I’ve seen this book by Arthur M. Jensen mentioned a few times and I thought it was worth a look, given its philosophy. This book, which was originally published in 1958 (and still in copyright according to the death+70 rule), is a reading-based introduction to French, with the pronunciation of the text in IPA under each line. The text is quite mundane and repetititve, but the repetition is intentional to allow the language to be acquired by reading. A similar approach is used in several (relatively entertaining) stories in French, such as those by Wayside Publishing and TPRS, in addition to other languages. It is also used for an engaging story in Old English called Osweald Bera.

Jensen’s book makes no assumption about the learner’s first language. There are no glosses or definitions in another language. There are pictures to illustrate nouns that are introduced and names of characters talked about. This makes it a good choice for those with a language background that is not English, since many books assume English (or another common European language). It may be less useful for those who have no prior exposure to the Roman alphabet. That would need to be learnt first.

I ran my usual analysis on the first approximately 100 words and confirmed that based on my measures, it is easy French. Its type-token ratio (measure of repetition and learnability from text) is the lowest I have found so far, meaning there is a high chance of learning the vocabulary when reading the text. Its overall score, encompassing expected vocabulary at 95% coverage and sentence length (assuming that the text above and below the pictures in the first chapter, such as “une fille”, were sentences) was 4.84, making it the 7th easiest in my small table of the readability of French texts for learners.

One weakness of the text is that it is a bit old-fashioned. A lot of the conversation examples are not how people speak nowadays. Also, some of the words are more what would be read rather than spoken, such as “demeurer”, which I only come across in old texts, whereas to my knowledge, “habiter” has been the most common verb to use for decades.

Ayan Academy has audio of many chapters on Youtube. This can be useful simple audio comprehensible input.

In summary, its strengths are that there is no assumption of first language, it is comprehensive, and there is a high chance of learning the language from reading due to its high level of repetitivness. Its weaknesses are it is dull and dated.