Instant Immersion French Reviewer's Comments

Instant Immersion French Deluxe, by TOPICS Entertainment, is a complete French learning package. The Instant Immersion program is actually a version of the #1 product, Tell Me More, but you also receive an audio CD course, an interactive DVD and a mystery game to help you learn more.

Unfortunately, the additional programs don’t really add value. It just gives you more discs to swap in and out of your computer. While the main French learning program is quite useful, the Instant Immersion package doesn’t include the online testing and online chat that made Tell Me More so useful. TOPICS Entertainment also has one of the worst customer support systems that we encountered in this review. These problems, coupled with the lack of ease of use, dragged down what could have been a top-3 program.

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Features:  

Instant Immersion Deluxe 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 comes with lessons for a mobile device or MP3 player, which makes it possible to learn even when you are away from your computer.

Fundamentals:  

All the fundamentals are covered well in Instant Immersion. There are specific exercises to practice vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension and conversations. Instant Immersion also inherited the useful speech recognition system from Tell Me More that allows you to get practice and evaluate your accent.

Ease of Use:  

Instant Immersion only gets average scores in Ease of Use because all the CDs result in a lot of disc swapping if you want to take advantage of all the resources in the box. The main program itself is fairly easy to use, but many of the icons are nearly transparent, making it hard to see then and tell what options you have.

Teaching Tools:  

There are many ways of learning with Instant Immersion. The program uses image-word association along with audio from native speakers to help you learn words. But much of the teaching also uses traditional textbook-type entries. The culture lessons are useful, and the included mystery game is great for practicing listening comprehension. One of the most glaring omissions is the lack of online testing and online chat with native speakers that makes it easy to reinforce what you have learned.

The speech recognition system in Instant Immersion is a definite strength, though. With it you can test your pronunciation and get feedback on how to make more accurate sounds. You can also use the speech recognition function to engage in conversations in certain sections of the lessons.

Word Tools:  

Instant Immersion has a useful glossary and reference section that can help you find words. A translator tool can also help you if you get stuck during some exercises.

Tech Support/Help:  

TOPICS Entertainment has poor customer support resources. There is a sort of FAQ on the website that is much more difficult to use than normal FAQs because you have to log your questions. There is also an email support option, but we found the responses to be slow and not very helpful.

Summary:  

Instant Immersion has a lot of extra programs and even a game, but it doesn’t improve the overall value of the product. The cheaper price remains the only reason to buy Instant Immersion over the top 3 products.