Tag Archives: vocabulary

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 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.”

(This page includes Amazon affiliate links.)

Episode 3: Easy Authentic Sentences from French Classics

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On this page are short extracts, titles and sentences which occur in classic French texts and only use the vocabulary of Episode 3 of my Gnomeville comic book series, that is, 29 frequently occurring words in French text, plus exact cognates and names. (I may update this list periodically, when I find more things with my scripts.)

C’est une promenade !

C’est une occasion.

C’est impossible !
C’est impossible !

Est-il possible, madame !

C’est une tradition.

Avec la Nature ?

Est-ce possible ?
C’est possible.

Pour qui ?

Pour La Rochelle.

Succès certain.

Je signe !

Graves questions !

Je refuse ! je refuse !

C’est terrible, … terrible.

Dorian Gray ? Qui est-ce ?

Est-ce une allusion ?

Des Alpes !

Est-ce le major ?

J’examine l’immense horizon.

C’est long.

C’est excellent !

C’est un crime !

Ah ! c’est horrible ! horrible !

C’est Arthur Labarou.

C’est abominable !

Une affaire de police !

Et qui est-ce ?

C’est probable.

C’est un poète !

Un grand poète ?

Et que désire Porthos ?

C’est le présent.

C’est imprudent.

C’est admirable !

C’est impossible, c’est impossible !

C’est possible, madame.

Paris est tranquille ?

Nobles sentiments !

C’est violent.

C’est innocent.

C’est exorbitant.

Succès certain.

Affaires de police !

C’est juste ! c’est juste !
Ah !

C’est une superstition.

C’est une consolation.

C’est différent.

N’est-ce pas ?

Sire, sa place est vacante.

Ce n’est pas juste.

J’ai de l’imagination.

J’ai du courage.

Je continue.

C’est une affaire !
C’est une grave affaire !

Le reste est horrible !

Son crime !

N’est-ce qu’une intrigue galante ?

Pas possible !

C’est absurde !

Qu’est-ce que c’est ? qu’est-ce que c’est ?

C’est la France !

C’est impossible, Marie !

C’est extravagant.

C’est interminable !

C’est correct.

C’est certain !
C’est fatal !

C’est simple.

C’est original.

C’est brave !

C’est immoral !

C’est inexplicable !

C’est la morale.

C’est la nature !

C’est une injustice !

Est-ce que c’est possible ?

C’est sa nature.

C’est le moment.

C’est le principal.

Est-ce qu’il est content ?

C’est en vain.

C’est la vengeance de l’ art.

N’est-ce pas , Louise ?

Ce n’est pas extravagant !

Ce n’est pas terrible !

Ce n’est pas possible.
À cause de sa fortune ?

C’est inexact.

C’est intolérable !

Ce n’est pas la question.

C’est stupide.

C’est splendide !

Ce n’est pas le moment !

C’est évident.

C’est le lion du désert.

C’est amusant !

C’est détestable !

Oh ! c’est superbe !

C’est stupide , n’est-ce pas ?

C’est une infidèle !

C’est la Révolution.

C’est un américanisme.

C’est du latin.

Est-ce le chagrin ?
Est-ce un crime ?

Avec qui est-il ?

Est-ce une hallucination ?

Est-ce un spectre ?
Ah !

C’est Madame !

N’est-ce pas juste ?

C’est une science.

La science…
Qu’ est -ce que la science ?

C’ est une disgrâce.

Avec qui ?

Est-il optimiste ?
Est-il pessimiste ?

Il est absurde, n’est-ce pas ?

Ce n’est pas probable.

Pour le service ?

Avec les dames.
Ah !

Ah !
C’est l’usage ?

Dans sa prison, Sire.

Et avec qui ?
Oh !

Les troupes arrivent en Canada.

Au combat !
Marche !

Est-ce un air ?

Ah ! Ce n’est pas long !

Pour paris ?
Pour paris.

Est-ce la police ?

C’est la police.

Le document ! c’est le document !

Je brave la damnation.

Au galop !
Au galop !

Est-ce un général ?
Est-ce un prince ?

C’est une miss Blake , de New-York.

Avec le chauffeur !

La harpe !

Est-ce négligence ?

Oh !
Jane, c’est cruel !

Est-ce juste.

Est-ce magnétisme animal ?

Sa religion !
Protestant !

C’est juste.
C’est un brave home, n’est-ce pas ?

Est-ce une menace ?

On ne manoeuvre pas.

Est-ce papa ?

C’est papa ! c’est papa !

C’est une vengeance !

C’est une désertion.

Il n’est pas imbécile.

C’est Antonia et ce n’est pas Antonia !
Oh !

Est-ce un millionnaire ?

Qu’est-ce que l’idéal ?

Est-ce une insurrection ?
C’est une insurrection.

C’est un saint !

C’est terrible.
N’est-ce pas ?

Oh ! ce canon, ce canon !

C’est incontestable.

Ah ! princesse Marie !

Qu’est-ce ?
De qui ?

Impossible ! oh ! c’est impossible !

Avec madame ?

Je n’ai pas de parents.
Pas de parents !

Pour la France ?

C’est sublime !

C’est pure imagination !

C’est son bureau.

C’est un secret.

Ce marquis est un danger.

C’est incompréhensible.

C’est bizarre.

Ah ! que c’est bizarre !

Est-ce grave ?

Est-ce long ?

Oh ! c’est un gas !

Oh ! c’est une terrible alternative !

En route pour la Madame Hütte !
Ah !

Oh ! je tremble !

Avec sa fortune !

J’arrive de New York.

Est-ce exact ?

Est-ce regret ?

C’est grave ?

Est-ce certain ?

Du moment que c’est pour madame !

C’est justice , n’est -ce pas ?

C’est une opinion.

C’est une situation.

C’est un massacre.

C’est son affaire.

C’est la cathédrale.

C’est le théàtre.

Est-ce possible !
Nancy ! capitale de la Lorraine !

De qui est-ce ?

O Zeus ! les horribles convulsions !

Est-ce une vision ?

En route ! en voyage !

J’ai de l’ambition.

Attention ! je commence.

Est-ce qu’il est content ?

Est-ce que ce n’est pas de tradition ?

Qu’est-ce que c’est que des spéculations , papa ?

Qu’est-ce que le courage ?

Qu’est-ce que la patience ?

C’est un satin ?

C’ est un satin !
… Ah !
… Ah !

N’ est-ce pas ?
Il est adorable ! adorable !

Opinion de sir Francis Burdett sur l’union.

Mariage de Bonaparte.

La position de Lyon et son importance.

Oh ! c’est une sainte !

Ah ! ce n’est pas de la diction.

Son courage.

C’est un artiste !

Note sur l’article de M. Clouard.

Est-ce l’original ?

Ce mariage est impossible, madame !

Est-ce distraction ?

C’est regrettable.

C’est urgent.

C’est un voyage !

Ce point est important.

C’est l’impossible !

C’est dans la nature.

C’est colossal !

C’est suspect !

Il est artiste.

C’est une position en France.

C’est impossible, n’est-ce pas ?

C’est un miracle !

C’est le chaos.

C’est la table.

Est-ce un parent ?

C’est le guide !

C’est sa glorification.

C’est un clown !

C’est une religion.

J’arrive de Bretagne.

C’est son secret.

C’est son expression.

C’est un brigand !

C’est une passion.

C’est le prince.

C’est un affront !

C’est un martyr !

C’est le message !

C’est une question.

C’est le Temple.

C’est un original.

C’est un duel !

C’est un vice.

C’est la cause !

Est-ce une illusion ?

Est-ce un temple ?

C’est une abomination.

C’est une rage !

C’est la fortune !

C’est une supposition.

C’est le colonel.

Et c’est justice.

C’est le signal !

C’est un déluge !

C’est la débâcle.

Est-ce une profession ?

C’est la principale.

C’est un aristocrate.

C’est une fatigue qui n’est pas supportable.

Qu’est-ce que c’est que la civilisation ?

N’est-ce pas admirable ?

Est-ce le secret sombre ?

Qui n’est-ce pas ?

Ce n’est que justice.

C’est de la religion.

C’est le moment favorable.

N’est-ce pas abominable ?

C’est de l’injustice !

C’est un prince exorbitant.

Qui est ce saint Abraham ?

Le second, qui est-ce ?

C’est une horrible situation !

Est-ce de la justice ?

Il n’est pas terrible .

Et c’est en vain.

C’est de la farce.

C’est un danger public.

C’est Satan en personne ?

C’est le papyrus antique.

C’est terrible, ce silence !

N’est-ce pas horrible ?

Est-ce que je tremble ?

Ce n’est pas loyal !

C’est d’impatience , Parry.

Soprano, n’est-ce pas ?

C’est une véritable invasion.

C’est une seconde création !

N’est-il pas horrible ?

Qu’est-ce que le miracle ?

C’est de l’extravagance pure.

C’est stupide; c’est immoral.

Il arrive, n’est-ce pas ?

C’est l’unique solution probable.

Ce n’est pas un idiot.

Il n’est pas en danger.

J’adopte le plan d’Athos.

Episode 2: Easy Authentic Sentences from French Classics

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On this page are short extracts, titles and sentences which occur in classic French texts and only use the vocabulary of Episode 2 of my Gnomeville comic book series, that is, the twenty most frequently occurring words in French newspapers plus exact cognates and names. Even easier sentences are found on the Episode 1 page. (I may update these lists periodically, when I find more things with my scripts.)

Qui ?

Qui est Agostino ?

Qui est-il ?
… Oh !

Il change de place !

L’Europe !

Au railway !

En route !

Une avalanche ?

Au Louvre ?

Du cardinal.

De la patience, Athos.

Il est absent.

Du courage, Marguerite !
Du courage ?

Il est saint !

Il est excellent.

En vain.

Il ignore le riche, il ignore le noble.

L’addition finale.

Une simple promenade d’amateur.

Des biscuits !

Des sardines !

Il est dans un milieu abominable.

Ah ! L’animal !

Des talents !

De danger ?

Des convicts !

Des crimes !

Des dangers !

Est-il possible, madame !

Des documents ! Des documents !

Des brutes.

Il est à Florence.

Dans Paris ?

En prison !

Des conditions !

Dans la cave.

Il refuse ?

Et de qui ?
— Du cardinal.

De qui ?

Et de fatigue ?

Des regrets !
Ah !

On suppose !

En confession ?
Oh !

Dans le cabinet de Madame.

Des millions ?

Il est urgent .

Il est adorable !

Il est respectable.

On est content.

Il est en danger.

En Europe !

Arsène Lupin est en prison.

LA CIVILISATION EST EN DANGER !

À l’hôtel !

Fatale imprudence !

Il est simple.

Au lion !
Au lion !

Du champagne !

L’influence de Rome est incalculable.

Il est brave !

Il est probable.

Agitation dans Paris.

La nature est immorale.

Des excuses !

Dans un moment !
Oh !

Dans le corridor.

Il est intact.

De la passion !

Le portrait d’une dame !

Au camp !

Il est possible , et il est probable.

La force dans le calme…

L’absence !
Oh !

De l’humiliation.
De l’humiliation ?

Et dans la marine !

Dans un instant.

Des brigands !
Des brigands !

Du talent.

Ah ! l’abomination !

Ah ! l’innocent !

Il est parent de madame Von Lembke ?

L’inauguration du canal de Suez.

L’Obsession.

Ah ! l’horrible spectacle !

La Scene est à Rome.

Au club ! au club !

Il est riche.

La mission est secrète.

La contradiction est évidente.

Il est indulgent.

Dans un village de Normandie !

Oh ! l’ogre !

Il continue.

Dans la maison de Don Juan.

Hallucination de l’assassin.

Paris est en danger…

L’ instruction.
La cascade.

En France ! en France !

Il est timide !
Oh !

Il force l’attention.

Le théâtre d’Alfred de Musset.

Opposition au Code civil.

Des forces ! des forces !

L’empire.

Critique de l’ article de M. Rocheblave.

La statue est en bronze.

Il est original.

La confusion est extrème dans Berlin.

L’instant est grave, sire !

Il est ?

Il est.

Qui est ?

Il est le lion du village.

Il est extravagant.

Il est brutal.

Il est rare.

De qui, madame ?

Il est un dans la multitude.

L’occasion est favorable.

Un voyage en Portugal !

Le général Victor en Hollande.

La Statue est à Versailles.

Et il est à Paris ?

Le général est au camp ?

Et de qui est-il ?

Common One-Word Sentences in the French Classics

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While exploring French readability and the fact that sentence length is a key factor for English speakers learning French, I thought I’d take it to the extreme and see what are the most common one-word sentences in French literature. Here is the top 20. Note that it is highly influenced by Les Trois Mousquetaires, which is a sizeable portion of the corpus and responsible for about half the occurrences of “diable”.

  1. Ah
  2. Oh
  3. Non
  4. Hélas
  5. Oui
  6. Quoi
  7. Eh
  8. Comment
  9. Pourquoi
  10. Diable
  11. Bah
  12. Tiens
  13. Amen
  14. Moi
  15. Bon
  16. Vraiment
  17. Monsieur
  18. Jamais
  19. Pardieu
  20. Hé

In a different corpus less dominated by Les Trois Mousquetaires, the following were also found in the top 20:

  • Allons
  • Bien
  • Adieu
  • Rien
  • Jamais

In a modern corpus I think we would find different expletive-like exclamations than “Diable”, “Parbleu”, and “Pardieu”. A common one these days seems to be “Putain!”, or somewhat less extreme “Punaise!”. Maybe I’ll try to process the French movie subtitle corpus at some point to get a more up to date glimpse at one-word sentences in French.

A tale of three French picture books: passé simple is not that hard!

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One of the weird things about studying French is that we seem to have three levels:

  • Beginners use present tense, imperatives, infinitives, and future proche;
  • Intermediate learners use passé composé, imparfait, future and conditional tenses
  • Advanced learners use passé simple and subjonctif

Yet, if we look at picture books written for French children, many use passé simple straight off.

I remember when I started reading (in English) in Grade 1 of primary school, one thing I had to get used to was constructs like “said Dora”. It doesn’t happen in spoken English, so felt a little weird. But it wasn’t overly difficult. Perhaps people from English-speaking backgrounds who had stories read to them would have been familiar with that already before reading it. The same thing must be true for French children reading or hearing passé simple. It’s a little different but not hard.

I recently read three French picture books. The first (Le Grand Antonio by Élise Gravel) was a fairly easy one with few words, written in present tense. The second (Quel est mon superpouvoir? by Aviaq Johnston) was a translation from English, written in passé simple (and imparfait). It was a comfortable read for me. The third (Dounia by Marya Zarif) was (mostly) written in present tense but was more difficult due to its vocabulary and more descriptive text. It is obvious to me that it is possible for texts in passé simple to be easier than those in the easiest tenses.

The thing is, you don’t need to know how to conjugate passé simple to read it. You just need to recognise the endings of third person singular (3ps) and plural (3pp) for regular verbs plus know a few of the irregular verbs. Here they are.

For -er verbs, 3ps ends in -a and 3pp ends in -èrent.
For -ir and -re verbs, 3ps ends in -it and 3pp in -irent.
You may come across a few -oir verbs, which have -ut and -urent.

The main irregular verbs to watch out for are:

être: fut, furent
faire: fit, firent
avoir: eut, eurent

The regular ones should not pose any problems. The avoir ones are recognisable thanks to already knowing the past participle of avoir (eu). The main difficulty is not mixing up the être and faire words. A simple rule is that faire has an ‘i’ in it, and so does its passé simple conjugation.

I hope that helps. It helps me.

Beginner French Resources

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tldr: Easy French sentences from classics here.

Years ago I was tinkering with creating my beginner comic book in French, and then researching what made things easy to read in French for those with English speaking background. I learnt that the two main aspects that characterise text difficulty are grammar and vocabulary, with other aspects usually having a much smaller role to play. Through my own research, inspired by my own frustration and anecdotal experience, I learnt that for French the typical readability measures that use word length or even how common a word is for vocabulary difficulty just don’t work for people with English speaking backgrounds. This is because so many of the longer “difficult” words in French are identical to those in English, or close enough not to matter. My experiment demonstrated that you may as well just use sentence length to decide on difficulty, being the simplest measure of grammatical complexity. Despite this, vocabulary matters. It’s just that the words that are difficult are differently distributed than for languages that don’t have this peculiar French-English relationship.

In another of my experiments, I tried to filter a large collection of French text to find extracts that are easy for English speakers. While the extracts that are very easy are not long, they do exist. It’s a matter of playing around with the constraints to get something sizeable. It should also be noted that the text I used consists of French classics, which can be challenging to read. Anyway, it’s been a while since I looked at this. The other day I created a page on this site that contains all the sentences and extracts I found that restrict themselves to the vocabulary and grammar of Episode 1 of my comic book, (le, la, les, de, du, des, et, est, se, que, and present tense third person singular of -er verbs) plus cognates and names. I hope it is useful. More to come.

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.

Review: Kill the French

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Today I came across the book Kill the French by Vincent Serrano Guerra in a list of recommendations on Amazon and thought I would have a look. It appears to follow similar principles to others that do strict vocabulary control, pioneered by Michael West in the early years of the 20th century: restrict to cognates, introduce frequently occurring words first, include repetition, and slowly build up the assumed vocabulary. The author has also followed the principle of spaced repetition with the goal that readers will retain vocabulary at optimum levels. So how does it compare to other books and comics that do the same thing? Let’s have a look.

I have analysed approximately the first 100 words, which covers the Day 1 text and the title of the Day 2 text. According to Style, it has an average sentence length of 8.8 words and an average word length of 4.3. Word lengths don’t really tell us much for French, since longer words tend to often be easy for those with an English-speaking background. Sentence lengths do, however, have a stronger impact on readability.

Other stats on the sample: vocabulary is 45 words out of 95 words of text, making a vocabulary density (type-token ratio) of 0.47. Naturally the author has made heavy use of cognates. Some of these are exact cognates, such as “lion”, and in other cases they are more challenging without context, such as “musée”. If we assume that all cognates are known, then the assumed vocabulary size for 95% coverage is 41 (when words are ranked in general frequency order), which is an excellent achievement. The only books in my collection that achieve that level or better are:

RankTitle
Required Vocabulary Size for 95% Coverage
1Gnomeville 2: Les pythons et les potions16
2Gnomeville 1: Introductions25
3Longman’s Modern French Course Part 135
4Gnomeville 3: Les six protections de la potion40
5Kill the French41

So from the perspective of readability in French for people with an English-speaking background, I put it at the same level as Gnomeville 3 initially, as they both have similar sentence lengths as well as vocabulary coverage.

Unfortunately, like many graded readers out there, the text of Kill the French is quite dull. I checked the 18th day in the sample to see if it was more interesting, having gained extra vocabulary. Sadly, no. I can’t comment on the final stories in the book, which may be more interesting, since I have only examined the sample.

So, here is my conclusion. If you are an absolute beginner in French and are a huge fan of spaced repetition-based learning and willing to put up with texts that are mildly interesting at best, then this is an excellent graded reader for getting you to become familiar with the 500 most frequent French words efficiently. It certainly beats just memorising vocabulary in isolation. The Gnomeville comics may be more exciting and fun, but unfortunately they currently only take you to a frequent vocabulary of about 30, until the author gets cracking with the rest of the series. Perhaps the best approach at this stage is to use both together.

The first day of Kill the French uses frequent words that are introduced in Gnomeville Episodes 1 to 3. All except “avec” are introduced in the first two episodes. Day 2 introduces two words occurring in Episode 1, one from Episode 2, and one that doesn’t feature in the Gnomeville series yet, since it is far less frequent in text. Gnomeville‘s first two episodes introduce the twenty most frequent words occurring in French newspapers, which is a slightly different frequency profile to spoken language, and somewhat different to other text corpora. Kill the French introduces words in an order that doesn’t resemble any specific corpus frequency list but they are still frequent words. For example, the second day includes the word “aussi”, which in movie vocabulary ranks about 91, in books at 78, and in the Minnesota spoken corpus, at 79. But, it is still a frequent word, and I know from personal experience that being a bit flexible about the order of introduced words makes it easier to produce a coherent story.

Given that the order of word introduction varies enough that words will be introduced in one book and not the other, it doesn’t really matter too much which you read first. You could, for example, read Day 1, then reward yourself with Episode 1, then after Day 2, do the same with Episode 2. Day 3 is where the two texts diverge the most in terms of vocabulary, but there is still overlap. After that, you are stuck with Kill the French. But at some point you might be able to switch to Première Étape: Basic French Readings: Alternate Series by Otto Bond (published 1937), if you can locate a copy. According to my stats the expected vocabulary works out to 316, but it is another principled graded reader, using cognates, frequent words, and slowly adding new words as you read. It’s also an entertaining read. However, from memory, it does use more difficult tenses typically found in French literature right from the start, so can be challenging grammatically. The average sentence length is also quite long, making it potentially daunting.

In summary, I recommend using Kill the French in the following manner: for the first three days, read the day’s material and follow it with an episode of Gnomeville. After that, if you can keep going with the spaced repetition from Kill the French for about 100 days, you then might be able to start reading Première Étape: Basic French Readings: Alternate Series, which is interesting right from the start with an initial vocabulary of 97 frequent words and Si Nous Lisions, which starts being interesting from Chapter 6 with a vocabulary of about 100 words. Best of luck!

Function word frustrations

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I recently re-watched Dilili in Paris, which is a fabulous animation movie for children, with French dialogue that is slow enough for French language learners to follow. I originally watched the movie during the Melbourne French Film Festival and considered buying the movie later so I could try watching it without English subtitles.

Frustration 1: Memory

There is a frequently repeated phrase when Dilili meets new people: “Je suis heureuse de vous rencontrer”. It was semi-humorous, and certainly designed to be remembered, to teach how to be polite when meeting someone new. However, what I actually remembered after a week or two was: “Je suis heureuse __ vous rencontrer.” Despite being exposed to many occurrences, the function word was lost. Function words don’t provide semantic content and therefore appear to be harder to retain. There is certainly research evidence that concrete nouns are easier to remember than various other types of words. This movie brought that home to me in a big way.

Frustration 2: Resources

(Not really about function words…)

I bought the DVD of the movie, and then when viewing it, discovered that the subtitles could not be switch off, and that the only subtitles were in English. I don’t know who makes these decisions when preparing DVDs for sale, but perhaps they don’t really consider their audience carefully enough. A French movie sold in Australia would have various audience segments: French ex-pats – possibly including some French people who are hard of hearing, Australian francophiles, Australians learning French. To me, movies and TV episodes are highly useful for practising comprehension of the spoken language. Ideally it can be done at three levels of difficulty (with the example given for L2 referring to the language being learnt and L1 referring to the native language):

  1. L2 audio with L1 subtitles,
  2. L2 audio with L2 subtitles,
  3. L2 audio without subtitles

I even do this with DVDs that were originally in English. I’ve watched two entire series of Perry Mason with French audio, which was quite illuminating. If you are short of practice material, check your DVD collection for audio in your target language. You may be pleasantly surprised to find a good selection amongst your favourite shows.

Frustration 3: Vocabulary Size

(Function words are frequent words…)

One of the excellent things about some graded readers was that they were designed for a specific vocabulary size. For me, vocabulary makes all the difference between a readable text and an unreadable one.  CLE International used to publish books targeting a specific vocabulary size. For example, Niveau 1 had vocabularies of 400-700 words. Through extensive reading, I have successfully moved from 300-word vocabulary books to 700-1000 word ones, and I hope to continue to progress through further reading. However, as with other publishers, the publications have now been converted to CEFR levels: A1, A2 etc. and as far as I can tell, the subtleties of vocabulary size have been removed from the book information.

I have completed a CEFR B1 in French, yet I’m most comfortable reading A1 texts (and texts with less than 1000 word vocabularies) and with few exceptions they are not easy apart from the grammar, which is too easy for me, but the books are still sometimes challenging vocabulary-wise. What frustrates me is that A2 covers such a wide range of vocabularies, depending on the source material, from readable to incomprehensible. Published vocabulary sizes for A2, where they occur at all, vary from 400 to >1200 words. The level of frustration with some of these graded readers is the same as for texts written for native speakers. I oscillate between A1, A2, native texts and back again. The original memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan are as easy and more exciting than many A2 texts.

CEFR is designed, as far as I can tell, to describe a person’s practical skill in a language, and for that it is useful. However, the jumps between levels are quite large, so that the defined levels are not very useful for the learner themselves. Some publishers solve this by dividing up levels. ELI uses A0, A1, A1.1. The Danish Teen Readers/Easy Readers also divide up the levels, and still appear to quote target vocabulary sizes. Indie publishers tend to ignore vocabulary size in their writing. However, writers and publishers should remember that:

  1. Extensive reading is at its best if learners are reading at a comfortable level while not being familiar with all vocabulary. Ideally learners should know 98% of the words in text they are reading.
  2. Readability of text largely consists of grammar and vocabulary components.
  3. The more readable AND interesting reading material is, the more learners will read, the better their vocabularies will become, and the better their skill in a language will be.
  4. Publishing vocabulary levels required for 95-98% coverage of the text will assist learners in finding materials of the right level for them at any point. Vocabulary levels should be (loosely) based on general word frequency.

This is why I write my comic books for language learners. This is why I research extensive reading, readability and language acquisition.