If you want to improve your French while you're on the go, this can assist a bit.
Ubisoft has decided to lay some foundational work on the portable scene around this area to see if anyone would bite. I don't know the sales figures but I know I can't find My Spanish Coach at the local Future Shop or the Toys R Us so they either didn't ship out enough or people are buying them.
With that said, the game is really unique obviously because most games are about just having fun, either it be mindless or accidentally educational. This game is trying to be educational first while attempting to be fun second so you have to bare that in mind as you go through the program.
My French Coach is basically a beginner's introduction into the French World. When you start it up, it recommends using headphones because there is a lot of audio and I would as well because it's much more clear.
After you start a profile, the game will introduce a few words to match to see how much French you know. If you score low, they start at the beginning lessons but if you score higher, you skip some lessons. You can always go back and learn those lessons so it's not a problem if you thought they overshot your French abilities.
The game revolves around minigames. Most of it is vocabulary based. One minigame revolves you hitting gophers or moles or some sort of subterranean mammal. It says for you to hit the ones that say "Germany." So you have to use the stylus and hit all the ones that are "Allemagne". If you get a certain percentage, I think it's sixty of seventy percent, than you improve your mastery for the word. They'll throw about 10 words at you each lesson and there's about 160 lessons in the whole game so there is a lot of vocabulary.
There are many other minigames such as memory with cards on the table and Bridge Builder which I found to be the most effective. You have to build a sentence in French. This allows you to understand things in sentences instead of words. The problem I found with the game was it was very much vocabulary based so if you wanted to actually converse with someone in French, you might have a lot of vocabulary down pat, but you wouldn't be able to string any sentences together because the syntax is not exactly the same as English.
Another problem I had was that they would introduce some words in games such as Bridge Builder without ever introducing them before. I myself had a heck of a time figuring which word meant park in French since I had never got to it but they threw it at me anyways like I had already been through it.
The game does have a dictionary so you could go back and reference but that seems a little odd to me that the game would do that.
One cool thing about the game is the use of the mic. Each word is said aloud in French and you can listen to it over and over again or slow it down if you wish. The neatest thing is the ability for you to record what you're saying and then compare it to what the recording was like, then you can also play them both at the same time to see if how close alike they are. This is one of the very useful features the game has. Learning to speak a language requires that you can emulate some sounds from others to see if your tones are right or if there is inflection. Since no one around me speaks French, the mic and recording utility gives me a chance to emulate some words more closely to how it would be said.
If you're not in the mood for constant lessons, you can always just play the minigames. More and more unlock as you progress higher through the game so that's really nice. Some of the games don't really reinforce a lot of things other than vocabulary so I have to stress this again. Bridge builder has the problem of having only set sentences so sometimes, there aren't any sentences around the lesson you may be learning at the moment. You want to learn about time through that mini game, tough luck because there are no sentences in that lesson!
The game also tracks your progress but how accurate it is, is debatable. It also has some sayings in there that you can emulate through the mic if you decide to visit some place that is French supposedly.
One of the things that really irritated me about the game was the minigames. Some of them were great but what really made it lackluster was the fact that you could not choose a minigame and choose lessons to focus on. I had a weakness on some numbers and directions. If I wanted to play the memory game, I might want to focus on just those two lessons, it doesn't give me a choice. I can only choose between mastered words which are all the lessons except for the current one, or open, which is all words.
The game's music is definitely cheerful and some people may find it really kiddish but you can always turn down or off the music so it's not a problem. There's sounds here and there like when you build the bridge or when you spell the word correctly that lets you know you did a good or poor job.
Graphically, the game is pretty simple. There are a lot of pictures that probably could have been done on the Sega Genesis but the game is about that. There are no times where the lack of graphical prowess impacts your ability to learn nor the enjoyment from the game.
Overall, the game is a simple game. It's for beginners so it doesn't cover past tense and all those other goodies that advanced learners may want to learn. If you've already taken a year or two in French, this game probably isn't for you unless you want a version of a talking dictionary to use but for the most of us who want to learn some French in a fun, portable, gaming fashion, this is a fine choice. Note, also your only choice =)