Tag Archives: French comprehensible input

Gnomeville Comics are Easier than I Thought

18 April, 2026My Comic Books, Research, Resources, My Publicationscomics, comprehensible input, easy french, Easy French comics, education, extensive reading, French, French comics, French comprehensible input, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, readability, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

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.

Episode	Old Expected Vocab Size	New Expected Vocab Size	New Readability Score
1	25	3	2.20
2	16	14	3.23
3	40	17	3.83
4		15	3.66

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.

Review: Le Français par la méthode nature

16 April, 2026Resources, Reviewscomprehensible input, easy french, extensive reading, French, French comprehensible input, french graded readers, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, vocabularySandra Bogerd

I’ve seen this book by Arthur M. Jensen mentioned a few times and I thought it was worth a look, given its philosophy. This book, which was originally published in 1958 (and still in copyright, according to the death+70 rule), is a reading-based introduction to French, with the pronunciation of the text in IPA under each line. The text is quite mundane and repetititve, but the repetition is intentional to allow the language to be acquired by reading. Things get a little more interesting after a dozen or so chapters. A similar approach is used in several (relatively entertaining) stories in French, such as those by Wayside Publishing and TPRS, in addition to other languages. It is also used for an engaging story in Old English called Osweald Bera.

Jensen’s book makes no assumption about the learner’s first language. There are no glosses or definitions in another language. There are pictures to illustrate nouns that are introduced and names of characters talked about. This makes it a good choice for those with a language background that is not English, since many books assume English (or another common European language). It may be less useful for those who have no prior exposure to the Roman alphabet. That would need to be learnt first.

I ran my usual analysis on the first approximately 100 words and confirmed that based on my measures, it is easy French. Its type-token ratio (measure of repetition and learnability from text) is the lowest I have found so far, meaning there is a high chance of learning the vocabulary when reading the text. Its overall score, encompassing expected vocabulary at 95% coverage and sentence length (assuming that the text above and below the pictures on the first page, such as “une fille”, were sentences) was 4.84, making it the 7th easiest in my small table of the readability of French texts for learners.

One weakness of the text is that it is a bit old-fashioned. A lot of the conversation examples are not how people speak nowadays. Also, some of the words are more what would be read rather than spoken, such as “demeurer”, which I only come across in texts, whereas to my knowledge, “habiter” has been the most common verb to use for decades.

Ayan Academy has audio of many chapters on Youtube. This can be useful simple audio comprehensible input.

In summary, its strengths are that there is no assumption of first language, it is comprehensive, and there is a high chance of learning the language from reading due to its high level of repetitivness. Its weaknesses are it is dull and dated.

Gnomeville Episode 4 Soon to be Released!

26 March, 2026My Comic Books, My Publicationscomics, comprehensible input, easy french, extensive reading, French, french comics for beginners, French comprehensible input, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

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!