With this program, listening and repeating individual words, I was able to really improve my pronunciation. In particular ""Le Renard"" fixed my R pronuciation once and for all! Some French people recently told me they never would have picked me as an anglophone on the back of that r pronunciation. It was of fairly limited value otherwise, but then I have found all tools work best as part of a toolbox and none provide everything.

I used the free version of BYKI for a couple of weeks, with Laura's Mot-du-Jour lists and with the vendor's lists, and liked it enough to buy the full version so I could make my own. The authors do a good job of progressively exposing you to a new word, asking you translate back and forth in your head, and finally having you write it out. Every time you see the word in French, it is pronounced (the MdJ lists don't have audio however), so you get to associate the sound with the written word. I can replay the audio file easily to listen for nuances, but I wish there were a way to slow down the playback for more careful analysis. There is an audio analysis feature with waveforms, that I haven't played with yet. It does not score the student's pronunciation as Auralog products do, but that's not a big issue in my opinion. I was very pleased to see how easy it is to load a text-based vocabulary list into the program (only the full version). That is a huge feature to me. This makes it useful for general purpose studying, not just language. Flash cards are best used for words that have equivalents in the target language, and not so useful for things like conjunctions and prepositions, for instance, where the usage is different in each language. BYKI is no different in this regard. The forum member who transcribed the MdJ lists discovered a weakness in the vendor lists, namely the gender of the noun. He chose to use blue for masculine (unmarked) and red for feminine (marked) nouns. In BYKI's lists, all nouns are preceded by the definite article, so all the noun entries of necessity start with l, and often have no gender information at all (l'avion). I like this program. I like the free lists, and I like the ability to easily customize my own lists.

I went for the download of the free software ""Before You Know It."" It downloaded for over 2 hours and then came up with ""Download Failed."" Needless to say I won't try it again and would caution anyone else trying it that they might run into the same problem.