Tag Archives: language acquisition

Extensive Listening

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Mostly I have focused on extensive reading, both in my research and practice. This is obvious from my DELF results, where listening, and especially speaking, were much worse than my reading and writing results in French. To build skill in listening requires suitable comprehensible input. There are various podcast and youtube channels that are recommended. Some have beginner content, others intermediate, and others cater to multiple skill levels. Partly for my own benefit and partly as a resource for others, I thought I’d list those I have found out about.

I should also mention that if something is too hard to comprehend because of the speed, you can always slow it down. If it is too hard because you are unfamiliar with most of the words, it is best to start with something easier and/or do more reading first. (Also, if it is too easy, you can speed it up).

Beginner channels.

There are also a few easy songs you can listen to (based on repetitiousness and vocabulary size).

Intermediate channels

For the intermediate channels, you may need to have developed your vocabulary a bit more via extensive reading with graded readers and the like.

At the intermediate level, the innerfrench.com is the most recommended. It starts slowly and has many episodes, which generally become gradually more difficult, apart from a few exceptions. There are some interesting topics amongst the series.

Another that has some interesting comprehensible content is Français avec Fluidité. There is an A2+ playlist (start here) as well as various interesting topic playlists. I feel as though it is slightly more difficult than the innerfrench podcasts but still quite comprehensible for an intermediate.

Little Talk in Slow French is beginner-intermediate level but has some words translated into English during the podcast.

Lingua.com has recordings that are labelled with CEFR competence levels, from A1 to B2, with questions to test your comprehension. They also have resources for other languages.

Excerpt of sheet music for the song La Mission by Uitdenbogerd

The Easiest Songs in French

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Someone recently asked whether there were any A0 songs in French for improving listening skills. There may be some learner songs. I wrote a few to go with my comic books but they are optimised for reading, not listening.

So what would be the criteria for easy songs? I think that the easiest would have a very small set of words and be repetitive. Where two songs equate in vocabulary and repetition, perhaps the one with the easiest grammar or the most standard expressions would be ranked easier.

I cannot comment on whether there are any easy popular songs. Most have extensive lyrics, with only the chorus being repetitive. However, in the collection of children’s songs (comptines) and folk songs, several can be found. Some were printed in my old Horan and Wheeler textbooks. Others I have found elsewhere. Given the above criteria, here is my list and a rough sequence of difficulty based on vocabulary size; type-token ratio, which captures repetitiveness; and a grammar scale. Beginners will probably want to read the lyrics for the first few listens.

SongVocabulary SizeLyrics LengthType Token RatioGrammar LevelMeasure
Bonsoir mes amis3210.14300.06
Savez-vous planter les choux ?191180.16110.23
Frère Jacques7140.50010.25
Sur le pont d’Avignon231300.17710.27
Alouette13960.13530.28
Quand trois poules14290.48310.29
Dansons la capucine
(or more seriously)		26910.28610.32
J’ai mangé un croissant10200.50010.32
Au petit pas militaire12390.3130.33
J’ai mangé un croissant remix19560.33930.39
Didi et Dada32720.44410.41
J’ai du bon tabac341110.30630.48
La mission33480.68810.49
Au clair de la lune701330.52640.86

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

A Tale of Three Three Musketeers and Another One or Two

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No, that is not a typo in my title. Thanks to my recent obsession with this novel, leading to the Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers book, with a second on the way, I thought I’d look at three different abridged versions of Les Trois Mousquetaires. I have one published by CLE International, who, in the copy I have, state that it is for a vocabulary of 700 words, at the top level of the Niveau 1. New editions call that CEFR level A1. I also borrowed the CIDEB version, which is aimed at B1, with no mention of vocabulary size, as is common in current publications. When looking online at Mousquetaires books, I found another one adapted by Frédéric de Lavenne de Choulot (FLC).

One thing I’ve noticed with these, as with the recent movies, is that writers select different scenes to include in their version. CLE and FLC both include d’Artagnan’s anger at being ridiculed for riding an old nag. Both the recent movies and CIDEB chose to exclude that scene. The movies also took many more liberties with the story.

OK, now to details…

The CLE version

The CLE version, which aims for a vocabulary of 700 words, has a text length of about 10,000 words of story. It is written in present tense, and the volume includes a brief biography of Dumas, vocabulary support, and some short questions at the end of the book, with solutions. The books of this series provide two types of vocabulary support: general vocabulary is defined in French in a footnote, whereas words that are specific to the story, such as épée, are listed at the back. There are several ink illustrations throughout the 64-page book. (I notice the new edition has new greyscale images.)

On my simple readability score, based on a sample of the first 115 words, it gets 13.15, due to long sentences in the introduction. The expected vocabulary size for 95% coverage is estimated to be 7,427 (based on types, not word families).

The CIDEB version

CIDEB always include lots of additional material, such as many exercises, images, and additional articles to read that are related to the story. The book is 128 pages long, with less than half of that being for the story. I estimate it to have about 13,000 words of story. In addition there is an imaginary interview with Dumas, historical information about the period, and information about movies made of the story. The vocabulary support is provided as footnotes in French.

The story itself is written in passé simple. Based on a sample of 125 words at the start of the story, it gets a score of 8.71, also having a vocabulary size score of 7,427 and an average sentence length of 12.1.

The FLC version

The caveat for this review is that I have only looked at the sample. Therefore I do not know what additional material may be found in the book. There appears to be some vocabulary support, though I cannot say what form it takes, since I have only looked at the sample, which doesn’t allow the links to be followed. I am uncertain why certain words were selected for vocabulary support. Given the target audience appearing to be English-speakers, I would think it pointless to define “armes” and “crient”, but perhaps some nuance was discussed about these words. I noted one minor typo, a missing circumflex on the “i” of “boîte”. That’s not a big issue, given that I’ve seen many errors in books published by major publishing houses (and have been guilty of a couple in my published papers and comics).

The text is in present tense and received 8.18 on my readability measure, with a lower sentence length in the sample of 113 words analysed. The expected vocabulary size at 95% is 5,010.

Summary and Another Mousquetaire

Based on my simple measure, the FLC book comes out in front as the easiest, but there’s not much in it. I might add that the original only scored 12.3 in a short sample from the introduction, due to many low frequency cognates giving it an expected vocabulary size of only 5,543. All three books are simpler than the original in some way, and based on my reading, they are all engaging. All are a similar length in terms of story at 10-16 thousand words. The readability score of the original does highlight a potential problem that happens in graded readers that are not catering for a specific language pair. A different, higher general frequency word may replace a low frequency French-English cognate, making the resulting text harder, not easier for someone with an English-speaking background (although it can help an English-speaker get more experience of those higher frequency words). I have noticed in the past that some vocabulary support is more difficult than the word being defined, due to its similarity to an English word.

Both the CLE and FLC are very much reading-focused, whereas CIDEB tends to turn each story into a bunch of lessons, which, while often interesting and useful, get in the way of reading the story. Depending on my mood, I’ll either skip all the extra material and read the story, potentially going back to read the extra things later, or I’ll look through the extra material as I go. The one activity that I do find useful and make use of in CIDEB books is the pre-chapter vocabulary activities. My favourites are the mix and match vocabulary to images. This is great for people with different vocabulary backgrounds, as there will be some words you know, and others that you can puzzle through, based on the images and the other words to be matched. The activities help increase familiarity with the words, which appear in the chapter to follow.

I have another musketeer story in my collection, not written by Dumas. It is L’autre mousquetaire by Rupert Besley, illustrated by Bob Moulder. This is from the Mary Glasgow Bibliobus set of books, which are no longer in print. It is a short comic about Pathos, a musketeer wannabe. I’ve noticed several phrases in it that come up frequently in the original book, as determined by my bootstrapping algorithm: parbleu! bah! diable ! morbleu ! pardieu ! These words don’t come up so much in the adapted versions, since they are not “useful” language and are mostly dated, but they are an essential part of the character of the original novel. Something to look forward to if you decide to tackle it.

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

Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers

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Those who have visited my blog this year will know that I have put up some “filtered French”, such as a list of the most common one-word sentences in French classic literature, and sentences that fit the highly constrained vocabulary of my comic books. After musing on language acquisition, in particular how babies learn, not to mention our experience of picking up a few words and phrases in a foreign language by ear, I thought I’d try a different approach. This has resulted in producing a book (with more volumes to come) where I filter Les trois mousquetaires, and add vocabulary one word at a time based on which word will complete the most sentences. Using a combination of manual and automatic filtering, I have created extracts that have sufficient repetition in their vocabulary for people to become familiar with the words.

It has been fascinating to see what happens as I add each new word. The algorithm tends to find dialogue first, gradually increasing in average sentence length, then short non-dialogue sentences – after the 93rd word of vocabulary was added.

Anyway, if you’d like to have a look, it’s on Amazon, with a substantial preview.

(Affiliate links in this post.)

French Novels Recommended to Learners of French

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At some point learners of French should tackle novels in French that are written for native speakers. However, they vary considerably in difficulty. I thought I’d keep a list of those I’ve seen recommended. At some point I’ll add a readability score, as modelled for learners of French with an English-speaking background.

Several others are listed at https://www.private-frenchlessons-paris.com/blog/10-books-for-french-learners.

Novels that are translations from English to French are often easier than those originally written in French, but it is definitely not always the case.

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Common One-Word Sentences in French, Revisited

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I’ve been playing with my scripts lately, filtering French. Previously I have published a list of the top one-word sentences in a corpus of French classic texts, as well as my lists of very easy extracts, based on the language repertoire covered by my Gnomeville comics. Today, while waiting for my very inefficient scripts to finish processing my old download of the French texts from Project Gutenberg, I revisited the frequent one-word sentences. I decided to keep the exclamation marks and question marks this time, so it is clear whether something is being used as a question or not. Here is what is coming up so far…

  1. Ah !
  2. Oh !
  3. Eh !
  4. Hélas !
  5. Oui.
  6. Non !
  7. Non.
  8. Oui !
  9. Comment !
  10. Quoi !
  11. Bah !
  12. <name>. (most likely names of characters in a play, the first one being Bonaparte.)
  13. Pourquoi ?
  14. Bon !
  15. etc. (probably an artifact of how things were processed)
  16. Allons !
  17. Ha !
  18. Tiens !
  19. Hé !
  20. Moi.

There’s quite a bit in common with the previous list of one-word sentences. The exclamations that showed in the previous list (Diable ! Parbleu !) still occur in the top 30, so there isn’t a lot of change despite the much larger corpus. I suspect further changes to be quite minor as the processed corpus grows.

The Book Flood Study

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In 1983, Elly and Mangubhai published their influential study that compared reading high interest stories to ordinary language instruction and found that there was considerable improvement in reading comprehension and other measures in the two reading-based groups compared to the language instruction group.

I’ve been reminded recently that the paper is behind a paywall, so I thought I would produce a few figures from it here and highlight some of the aspects of the study.

The study participants were primary school students in Fiji, who normally received instruction in their native Fijian for the first three years, switching to English in Class 4.

Here are the residual gains for each Class 4 group (300 students from 12 primary schools) and each type of assessment. The shared book group experienced the teacher reading aloud, sharing the story in an enlarged format, with students joining in to read easier sections, and doing story-related activities. The silent reading group read books of their own choice for 20-30 minutes a day. The control group did the normal curriculum (SPC/Tate audio-lingual program).

Another table showed that the gains a year later, continuing with the same reading activities, were even greater. The results were improved for exam marks in other subjects, including maths.

The Second Easiest Series of Books in French

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At last I’ve found them. The books that can be read after Gnomeville.

As those who have been following my blog or buying my comics know, my comics start from a vocabulary of zero French but an English speaking background. Episode 1 introduces twelve very frequent words (with over 300 words of text); Episode 2 adds the remaining eight of the top twenty words occurring in French newspapers (while giving over 700 words of text to read); Episode 3 adds nine more frequent words (with 1200 words of text) and Episode 4 (yet to be released) adds ten more (in 1800 words of text). This makes a total of 39 frequently occurring words. In addition, the comic uses many French-English cognates to make entertaining stories.

While I’m sure that the books I’ve found don’t restrict themselves to frequent words, they do start with a very small vocabulary and include repetition to allow the vocabulary to be acquired easily. The book with the smallest, at 55 words, in an illustrated text of 2100 words, is Edi l’éléphant. From there you can go to Les abeilles exploratrice at 88 words, then Émeraude, le bébé tortue, at 90 words. From there you can go to Brandon Brown dit la verité (95), Brandon Brown veut un chien (104), Brandon Brown à la conquête de Québec (165), and Obsession dangereuse (200). Some of the “Novice Mid” books have smaller vocabularies than these but use past tense.

I’ve now had a chance to look at a couple of sample chapters of two of the books. I can say there is definitely a narrative, but the low vocabulary in many words of text mean that there is quite a bit of repetition. This is great for acquiring vocabulary, but if you already have this vocabulary, you will probably want to choose something a little more challenging.

Picture Books for Beginners in French

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A while back, while reading what I could (which is not very much) in Japanese, I noticed that once you knew the writing system, you could immediately read some picture books that are just illustrated dictionaries, as long as there is a direct correspondence between the text and the image. With this in mind, I thought I would compile a list of picture books that beginners in French can read right now. While I don’t have any that completely fall into that category, I have some that are easy for those who have the vocabulary of Episode 2 of the “I can’t believe I’m reading French” Gnomeville comic book series, being the 20 most frequently occurring words in French newspapers.

As the Gnomeville comic book series focuses on frequent words, which tend to be function words, learners don’t get exposed to common concrete nouns, adjectives and verbs, which tend to be much lower down the word frequency list. However, research suggests that concrete nouns are easier to learn and remember than function words. So, it might be valuable to read picture books in parallel with the comics. I don’t think it is worth memorising what you read, but with repeated exposure – especially with pictures – the words will become familiar.

With all that preamble out of the way, here is my list. I only have a few items so far, but will add any I find later. The episode numbers indicate the assumed vocabulary, where the only words that are not within that vocabulary are clearly defined by the illustrations. Where there is an asterisk (*) after the episode number, it means you need an additional word or two for complete coverage.

TitleAuthorLenghRead After EpisodeComments
Un chatRoger Paré110w2This short book adds a new item to the picture with each page. Annoyingly, it appears to be out of print, but if you access Libby via your library, you might be able to read it there.
Un éléphantRoger Paré110w2This short book adds a new item to the picture with each page. Annoyingly, it appears to be out of print, but if you access Libby via your library, you might be able to read it there.
Le vertAnna C. Peterson31w1*This short book introduces various items that are green. You could read this after Episode 1, assuming you recognise the cognate couleur and note that cet means “this”. Once again, this is not available on-line, but can probably be read via Libby, which is where I found it.
The rest of the series uses a bit more vocabulary but would be easy for those who have studied French for a few weeks.
Une maisonAnnette Smith24w1*This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the nouns. All you need for this one is un, une, and voici (here is).
De grosse chosesAnnette Smith34w1*This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the nouns. All you need for this one is un, une, est, and gros/grosse (big). The title includes “choses”, meaning “things”.
MamanAnnette Smith16w1*This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the verbs. All you need to know is that “maman” means mum/mom.
Les animauxAnnette Smith35w2*This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the nouns. All you need for this one is le, la, l’, les, est, d’, and ici (here). The title includes the cognate “animaux” (animals).
MoiAnnette Smith16w3This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the verbs. All you need for this one is je. The title means “me”.
Je me déguiseAnnette Smith32w3*This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the nouns. All you need for this one is je, un, and suis (am). The title means “I disguise myself”.
Nous sortonsAnnette Smith39w4*This is a level 1 book in the GB+ nouveaux lecteurs series. The pictures illustrate the nouns. All you need for this one is nous, à, la, au, de, l’, and allons (go). The title means “We go out.”

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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.