Tag Archives: book-review

Publishers of Graded Readers in French

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I thought I would put links to the publishers I’m aware of who sell graded readers in French. As usual, some have disappeared, but some still exist.

Wayside Publishing have some beginner readers that work well for those with an English speaking background. They have strict vocabulary control, using a very small vocabulary, lots of French-English cognates, and repetition. The smallest vocabulary, in Édi l’elephant, is 55 words in a text of 2100 words.

TPRS Books also has a range of books that follow the same approach of small vocabularies and much repetition, with some using base vocabularies below 100 in size.

CLE International have over 300 graded readers, some targeting specific age groups, and covering levels from A1 to B2. Their rebranded Lectures Découverte series (was Collection Découverte) are generally easier than A2 readers from other publishers (and other series) in my experience and their A1.1 stories are very easy compared to those typically labelled A1. I’m slightly frustrated that vocabulary sizes are no longer published, since they are quite relevant to the person reading, if not for the person assessing language level.

CIDEB also have a good range of graded readers (in multiple languages).

Editions Maison des Langues have a small range of graded readers. I get the feeling that they used to have more, since I’m sure I have read some that are not listed on this page. I have read and enjoyed the Alex Leroc series and various other books. From memory the A2 offerings felt more difficult than the CIDEB ones of the same level.

ELI have materials in multiple languages, and publish some beginner books that claim to be based on 100 words of vocabulary. I have a few of their books. The children’s A1 books are much easier than their adult A1 books, which I found quite challenging (in German). Note that if you are learning multiple languages, some of these stories are published in additional languages.

Hachette have their LFF range of graded readers, going from A1 to B2. It looks that they currently sell via specific distributors in different countries. I’ve read some of their A1 Albert et Folio books, which are easy A1 stories. I think the adolescent A1 stories are slightly harder. I’ve also read some of the A2 stories for adolescents. The B1 stories start to use passé simple.

Didier have a small collection of graded readers from A1 to B2. I’ve read Victor Hugo habite chez moi, which was pretty cute from memory. The Didier website is pretty horrible to navigate though.

The Danish company Egmont has their Easy Readers, which are stories that have been adapted to learners. They are available via Languages Direct, who also sell readers from other publishers. Teen Readers is also published by Egmont. You can buy some books online at Amazon and elsewhere.

Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press used to have graded reader series suited to those with an English-speaking background. Some may be findable in the secondhand market.

National Textbook Company also seems to have disappeared, sadly. They had some beginner and intermediate level readers that were quite good.

In addition to these major publishing houses, there are independent authors publishing stories for people learning French. I have links to representative works in my list of French graded readers.

A Personal Rating of French Novel Readability

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Lately I’ve been reading a range of books in French and thought I’d keep track of how difficult each was. My categories are: comfortable enough, difficult but the story kept me reading, difficult and I wasn’t motivated to continue. The decision to not continue was often made in the first two pages, and may not reflect the difficulty of the remainder of the book. For context, I passed B1 years ago with 23.5/25 for Compréhension Ecrite, and I’ve continued to read sporadically since, with a burst this year thanks to access to French books in Libby. Here goes…

Easy enoughToo hard but I kept readingToo hard and I gave up
Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamilloAmari et le Bureau des affaires surnaturelles by B.B. AlstonMaigret by George Simenon
Motel Calivista
(translated to Canadian French from English)
and
Les Trois Clés by Kelly Yang		Arsène Lupin (inspired by watching the TV series)
Love and Gelato by Jenna Evans WelchThe Sun is also a Star by Nicola Yoon
Repartir by Gordon KormanDragon Mountain by Katie and Kevin Tsang
Sabotage by Sigmund BrouwerLes Penderwick by Jeanne Birdsall.
Nish tome 1 by Isabelle Picard. I mainly put it here because of the québecois phrases, which are fine once you know what they mean. “Pis” is short for “puis” and is used pretty much like “and”.
La fabuleuse histoire de cinq orphelins inadoptable by Hana Tooke. This feels much harder than several of the above books.
M. Lemoncello by Chris Grabenstein. (I initially had this in the difficult and gave up category but have since read it.)
As-tu peur du loup ? by Véronique Drouin. (I initially had this in the difficult and gave up category but have since read it.)
Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat. This felt much harder than some of the others above.
Idéalis by Christopher Paolini. I really should give up on this book as it is way beyond my current level, and I have looked up more words than I normally allow. On the plus side, if you want science fiction vocabulary, you’ll find it in abundance here.

I will continue to update this page, since I think it will be useful for those wanting to choose books written for native speakers that are achievable. But what you should read depends on your current level.

For beginners, I recommend French comics written for language learners, followed by easy stories written for language learners (I like the Collection Découverte series by CLE International) and some very easy picture books for young children.

For early intermediate, look at stories written for language learners and start to explore comic books for native speakers of French based on your personal interests. There are a wide range to choose from.

The next phase is a mix of stories written for language learners and books written for middle grades. The J’aime Lire publications vary in how easy they are for a person with an English-speaking background to understand. Children’s novels translated from English to French are generally slightly easier than those that were originally written in French. If you have a favourite novel that you know well, reading it in French will be easier than reading a story that you don’t know well. Many people seem to like this approach but I prefer to read new things.

Penultimately, read novels for an adult audience. Again, translations will probably be easier on average than books originally written in French. Another approach is called “narrow reading”, where you focus on a single author or genre, so that you benefit from the larger percentage of vocabulary shared across books.

Finally, if it was your goal, try tackling the classic novels you are interested in, like Les Misérables.

(Page includes Amazon Affiliate links.)

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.