Category Archives: Resources

Resources for language learning and for producing language learning resources

A tale of three French picture books: passé simple is not that hard!

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One of the weird things about studying French is that we seem to have three levels:

  • Beginners use present tense, imperatives, infinitives, and future proche;
  • Intermediate learners use passé composé, imparfait, future and conditional tenses
  • Advanced learners use passé simple and subjonctif

Yet, if we look at picture books written for French children, many use passé simple straight off.

I remember when I started reading (in English) in Grade 1 of primary school, one thing I had to get used to was constructs like “said Dora”. It doesn’t happen in spoken English, so felt a little weird. But it wasn’t overly difficult. Perhaps people from English-speaking backgrounds who had stories read to them would have been familiar with that already before reading it. The same thing must be true for French children reading or hearing passé simple. It’s a little different but not hard.

I recently read three French picture books. The first (Le Grand Antonio by Élise Gravel) was a fairly easy one with few words, written in present tense. The second (Quel est mon superpouvoir? by Aviaq Johnston) was a translation from English, written in passé simple (and imparfait). It was a comfortable read for me. The third (Dounia by Marya Zarif) was (mostly) written in present tense but was more difficult due to its vocabulary and more descriptive text. It is obvious to me that it is possible for texts in passé simple to be easier than those in the easiest tenses.

The thing is, you don’t need to know how to conjugate passé simple to read it. You just need to recognise the endings of third person singular (3ps) and plural (3pp) for regular verbs plus know a few of the irregular verbs. Here they are.

For -er verbs, 3ps ends in -a and 3pp ends in -èrent.
For -ir and -re verbs, 3ps ends in -it and 3pp in -irent.
You may come across a few -oir verbs, which have -ut and -urent.

The main irregular verbs to watch out for are:

être: fut, furent
faire: fit, firent
avoir: eut, eurent

The regular ones should not pose any problems. The avoir ones are recognisable thanks to already knowing the past participle of avoir (eu). The main difficulty is not mixing up the être and faire words. A simple rule is that faire has an ‘i’ in it, and so does its passé simple conjugation.

I hope that helps. It helps me.

French Comic for Beginners Video

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A slide show of panels from Episodes 1 to 3 of my Gnomeville comic for beginners learning French with an English-speaking background is now up on Youtube, accompanying the song of the third episode. Note that there are spoilers, if you are wanting to wait until you’ve read the comics.

Beginner French Resources

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tldr: Easy French sentences from classics here.

Years ago I was tinkering with creating my beginner comic book in French, and then researching what made things easy to read in French for those with English speaking background. I learnt that the two main aspects that characterise text difficulty are grammar and vocabulary, with other aspects usually having a much smaller role to play. Through my own research, inspired by my own frustration and anecdotal experience, I learnt that for French the typical readability measures that use word length or even how common a word is for vocabulary difficulty just don’t work for people with English speaking backgrounds. This is because so many of the longer “difficult” words in French are identical to those in English, or close enough not to matter. My experiment demonstrated that you may as well just use sentence length to decide on difficulty, being the simplest measure of grammatical complexity. Despite this, vocabulary matters. It’s just that the words that are difficult are differently distributed than for languages that don’t have this peculiar French-English relationship.

In another of my experiments, I tried to filter a large collection of French text to find extracts that are easy for English speakers. While the extracts that are very easy are not long, they do exist. It’s a matter of playing around with the constraints to get something sizeable. It should also be noted that the text I used consists of French classics, which can be challenging to read. Anyway, it’s been a while since I looked at this. The other day I created a page on this site that contains all the sentences and extracts I found that restrict themselves to the vocabulary and grammar of Episode 1 of my comic book, (le, la, les, de, du, des, et, est, se, que, and present tense third person singular of -er verbs) plus cognates and names. I hope it is useful. More to come.

It’s not too late for your free beginner French comic from Amazon

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Episode 2 of the Gnomeville beginner French comic book series is still available for free on Amazon until Friday. Episode 1 is still discounted on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in a countdown deal that increases every couple of days. I hope you enjoy it!

Freebie French Beginner Comic ebook Soon

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Just a heads up. On Monday 17th March, Episode 2 of the Gnomeville beginner French comic book series will be available for free on Amazon for five days. Episode 1 will also be available at the minimum 0.99 price on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk in a countdown deal that increases every couple of days. Mark the date in your calendar!

Excerpt from Episode 2 of Gnomeville: Dragon! – a series of comic books written in French for beginners with an English speaking background. Episode 2 only assumes that you know the following words that are covered in Episode 1: le, la, les, et, est, de, du, des, un, une, que, se. The story so far is summarised on the first page of Episode 2.

Comic Books versus Text-Only Books for Language Learning

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Recently I have been reading a few comics in French, mainly by French-Canadian authors, or translated by them. The target audience for most of them is children and young adults. It had me thinking again about how best to grade comics in terms of difficulty.

My experience in attempting to read various Japanese books for children or learners showed me that it is possible to read a picture book that is really just an illustrated vocabulary without knowing any of the words beforehand. At the other extreme, it is theoretically possible to read everything in a parallel text, since the translation is right there to refer to, just very slow if every sentence needs to be analysed. That is known as “intensive reading”, which has been shown to be less useful than “extensive reading” for language acquisition. Complete glosses similarly make it possible to read a text without prior knowledge of the language, albeit with lots of interruptions to look things up.

Translations and glosses aside, a comic book will be easier than its text presented without illustration, since the illustrations provide clues to what is happening. It is also easier than text describing the same scenes provided by illustrations – a point that was made elsewhere in favour of learning language from comic books. In other words, “a picture paints a thousand words”.

In general, there is more dialogue and less descriptive text in comics, compared to novels, so the sentences are shorter on average. (This also applies to scripts of plays.) In addition, the pictures give clues as to what the text is about. A further benefit is that it often provides more examples of speech than would be found in a novel – or at least, as a proportion of the text read. This can be useful for absorbing speech patterns, particularly for people who are not exposed to much speech directly.

While the shorter average sentence length means that comic book text will generally be scored as easier than text from novels by readability measures, I think that a measure of difficulty of a comic may need to consider whether concrete nouns are illustrated when used. For example, a picture containing a wild boar with the text clearly indicating that it is “un sanglier” could be almost as easy as reading a French-English cognate, such as “village”. Or perhaps it is roughly equivalent to having a gloss entry, albeit introduced in the story instead of in a footnote.

Either way, comic books should be easier to read than books that have no illustrations. See my list of easy comic books in French for some that are a good starting point for beginners.

French Comics for Beginners

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Most pages I’ve seen that try to answer the question “What are the best French comics for beginners?” only include comics written for native speakers. That is fine, and it is easier to follow a francophone comic than a novel, thanks to the pictures. However, if Astérix is still beyond you, there are easier alternatives to start with.

Based on the principles of extensive reading, you want comics where you know the meaning of 95-98% of the words you read, to read fluently, enjoy what you’re reading, and gain language capability from exposure to lots of text. Of course, you also need to enjoy what you’re reading to benefit from it, so if something doesn’t appeal to you, it would be better to find something else to read.

Materials written for native speakers of French will have much richer vocabularies and grammatical constructions than those written for learners. If you want to start on something written for you the learner, rather than a francophone, here are a few options to look at.

  1. Gnomeville episodes 1-3. These assume no knowledge of French and tell an entertaining tale about gnomes, a griffon and a mage going on a quest to capture a dragon. The focus is on introducing the most frequent words in French while using cognates (words that are the same in both languages, in this case, English and French) and pictures to make the story entertaining. Suits ages 8 and above. Available from Amazon as ebook or on Square as a physical comic book.
  2. Various offerings from My Generation of Polyglots. I’ve only looked at the sample of the graphic novel, which is of Chapter 7. It is more like a picture book in format than comic book/bande dessinée. The language is very simple and every word has a translation at the bottom of the page. There is only a small amount of text on each page, so it has a high picture to text ratio, making it a comfortable beginner book, despite it being a 110-page text. If the sample chapter is anything to go by, each chapter is a complete story. There are other comic books available at the website too. The language level seems to be tied to school levels 1 and 2. The stories appear to suit young adolescents. Definitely worth a look for beginners who want to read in French.
  3. languagecomics.com have a series of comics published on-line that are written for learners. There are a few available for free to try out and the rest can be accessed via a subscription. Episodes are a page or two long, with links for difficult words, as well as other resources. These also appear to be targeted at adolescent learners of French. Definitely worth trying if you find comics for native speakers daunting.
  4. Luc et Sophie. These are beginner comics, suited to 7-11 year olds who are learning French. I found them a bit annoying, but if you like young sibling rivalry antics, they may suit you. Vocabulary is found at the back of each short comic. If you feel daunted by long texts and want to feel a sense of achievement at finishing something, these very short comics will be an ideal start.
  5. Mary Glasgow’s Bibliobus books and others. Unfortunately these are out of print, but if you can get them (I scored a few second hand, and also borrowed some via inter-library loan), they are reasonably easy to read. Some are quite entertaining, while others are a little contrived or annoying. The contrivedness disappears as you go up the levels, as the authors have more freedom to express themselves. My favourites are Le chapeau rouge and Le gangster et le chat. Note that Bibliobus is also the name of a series of French books for French children, so make sure you are getting what you expect.
  6. The Lire Davantage series published by Heinemann has a comic book format for many of the books. As with the Glasgow ones, some are entertaining, while others are a bit dull or contrived. Yet others are informative non-fiction. I believe these are also out of print, but seem to be available secondhand. Probably suits ages 10+.
  7. There are a few textbooks that include a comic book format story in each lesson. Ça Bouge by Michael Sedunary is one of these, aimed at young adolescents and is fairly entertaining.
  8. ELI publish a magazine for learners of various ages/levels. Each issue of series Voilà (young children), C’est facile (A1-A2), Môme (A2-B1), and Jeunes (B1-B2), contain comics. If the format hasn’t changed since I last grabbed copies, it is two pages of comic in a 16-page magazine. The rest is filled with activities, quizzes, and articles.
  9. Aquila Communications have comics/bandes dessinnées for beginners to intermediate. Normally they only sell to schools but they might agree to sell to an individual if you contact them directly. Either way, you can read some pages from some books on the website for practice and to get an idea of what they’re like. I don’t have their comics but have enjoyed some of their books for low-intermediate to intermediate in the past.

It’s all down to how comfortable you feel with the language you don’t know. If you are confident, then dive straight into the classics: Lucky Luke, Tintin and Astérix. Then venture beyond those based on your tastes or language goals. But if they are still at your frustration level, start with those that are written for beginners and work your way up.

Once you are confident enough to read comics written for native speakers, it is worth having a look at those available to read for free from comicbookplus.com. I haven’t looked at many yet but the Baby Journal might be easier given it is aimed at children. The comics have ratings, which may make choosing easier. Le Fanchon de Soeur Bourgeoys dramatises a bit of history from the early days of Québec.

Note to authors of French comic books for learners: if I haven’t got your offerings on my list, please let me know. I’d be very happy to add them.

(Last updated 26th April, 2024. Now with affiliate links again (2025).)

Japanese language resources

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I thought I’d share Theo’s post on Japanese language study. It has a great list of resources and tips for learning Japanese based on his experience. He is producing a game for learning hiragana and katakana, which should be released this year. I’m looking forward to it, since I could do with improving my katakana recognition. Apparently the game is sufficiently entertaining that even native Japanese speakers enjoy it. This is similar to my goal with my Gnomeville comics for French.

Theo’s point about the limitations of using anime is a good one. Language is huge, and it is used in different ways in different situations. He has some great suggestions for alternative, more useful resources.

I agree with Theo’s comment about flash cards and Anki. There is a difference between knowing a word (learning) and using it (acquisition).  This is why focusing on the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking are important, with extensive reading being the way to get maximum comprehensible input, if done properly.

One additional resource I would mention for reading in Japanese at the early stages is the Tadoku extensive reading books. I use extensive reading principles in all the languages I learn. Japanese is the most challenging of these for me, since it has a different writing system to European languages. At my current beginner level I read level 0 and 1 of the Tadoku.org books (assumed vocabulary of 350 characters) with some difficulty, so really the books are just a little more difficult than the ideal for extensive reading, but I read them anyway. Fortunately the level 0 ones are designed so that you can follow most of the stories via the pictures, so can deduce what some of the words mean from context, especially where it is a retelling of a well-known fable or folk tale. I have a range of other books from Australian and New Zealand publishers that are easier, but less entertaining. To supplement this I have some Japanese children’s books (ehon). The Kimono Japanese textbook series for adolescents also has entertaining comics in each chapter, which can be used to supplement reading.

I certainly pick up vocabulary through the repetition of reading, despite not trying to translate everything. For example, the Tadoku books frequently use 言いました (iimashita = said), which I picked up through reading them, and the Level 0 books have several that are about daily life in Japan, providing essential phrases and cultural knowledge. The children’s picture books taught me animal names and noises, as well as some colours and expressions. Maybe they’re not as important for adults as other vocabulary, but they’re part of language nevertheless.

The best approach to extensive reading for vocabulary acquisition still isn’t clear, but it does improve language, and surprisingly, not just reading skill. One study found that it even improved speaking, more than some traditional methods of language teaching. Also, just 10 minutes per day pretty much guarantees at least some improvement, with more likely to be better. So keep reading, but don’t stress about unknown words or grammar. Look up meanings if you want to, as you will retain vocabulary better that way – especially if you try to guess the meaning first, but don’t let it slow down your reading too much.

German reading resources

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On my long to-do list is to not only write the Gnomeville beginner French comics, but to also write a series in German and another in Dutch, both for which I have some preliminary drafts. Meanwhile, I have found an excellent beginner comic in German by Janine Wolf-Schindler. The illustrations are crude but effective, the language simple, and there are translations discreetly placed at the bottom of the page. This is now my recommended first read in German. That may change when I find (or write) other resources, but it is a good start.

Learn German with a Comic. John in Berlin by Janine Wolf-Schindler.

I’ve yet to think about where this comic fits in the sequence of reading difficulty of available texts in German. There are ELI and La Spiga texts that are easy. After that there are teen readers, and various krimis. I’ll leave that analysis and discussion for another day.