+1
Pretty much my “go to” dictionary. the online Collins French-English is useful as well, though I am using the online Larousse more as my French gets a bit better
Amongst other dictionaries…I’ve a little 1973 version of Larousse… A6 size… fits in my bag… 
Can’t beat that 
My oldest and most thumbed French dictionary is a 1990 Collins-Robert French-English tomb that I bought when I had a misguided attempt at French A’ Level.
My oldest French textbook is an extremely tattered copy of this one
which I bought in '76 or '77. I still reckon that if I knew all the French in there I would be considerably better at the language than I am.
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It’s all good fun… keeps the little grey cells active… 
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Aha… which year David…??? Wonderful piece of nostalgia…
That’s in amazing nick compared with mine
I did French O level when I was 12 along with Latin Scripture and Maths and I can’t remember what book we used 
actually I’m not sure I was persona grata in French lessons, I have a feeling I was just called on to read dictations out loud.
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The book is 1976.
It’s not bad. Lack of use? I looked for my secondary school French course books on the internet but they are selling for about £60 for each level. I will give that a miss then and concentrate on the collection I already own.
I did O level in 1977! And I lied, I wasn’t 12 I was 13, now I come to think of it. It was my first year at that school.
I do remember Kennedy’s Latin Primer and A New Approach to Latin.
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That was a prodigious performance, Véronique. I bet you put the wind up some of your teachers!
I started learning French in my first year at a Birmingham grammar school for boys, age 11, in 1949. We were given a pile of brand new text books each, and I remember the sense of enormous excitement that produced in me at the time. Our teacher was an energetic and rather flamboyant man, with a strange accent. His surname was Coultas, which is unusual, and its origin I never knew. He was a good teacher, but stern and he had no disciplinary problems. I recall that he drove an open-topped sports car to work, very unusual just after the war.
We got a new French textbook each year with the same binding but a different colour. I loved French but never mastered rolling my rs until late adolescence, when I suddenly got the knack! But we didn’t learn French conversation, we just had dictation and reading from the texts, cat-on-the-mat and la-bonne-est-dans-le-salon stuff.
But I am immensely grateful that I learned French grammar and how to form sentences all those 69 years ago, they have stood me in good stead now.
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I still have my Kennedy’s Latin Primer, and I used it to teach myself Latin to gain an O level, having opted for German in year 2, when the option was German or Latin.
The Latin came in handy as it helped me gain a place at Kings College to read medicine, but had to leave after a year as I was self-funding, had to work in a saw-mill on Kingsland Road Stoke Newington to earn enough to rent a room and buy food, but nearly died of exhaustion and malnutrition in the process. 
I passed my 11 plus and gained my place in “an all girls school” then next thing the year below me became mixed boys and girls…!
My mom and dad moved out of the area and at my next school I was rapidly graded top of my class in French but then I rapidly failed my French o’level with a grade D…
I never thought about it again until moving here several years ago…
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Going over our past and joining the (seeming) dots is part vanity exercise and part coming-to-terms with the past, as it is reconstructed in our imagination. I have few illusions about mine, but have some empathy with the child I was, and how vulnerable and alone, even with caring parents, however vulnerable and helpless they were too, and how alone despite the institution of marriage which convention caught them in, and the experience of world war.
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Despite Mr Butler’s efforts I got a “C” at O’ Level. I never really understood what the language was about, how it worked etc - I still struggle to be honest.
Sciences - no problem - but language does not follow logic so I am stumped.
Somehow though I was left with a lifelong determination to learn the bloomin’ language properly and I’m still trying.
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Goodness that is grim 
I took 2 years out between school and Cambridge and went to university in Germany, I wanted to be old enough to go to the pub. I worked in the long vac which funded everything quite well.
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I was speaking recently with a French fellow I met in a local bar (my second visit in three years), who told me he left school at 14 and never learned English, not a word, but regrets it.
But he said communication is essential and, with commitment and good-will, it is possible by gesture, guesswork, and mime. From your inputs to SFN, Paul, you seem richly endowed with the traits and human skills to be a roaring success in French and in France. If I’m wrong I’m a Chinaman.
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I should blush at your kind words.
I’m getting better at French but have a long way to go.
I’m better at communicating online though, than in person. A lot of non verbal stuff still wizzes by about a foot above my head and if it is possible to get the wrong end of the stick I probably will.
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Eng Lang was the ‘only’ GCE, I achieved, to much time spent going into the Lakes, climbing etc, instead of going to School, but English was so easy, I think perhaps, though Mam and Dad were no way, ‘Posh’, but, they spoke well, so the grammer etc was just, ‘natural’ 
The rest of the GCE’s were a catastrophe, but it all ‘panned out’ fine, good apprenticeship, led to an interesting, life 
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