Features:  

Instant Immersion French offers a comprehensive progress tracking system that records your scores on every exercise. This is useful for identifying weaknesses in your learning. Instant Immersion also offers a variety of exercises and tasks using images, video and audio instructions. We found this very effective and believe it will play to the strengths of many different learning styles.

We especially enjoyed how interactive the program is. Each disc allows you to pick from a few options as to what you want to learn next. You are not constricted by a streamlined program; variation is allowed. As well, after every level there is a game, which we found to be a fun way to practice what you’ve learned.

Instant Immersion also comes with lessons for a mobile device or MP3 player, which makes it possible to learn even when you are away from your computer. However, we were extremely disappointed that Instant Immersion did not come with online testing and online chat with a native speaker like our top rated product.

Fundamentals:  

This program does a great job of covering the basics. Things like vocabulary and grammar are hit hard in the first few lessons. Instant Immersion also provides audio and video instruction in French to enhance listening comprehension. We especially like the speech recognition system available with Instant Immersion. It allows you to practice punctuation and accent by comparing what you’re saying to that of the native speaker on the program.

This program comes in three levels, two discs per level. The first level is where you’ll get the basics. Flash card style teaching, accompanied by games and other interactive tasks, allow you to practice common French words and phrases. The second level begins to incorporate French phrases and dialogue. The third level adds onto this with more advanced phrases and dialogue.

Our only beef with this program is that it doesn’t have the most in-depth descriptions of sentence structure.

Ease of Use:  

Instant Immersion is a very easy program to install, but learning to use it is another story. The software comes in a nine disc set, and although we love all the information it provides, it’s annoying trying to disc swap all the time just to get from one level to another. Most of the nine discs are also formatted differently, which means you have to learn how to navigate through each one individually. This being said, once we figured all that out, it really was a breeze to use.