Tag Archives: comics

Different Ways of Beginning with Graded Reading

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There isn’t really just one way of starting out with reading in a language that you want to learn. Through my observations and reflections, I have found the following different approaches for absolute beginners and near beginners.

  • All new words are illustrated. This can be a book that is like an illustrated dictionary, such as some board books I have read. Alternatively, it can be like Le Français par la méthode nature, where new words are slowly added and the text slowly becomes more complicated.
  • Assume exact cognates (words with similar appearance and meaning) to give a starting pool of vocabulary, then introduce new words gradually. This is the approach in Gnomeville. Unlike the previous option, this one requires an assumption about the first language of the learner. But the benefit is a greater starting vocabulary, allowing for more interesting content. It only works well with related language pairs, like French and English.
  • Small vocabulary stories with much repetition. This is the TPRS/Wayside publishing approach, and it’s valuable for absorbing language thanks to the repetition. These also tend to use cognates, which mean there is an assumption about the first language of the learner.
  • Parallel texts. Some people are really keen on these. It can be like your own personal Rosetta Stone (the stone, not the app), which can be fun – especially where there is a different writing system. I think these are most useful where the text in the language being learnt isn’t too hard, so that the translation is just used to check things occasionally.
  • Reading a story you know well in your first language. This is a bit like using parallel texts. I think it is too difficult for starting out but some people like to intensively read (that is, slowly, with translation and lookups of unfamiliar words) a favourite book rather than fluently read something easier. The argument against the approach is that very little text is read per minute, reducing the opportunity to be exposed to more text.
  • Bootstrapping a text. This is an idea that I have explored a few times. The idea is to filter a book’s sentences based on difficulty, starting with the easiest sentences and gradually adding more complex sentences and vocabulary. Finally, you read the full book. My earlier experiments with this idea were not successful. My current version is “Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers“, which starts with mostly one-word sentences consisting of names, interjections and a few cognates, and slowly builds vocabulary. As more is added, the book snippets get a bit longer, being either multiple sentences or longer sentences. The bootstrap book is organised like a form of spaced repetition, where new words occur several times in the chapters. So far, the extracts are not long enough to allow people to deduce the meaning of words through context, so there are short (5-8 word) glossaries at the start of each chapter.
  • Another approach that has been used on occasion is to start a story in the person’s main language and slowly add more of the target language words, resulting in a mixture of both languages. I have seen this done to teach Chinese characters in a story written in English. I’ve also read a paper on the approach being applied to English-German. In a way it is not too different to the Gnomeville method of adding a new word periodically, in a cognate-rich text, except in Gnomeville you are reading the target language immediately. For more distant languages, such as Chinese and English, the approach is necessarily different.
  • Related to the previous idea, it might be possible to have text that is in the learner’s main language but structured according to the target language. This might only work where there is enough similarity or simplicity in the target language. For example, you could have sentences like “I it to him have given”, to provide the flow of the language but with fully understandable vocabulary. Then, as for the other graded readers that incrementally increase their difficulty, words could be switched from main language to target language.

Is there a best approach? The research emphasises that time spent reading and interest in what you are reading are the most important factors. As for level of difficulty, the optimal is considered to be 95-98% knowledge of the vocabulary in the text. But there is quite a spread for this across individuals. The main factor seems to be whether you are comfortable with the amount you don’t know, and are happy inferring meaning despite not knowing the definition of some words. It is a skill worth developing. I think we have it as children and lose it at some point, and then need to regain the skill for language learning. Certainly my recollection in childhood was of happily reading comics in Dutch without knowing the meaning of every word. Then a couple of decades later, being frustrated that there were so many words I didn’t know in Dutch children’s books. I’m now back to reading books without stressing about unknown words in Dutch, French and German. For other languages, I still need beginner material.

Book cover with musketeer holding a boot, saying "Diable !"

Repetition in Graded Readers

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There is a class of graded readers that make much use of repetition in order to give learners the best chance of picking up vocabulary via their reading. This is the approach used by TPRS, Wayside Publishing, and the Old English book Osweald Bera. On re-reading Otto Bond’s Sept d’un Coup, published in 1936, I noticed that a similar technique was used, albeit more subtly, so it is not a new idea.

My observation of reading books with lots of repetition is that on the first read this is fine and helpful, but on rereading it becomes extra tedious. If things get too dull, the learner won’t engage. It occurs to me that my approach in the Gnomeville comics saves people from rereading unless they really want to, via their design.

The first couple of episodes of Gnomeville are moderately repetitive, in that they are not the most repetitive French graded readers around (Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers is the most repetitive I know of, followed by Le français par la methode nature, followed by Édi l’élephant), but they are more repetitive than other books, based on analyses of the first roughly 100 words. I try to ensure at least five occurrences of each new vocabulary word in the comic but I don’t force it into the Gnomeville story. Instead, I have a separate story (La Question du Moment), which uses any words that haven’t had enough repetition yet. Then the following episode has a revision page at the start, which recaps the story so far, using all the vocabulary and grammar used so far. Learners can read this and decide whether they are familiar with everything or need to revisit the previous episode. When revisiting, learners can skip La Question with all its repetition and just reread the Gnomeville story. Or they can use some other method of checking the words that are still unfamiliar.

When rereading the first few chapters of Osweald Bera, which I do periodically because I only dip into the book occasionally in my world of many demands, commitments and distractions, I have been wishing for a summary for each chapter, which summarises the story so far and includes all the vocabulary I should have picked up from it without the additional repetition. I consider it my “homework” to create this for my own use. For languages like French, Italian, German and Spanish, there are quite a few options for reading material, so it is probably better to read something else instead of trying to reread these often long, verbose, repetitive books. For Old English, however, Osweald is the only reader of its kind, so rereading is likely to be inevitable.

Gnomeville Comics are Easier than I Thought

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On reviewing my readability measure results for various items in my collection, I suddenly thought, “hang on, how can the expected vocabulary size for Gnomeville Episode 1 be 25 when only 12 very frequent words are introduced?” Clearly something had gone wrong somewhere.

I blame the fact that part of my analysis is manual, and I probably didn’t follow the procedure very well. I run various scripts to produce a ranked list of words in the text in the frequency order of a large corpus of written French (mostly from Project Gutenberg). The manual bit is counting up cognates, or at least starting at the least frequent word end and counting up until I find 5% of the words that are not cognates or names. I think I went astray previously by having a less reliable process.

Results can differ depending on decisions that are made, such as whether to include titles (which I treat as sentences), the “Présentation” section that has brief notes about each character, and what is counted as a cognate. It is reasonably clear-cut for Gnomeville, but for other texts, it is less clear. Should “habiter” be considered a cognate due to its similarity to “inhabit”? And there are other words that are cognates in the linguistic sense but not particularly obvious from a learner perspective. The choice of general frequency list will also make a difference. Spoken text has different characteristics to written text, especially in French. Also, the very frequent words used for Episode 1 and 2 are the 20 most frequent in French newspapers, which is not the same set of words as any other corpus of text. The text I use for calculating expected vocabulary size has some of those words at lower ranks (“se” at 25, “au” at 31, and “on” at 40), which explains why there was the potential for the expected vocabulary size to be larger than the number of words introduced. But unless those words made up about 5% of the extract it was unlikely they would receive those scores.

Anyway, on revisiting my incorrect assessments of the Gnomeville episodes, I have the following updated vocabulary sizes.

EpisodeOld Expected Vocab SizeNew Expected Vocab SizeNew Readability Score
12532.20
216143.23
340173.83
4153.66

You may notice that Episode 4 has a lower expected vocabulary size at 95% and a lower readability score than Episode 3. There’s not a lot in it, but Episode 3 had longer sentences in the extract.

Well, there you are. Gnomeville’s expected vocabulary size is much smaller than originally calculated – at least for Episodes 1 and 3.

Gnomeville Episode 4 Soon to be Released!

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Slowly (6 years!) but surely, my next comic for learners of French has been completed! I am holding a launch party for it on Sunday, where attendees will hear the Gnomeville songs performed, and have the opportunity to buy the comics at greatly reduced prices. Then, the physical comics will appear in the Square store, and not too much later, I intend to publish the ebook “wide”, as they call it, meaning it will be available from Kobo, Apple, and other ebook platforms. I intend to make Episodes 1 to 3 available in a bundle format for the platforms that haven’t had the comics before. So, more work to do. But first, we have the launch on Sunday!

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 1-4. 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 (up to 70 words in the first set) 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. My favourite is “Fichez-moi la paix !”
    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.

A fun web comic that isn’t too hard is Pepper & Carrot.

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 1 June, 2026. Now with affiliate links again (2025).)