Today I came across the book Kill the French by Vincent Serrano Guerra in a list of recommendations on Amazon and thought I would have a look. It appears to follow similar principles to others that do strict vocabulary control, pioneered by Michael West in the early years of the 20th century: restrict to cognates, introduce frequently occurring words first, include repetition, and slowly build up the assumed vocabulary. The author has also followed the principle of spaced repetition with the goal that readers will retain vocabulary at optimum levels. So how does it compare to other books and comics that do the same thing? Let’s have a look.

I have analysed approximately the first 100 words, which covers the Day 1 text and the title of the Day 2 text. According to Style, it has an average sentence length of 8.8 words and an average word length of 4.3. Word lengths don’t really tell us much for French, since longer words tend to often be easy for those with an English-speaking background. Sentence lengths do, however, have a stronger impact on readability.

Other stats on the sample: vocabulary is 45 words out of 95 words of text, making a vocabulary density (type-token ratio) of 0.47. Naturally the author has made heavy use of cognates. Some of these are exact cognates, such as “lion”, and in other cases they are more challenging without context, such as “musée”. If we assume that all cognates are known, then the assumed vocabulary size for 95% coverage is 41 (when words are ranked in general frequency order), which is an excellent achievement. The only books in my collection that achieve that level or better are:

So from the perspective of readability in French for people with an English-speaking background, I put it at the same level as Gnomeville 3 initially, as they both have similar sentence lengths as well as vocabulary coverage.

Unfortunately, like many graded readers out there, the text of Kill the French is quite dull. I checked the 18th day in the sample to see if it was more interesting, having gained extra vocabulary. Sadly, no. I can’t comment on the final stories in the book, which may be more interesting, since I have only examined the sample.

So, here is my conclusion. If you are an absolute beginner in French and are a huge fan of spaced repetition-based learning and willing to put up with texts that are mildly interesting at best, then this is an excellent graded reader for getting you to become familiar with the 500 most frequent French words efficiently. It certainly beats just memorising vocabulary in isolation. The Gnomeville comics may be more exciting and fun, but unfortunately they currently only take you to a frequent vocabulary of about 30, until the author gets cracking with the rest of the series. Perhaps the best approach at this stage is to use both together.

The first day of Kill the French uses frequent words that are introduced in Gnomeville Episodes 1 to 3. All except “avec” are introduced in the first two episodes. Day 2 introduces two words occurring in Episode 1, one from Episode 2, and one that doesn’t feature in the Gnomeville series yet, since it is far less frequent in text. Gnomeville‘s first two episodes introduce the twenty most frequent words occurring in French newspapers, which is a slightly different frequency profile to spoken language, and somewhat different to other text corpora. Kill the French introduces words in an order that doesn’t resemble any specific corpus frequency list but they are still frequent words. For example, the second day includes the word “aussi”, which in movie vocabulary ranks about 91, in books at 78, and in the Minnesota spoken corpus, at 79. But, it is still a frequent word, and I know from personal experience that being a bit flexible about the order of introduced words makes it easier to produce a coherent story.

Given that the order of word introduction varies enough that words will be introduced in one book and not the other, it doesn’t really matter too much which you read first. You could, for example, read Day 1, then reward yourself with Episode 1, then after Day 2, do the same with Episode 2. Day 3 is where the two texts diverge the most in terms of vocabulary, but there is still overlap. After that, you are stuck with Kill the French. But at some point you might be able to switch to Première Étape: Basic French Readings: Alternate Series by Otto Bond (published 1937), if you can locate a copy. According to my stats the expected vocabulary works out to 316, but it is another principled graded reader, using cognates, frequent words, and slowly adding new words as you read. It’s also an entertaining read. However, from memory, it does use more difficult tenses typically found in French literature right from the start, so can be challenging grammatically. The average sentence length is also quite long, making it potentially daunting.

In summary, I recommend using Kill the French in the following manner: for the first three days, read the day’s material and follow it with an episode of Gnomeville. After that, if you can keep going with the spaced repetition from Kill the French for about 100 days, you then might be able to start reading Première Étape: Basic French Readings: Alternate Series, which is interesting right from the start with an initial vocabulary of 97 frequent words and Si Nous Lisions, which starts being interesting from Chapter 6 with a vocabulary of about 100 words. Best of luck!