparfait and plus-que-parfait (pluperfect).
  • Ch 17 — Simple future and future perfect.
  • Ch 18 — Present conditional and past conditional.
  • Ch 19 — Could, Should, Would? — practical disambiguation of modal meanings.
  • Ch 20 — Present and past french-subjunctive.
  • Ch 21 — french-prepositions — the most extensive single chapter; classified by meaning and by the verbs/adjectives that govern them.
  • Ch 22 — Infinitive mood.
  • Ch 23 — Imperative mood.
  • Ch 24 — Present participle and gerund (en + participle).
  • Ch 25 — Simple past (passé simple), passive voice, indirect speech.

Part 6 — Pronouns (Ch 26–27)

  • Chapter 26 — Pronouns: Personal, object, disjunctive, and y/en; order rules when two pronouns co-occur.
  • Chapter 27 — Relative Pronouns: qui, que, dont, où, and compound relatives.

Part 7 — Adjectives and Adverbs (Ch 28–29)

  • Agreement rules, position, comparison (comparatives and superlatives).

Part 8 — Written French (Ch 30)

  • Transition phrases, formal correspondence, cohesion devices.

Part 9 — Conversation and Advanced Usage (Ch 31–37)

  • Verb transfers and confusing verb pairs (Ch 31).
  • French oddities: whatever, whenever, wherever constructions and prepositional fun (Ch 32).
  • Conversation modules: Meeting people (Ch 33), Making plans (Ch 34), Current events (Ch 35), Asking for help (Ch 36).
  • A taste of French literature (Ch 37) — literary excerpts for reading comprehension.

Appendices

  • Appendix A — French pronunciation guide.
  • Appendix B — Grammatical terminology for verbs.
  • Appendix C — French verb tables (conjugation reference).
  • Appendix D — French–English / English–French glossary.
  • Answer key and translations.

Key Pedagogical Approach

  1. Distillation model — Content selected from seven specialist volumes; each chapter focuses on a discrete grammar or vocabulary domain.
  2. Exercise density — Every concept is immediately drilled; exercises range from mechanical fill-in-the-blank to open-ended sentence construction.
  3. Audio integration — Premium edition pairs with mcgraw-hill-education’s Language Lab App for pronunciation modelling.
  4. Contextual anchoring — Examples and exercises use real-life situations (travel, daily discourse) to ground abstract rules.

Relevance to Knowledge Base

This source is the primary reference for french-grammar, french-verb-tenses, french-noun-gender, french-prepositions, and french-language-learning concept pages. It covers cefr-language-levels implicitly (content spans A2 through B2+). The book’s breadth makes it a benchmark for cross-referencing with other French methodology sources such as unknown-edito-a1-methode-de-francais.

Entities Mentioned

Graph View

Backlinks