Tag Archives: language

Gnomeville Comics Now on eBay

14 April, 2018Current Offers, My Comic Bookscomic books, comics, easy readers, extensive reading, fantasy, French, French graded reader, French language, language, language acquisition, vocabularySandra Bogerd

I sold the first “I can’t believe I’m reading French” Gnomeville comic that I listed on ebay last week, and I’ve decided it’s worth putting my comics up there to provide somewhere for people to buy them easily until I move toward having my on-line shop. Currently sales are a little too low to warrant having a shop front, but it will come. So far I’ve sold about 20 comics, and given away 14 ebook issues, but things are on the increase.

Here are a couple of photos of a comic book page spread in Episodes 1 and 2.

This link should help you find Gnomeville comics on ebay at any time, though it may be the Australian ebay. I have, however, set up international sales for the comics. My Gnomeville Comics products page also lists the links, if you should need them late.

The ebooks of Gnomeville comics, including previews are available on Amazon.

Wordle

21 December, 2017Resources, Reviewslanguage, reading, text analysis, vocabularySandra Bogerd

I’ve been playing with Wordle recently. It creates word clouds, showing the most frequently occurring words in a given block of text after a set of stop words, such as “the”, are removed, with font size indicating the relative frequency of words. It’s a fancier version of the tag cloud. Here is a wordle for my blog.

They’re pretty good at giving an idea of what something is about. Perhaps they can also help the language learner.

Here is a wordle word cloud for Les Trois Mousquetaires.

This shows who are the main characters, and a few common words that don’t appear to have been excluded via the stop list. When no words are filtered, we get something like this.

Really it’s just a pretty word frequency list, and frequency is one consideration for deciding whether a word is worth learning. If you want to get some idea of what are the important words to know for a particular text and you have the text handy, Wordle is an aesthetically pleasing way to find out.

Free offer of Episode 1 on Kindle

17 October, 2017Current Offers, My Comic Booksbeginner french, comic books, comics, competitions, extensive reading, fantasy, free, free stuff, French easy reader, French graded reader, French language, French reader, graded readers, language, languagesSandra Bogerd

Episode 1 of beginner French comic Gnomeville, is currently available for free as a Kindle ebook. Write a positive review on either Amazon or Goodreads by Sunday 22nd October and get a free pdf of the crossword from the comic. The best review will receive a free narration audio file. https://www.amazon.com/Gnomeville-Episode-Introductions-Believe-Reading-ebook/dp/B01N5JGI7O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1508028141&sr=1-1

Get your download quick. Wednesday 18th is the last day (US time zone, I think).

Gnomeville Episode 2 Now Out on Amazon!

1 October, 2017My Comic Bookscomics, easy readers, extensive reading, fantasy, French, French language, graded readers, language, storiesSandra Bogerd

Only four months after its launch, Gnomeville: Dragon! Episode 2: Les Potions et les Pythons is available on Amazon as an ebook. Now you can read both Episode 1 and 2 and learn the 20 most frequently occurring words in French newspapers, as well as many English-French cognates.

In this episode, you meet Le Prince des Pythons, who lives in La Jungle des Pythons. Enjoy!

Bonjour Berthe! Charming Beginner French Stories

9 September, 2017Resources, Reviewschildren's literature, extensive reading, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, languages, vocabularySandra Bogerd

I recently bought a copy of Bonjour Berthe by Gwen Brookes, which is a beginner French reader aimed at young children. I found the book charming, and I believe it would appeal to children in early primary school.

The book is a soft cover pamphlet with glossy pages. There are 13 pages of story, with each page having a large illustration and 1-2 sentences. The font is large and the quantity of text is minimal, at approximately 80 words in total. The sentences are in present tense with simple structures. The vocabulary density is around 50%, which indicates enough repetition to allow some learning of vocabulary. However, the text is so short that the only words to get at least 5 appearances are “est” and “elle”, so many books would need to be read to provide learning purely from reading. Instead, the book includes activities (a wordsearch and a game) to improve vocabulary retention. All words are translated in a glossary at the end of the story.

If you are looking for books for early primary school aged children learning French, this series is a good choice.

Using Martine by Marlier for French Extensive Reading Practice

27 August, 2017My Comic Books, Resources, Reviewschildren's literature, comics, Dr Seuss, extensive reading, French, French language, language, language acquisition, language learning, stories, vocabularySandra Bogerd

The Martine series was recently recommended to me for children learning French. I managed to purchase a couple of books from the series from FNAC. My review is of course biased by my own preferences in reading (and writing), and clearly I am not in the 5-12 age range for whom they were recommended, but hopefully it will be useful nevertheless.

I read Martine à la ferme, which is one of about 60 books in the series, which tell the adventures of Martine, a young girl. This particular book is about Martine visiting a farm with her friend Lucie.

From a story perspective, there is no driving narrative. It’s just a bunch of twee pastoral scenes with text. It is beautifully presented, and for children who love animals and dream of interacting with them, it may be an enjoyable experience. I found it dull, however.

From a language perspective, the series can be quite useful. It is authentic French in present tense, so great for learners to get reading practice without getting bogged down in passé simple. Plus, with 60 volumes to go through, that’s a good amount of practice at the level of the books – if you enjoy the genre.

There are 18 pages of illustrated text to read in the book, with about 60 words per page, making approximately 1000 words per book. The vocabulary and language appear to be sufficiently generic to be useful, and easier than other French children’s books I have seen in that regard. Sentences are fairly straightforward, and rarely longer than 15 words in length.

Vocabulary will be the main difficulty for foreign language learners. A sample of the first ~130 words had a vocabulary of 94 (including names and apostrophe’d words as separate words), making a vocabulary density of ~72% (unique words divided by total words). To put this into context, here are some vocabulary densities on the first ~100 words of other texts.

Consuelo 76%
Le Petit Prince 74%
Minnesota spoken corpus 68%
Gnomeville Episode 3 (not yet released) 58%
The French Bible 52%
Gnomeville Episode 2 46%
Gnomeville episode 1 43%

Basically, any normal native French text is likely to have a vocabulary density of about 75% in a sample of ~100. (The density typically drops a little as the length of the text sample increases.) Conversation (eg. Minnesota corpus) seems to be lower, and translations may also be lower. To get lower than that requires stories that are intentionally written with a small vocabulary, such as the Gnomeville comics listed above, and some Dr Seuss stories (in English) – especially Green Eggs and Ham.

So, in summary, if you are after authentic French text that has easy grammar, then the Martine series will be very useful for those who enjoy the genre. The books are also fairly short, allowing children to feel a sense of achievement in finishing them sooner than for a longer work like Le Petit Prince. Personally I would prefer to read more books that are specifically written for language learners until my vocabulary was large enough to read books that are more entertaining. The J’Aime Lire series of books for French children is much more entertaining and written for the 7-11 age group. The difficulty of the text does vary quite a lot though, depending on the author, so expect to occasionally struggle or skip stories. My current recommended sequence for primary-aged children is:

Gnomeville series (for English-speaking background only)
Mary Glasgow series (English-speaking background)
EMC’s À l’aventure! Readers (English-speaking background)
Aquila’s readers (English-speaking)
CLE International’s Collection Découverte
La Spiga Grand Débutant series (150 word vocabulary)
ELI for children
Martine or J’Aime Lire books

These are not a strict reading sequence, since the various series overlap in levels of difficulty (except Gnomeville). There are other series out there, such as CIDEB, Edition Maison des Langues. There are more books for adolescents, such as Teen Readers, and the adolescent FLE series by Hachette.

I will publish more detailed up to date lists as I become aware of more books and series. Stay tuned.

Episode 2 on ebay

20 June, 2017My Comic Booksbusiness, comic books, comics, foreign languages, French language, language, language acquisition, languages, readability, readers, vocabularySandra Bogerd

I decided to put the physical version of episode 2 of my French comic book on ebay to see how that will go. Currently I just have a “seconds” small format there on auction with buyout price of $5. It has a slight mark on the inside back cover, but is otherwise in good shape. This is of the “launch edition”, which lacks the Catalogue in Print information, since that arrived after the launch date.

Here’s the link to buy episode 2 of Gnomeville on ebay. Episode 1 is available as a Gnomeville ebook on Amazon of course. I still claim that it is the easiest French book for learners with an English speaking background. You can also buy the physical copy in large format from me directly.

What is the target age range of your writing?

3 June, 2017My Comic Books, Research, Writingcomic books, comics, French, French language, language, readability, stories, word frequencies, writingSandra Bogerd

In writing my Gnomeville comic book series, I was mainly focused on making an entertaining story that used French-English cognates and highly frequent words like “le”. As it was a comic book format I seem to have automatically written and drawn in a style that is similar to the main comics of my childhood: Donald Duck, Asterix and the Smurfs. Perhaps that is why people believe it to be targeted at children.

When my fellow French students at the Alliance Française read a draft of Episode 1 of my comic book I heard the occasional chuckle. These were all adults. A recent customer said “BTW, my 11yo read your book and I saw him giggling.” so I guess it works for at least some 11-year olds. It certainly is a general audience work at the very least. It does, however, include a few challenging words for the very young. such as “matérialise”, which led one native French speaker to rate the book as more difficult to read than other French children’s books. Though in my experience, children have fewer hang-ups about unfamiliar vocabulary than adults do.

In the world of readability measurement, a reading age is often calculated. This is usually based on vocabulary and grammar measures, often approximated by average word length and sentence length. Some vocabulary difficulty measures are based on a set of words that are generally known by children. These measures don’t directly capture conceptual difficulty or age-appropriate content. I may know quite a bit about readability research, but my knowledge of age-appropriate content is purely based on personal experience.

Generally speaking, stories for children tend to be full of fun, adventure, magic, mystery and silliness. Stories for adolescents start to include relationships as part of the plot, and then stories for adults have more of the complexity of the adult world, such as politics, law, medicine, finance, ethics and bureaucracy. Having stated that, it makes it clear that my stories are written for children without me realising it. While that isn’t a bad thing, I guess it makes sense. It is difficult to express complex and subtle ideas with a small vocabulary.

In other news, my Episode 2 comic book launch was a success. Episode 1 is still available as a countdown deal if you are in one of the few lucky countries that can enjoy those deals on Amazon. The next phase for me will be converting Episode 2 into an ebook.

The Evolution of a Language Comic Book

16 May, 2017My Comic Bookscomic books, comics, French, French easy readers, French for fun, French language, French reader, language, language acquisition, language learning, writingSandra Bogerd

I sometimes reflect on the journey that led to me now having published a comic book in French as an eBook. Like many who studied languages in school, I realised that despite 5 years of French, I couldn’t understand a native speaker, and I struggled to read a book written for native speakers. This didn’t seem right. I had some reading books written for learners of French, but there still seemed to be a lot of vocabulary that I didn’t know.

I started tinkering with the idea of a story that would only use words that English speakers already knew, plus one new word per page. The Taxi story in my comic was the first of these ideas. The Gnomeville story came later.

In the early 2000s, I showed my scribbled draft to a near-native French speaker, who gave me excellent feedback on my French. In addition to picking up a few grammatical nuances, I learnt that I couldn’t trust my textbook or my French-English dictionary. Around this time I also showed the draft to an artist colleague who was an author of children’s books. She suggested inking over the sketches and sending it to a publisher. I started working on the artwork and really enjoyed it. While I did send to a couple of publishers, they were not interested, so I decided to self-publish.

Feedback from other colleagues and friends led to the language summary section at the back of the comic, as well as page numbers. All the while I was learning more about language acquisition via reading, through my research in the field of computer-assisted language learning and computational linguistics. I learnt that 95% coverage is needed for comprehension (guessing of unknown words), and that glosses help with vocabulary acquisition, as do images. A subtlety I learnt more recently is that the best strategy for vocabulary retention is to first guess the word, and then look at the meaning.

I attended the Alliance Française to improve my French language skills. I continued to work on the comic, and brought the latest draft along to one of my lessons and was please to hear chuckles from my classmates at some of the humour. A few more language issues were sorted out thanks to feedback from the teachers.

Initially I was producing an A4 draft. This switched to A5 at some point. Then later I had the peculiar idea to make the comic fit into a DVD case, so the comic and CD could be sold together in a protective case. This became the default format for the comic that was released in 2014, at my choir’s La Musique de France concert. Feedback from someone at le forum led me to create a large format, which is roughly the size of a typical American comic book. So I ended up with many formats: small, small +CD in DVD case, large, large + CD. Finally, I now have it as an eBook as well. For my next issue I will be sticking with large format (and eBook), and make the audio a separate product. This reduces the number of ISBN numbers required, and the paperwork side of things.

Tonight I received feedback on my draft of the second issue, and the language side of things is in pretty good shape, so I’m hoping to have the full issue finalised by the end of May. I’m keen to have some progress after all these years. Also, the more episodes I do, the more useful it is for learners. I can see future learners reading one issue per day to get maximum benefit, or at least one issue per week.

Comprehensible Input

12 May, 2017My Comic Books, Researchcomics, French, French easy reader, French for fun, French graded reader, French language, language, language acquisition, language learning, SLASandra Bogerd

I came across this article recently while looking at on-line language learning groups and resources. Apparently there is a friction between those who understand the research on language acquisition and those who believe in language lessons. If one tries to learn or memorise language, it uses a different mental process to that used for communication, and doesn’t contribute to communication skill in the language, which explains a lot about people’s frustration with language education.

One point raised in the article is that early stage language acquirers tend to focus on content words, and not absorb the surrounding function words. This agrees with the observation that it is often easier to remember concrete nouns than the words that connect them in sentences.

How does this apply to my comic book? Well, my comic book attempts to make the input as comprehensible as possible for the complete novice. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this works. It also attempts to be as engaging as possible. Having heard chuckles from students of French when reading earlier drafts, I’d say that it does achieve that goal. Also, a recent customer said the following: “BTW, my 11yo read your book and I saw him giggling”. This makes me happy, as I was advised to develop this as a children’s reading resource.