On Thursday, Gnomeville Episode 1 will be available for free for 5 days.

What is Gnomeville Episode 1? It is arguably the easiest first read for people with an English-speaking background wanting to learn French. It achieves this by using a comic book format, exploiting the thousands of words that are the same in French and English (cognates), and introducing one new word per page. By starting with the most frequently occurring words, you will quickly know a larger proportion of the words in any French text than if the words you learn are of some random frequency. For example, in English, the word “the” makes up about 7% of any English text. This skewed distribution is similar in every language.

That’s all very well, but for it to be useful for learning, what you read has to be interesting. The main comic story is an all-ages fantasy story about a mage, a couple of gnomes, a human and a griffon going on a quest to capture a rogue dragon. The style is a cross between smurfs, Astérix, and Uncle Scrooge comics, with a slight artistic influence from Mr Men. The first episode relies a little on sight gags until more text is possible. I have seen people chuckle as they read the comic.

In addition to the main story that introduces the vocabulary, there is:

• A revision story that ensures that you see the vocabulary enough times for it to become more familiar.
• A crossword for extra reading and active use of the vocabulary.
• A song
• An extra easy story about a taxi driver.

Episode 1 has over 300 words of reading in a 28-page comic book, introducing 12 frequent words and many French-English cognates.

As you progress through the series, your receptive vocabulary gets larger, the stories get more complex, and the text length per comic increases (Episode 2: 700 words; Episode 3: 1200 words; Episode 4: 1800 words). The recommended reading rate for complete beginners is one comic per day for the first three episodes and optionally two days for Episode 4. Then, if you are still interested in reading to improve your French, try some of the books on this Amazon store specialising in beginner reading books for French learners or books from Wayside Publishing or TPRS, and build from there.

Meanwhile, you can try Episode 1 for free from Thursday to Monday. Save the date!