I remember sitting at the back of my French lessons in school, eating sandwiches and annoying David Smith in the seat in front by flicking his ear whenever he was trying to concentrate. It’s not that I was a bad kid or that I didn’t normally work hard in my lessons. It’s just that French was such a constant bore. I spent my entire senior school career attempting to learn the damn language, but never getting beyond being able to say “good morning” or asking for a Coke.

Fast-forward a few years and I made several other attempts to get up to speed with a foreign language, using Rosetta Stone mostly. I’d heard such good things about their teaching methods. Instead of forcing you to associate French words with English ones, they show you pictures to allow you to associate the “thing” rather than the word. Which kind of makes sense; it’s how we learn our native tongue in the first place. But I never managed to stick at it. I think it’s because it was too long and too samey. And you learned absolutely useless phrases. At what point am I ever going to need to say “the boy is under the aeroplane” in German, unless I’m at Stuttgart Airport and there happens to be a runway incident involving an aircraft and a small child?

So it put me off learning a language. I felt that it was simply beyond me and that no amount of teaching was ever going to resolve this problem. That was until I stood in Waterstone’s yesterday and found myself drawn to Collins French with Paul Noble. I’m not sure what it was that made me pick it up. I wasn’t even in the market for a new French course; I was simply having a wander and killing some time.

Whilst standing there I did what I always do when buying a book or a DVD; I scanned the barcode with my phone to look at the price on Amazon! They didn’t seem to have any in stock, which was a shame as they would ordinarily be cheaper than the £50 price tag on the back of the box in Waterstone’s. But what Amazon did have was a long list of near-perfect reviews stating just how incredible this course was. I was intrigued to say the least and was about to head over to the counter before stopping, taking my phone back out and just having a sneaky little check on iTunes. £16.95. Obviously, I put the box down and headed to the nearest coffee shop with wireless access to download it.

And the verdict? After just an hour on the course I now feel I know more about the French language than during all of my schooling. Paul Noble doesn’t just try to teach a long list of vocabulary, but to let you into the little secrets which will make learning French so much easier. Within half an hour I learned I already knew 1250 French words, as well as how to use them in the past and present tense. I know how to ask questions, place food and drink orders, make hotel reservations (checking at the same time whether it’s romantic), and how I can use a basic sentence structure to do so much more than I realised I ever could. And I have almost 12 hours of course still to go. Perhaps that makes this review a little premature, but I’m confident enough after just an hour to know that the rest of the course can only help me get better and better.

I don’t want to give anything else away, but it’s the best French course I’ve experienced by far. I think that Paul Noble is, quite frankly, a linguistic genius who teaches in a way that really helps things stick. And it’s all listening and speaking; there is no writing at all during the course to confuse you.

If you’re thinking of learning French yourself, I don’t think you can possibly go wrong with this.