Tag Archives: writing

Personal Experiments in Extensive Reading

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As mentioned in my previous post about learning Japanese, I’ve been applying extensive reading principles to improving my Japanese language skills. At best, in Japanese, I can be described as a “false beginner”, as I don’t have the skills yet to pass the lowest level Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I have dabbled in learning the language whenever I have found a fun resource (Let’s Learn Japanese TV series, Kimono text books); completed a half-semester beginner course, which taught Hiragana and some introductory phrases; and visited Japan briefly three times, each trip providing immersive language learning experiences.

I don’t recall exactly when I started, but it was either from December or early January, I attempted to read something in Japanese for ten minutes per day. I keep a database of my language books, and used data in that to produce an approximate order of difficulty for attempting the books, and probably read through about 80 booklets, plus the chapters of Kimono level 1, and the starting chapters of Kimono level 2. I stopped about a week ago, as it was frustratingly difficult, and I had other things occupying my mind. For the moment I am filling the gap by playing Kana Quest, which is keeping my kana recognition alive.

So in a way, this has been an experiment in seeing how well extensive reading goes in a language where you are still at the beginning stages. In a couple of readability studies I’ve led, I’ve used a 5-point scale to indicate how easy something is to read:

  1. Very easy, understood everything
  2. Easy, a few words were not known, but it didn’t impact reading comprehension
  3. Not easy, but it was possible to follow the story
  4. Difficult, a dictionary is needed to make sense of it
  5. Very difficult, a dictionary won’t help

Number 5 is rarely chosen by anyone, and it has been argued that maybe it doesn’t happen. However, if I were to attempt to read something in Chinese, a dictionary won’t help me, as I don’t know how to look up hanzu characters based on stroke count. Sure I might get there if I persist, but life is too short for that. So I guess Number 5 is more about lacking willpower when encountering very difficult text.

In terms of optimal language learning, ratings of 2-3 are ideal, since new language is being encountered, but the reading is not at the frustration level.

I “extensively read” in a few languages. In Dutch, my mother tongue (but not my best language, which is English), I can comfortably read novels written for children.  I would need a dictionary for anything technical if it was important for me to understand the nuances of meaning, but I would still be able to “follow the story” for most texts I come across.

In French, a language I have studied both in courses and on my own, I am also at the stage where most texts would not be classed as difficult. For German, I read graded readers up to B1 level, giving me texts in the target zone. Thanks to my Dutch background and some study of the language, it would not take too much for me to be able to read texts for native German speakers and be able to “follow the story”.

Now we come to Japanese. The booklets I read went from rating 1 to rating 4. Naturally, the rating 4 ones led to frustration and reduced willpower to continue. My approach to reading them was to read straight through, and then afterward, allow myself to look up a word or two that seemed to be important for understanding, or that had occurred a few times in my reading. I will make the following observations of my experience.

  • My vocabulary definitely improved, but I think that stopping will lead to much of it being forgotten again
  • My ability to recognize kanji improved, and I think that this may actually last a bit longer in my memory than the pronunciation, particularly where there is some obvious logical connection between the ideogram and the meaning, eg. the words for “above” and “below”.
  • Illustrated books that are basically an illustrated vocabulary are very easy to read, even if you don’t know any of the words beforehand and forget most of them afterwards. However, it can be challenging to make them interesting.
  • Booklets with illustrations and repeated sentences can be easy. For example, where the concrete noun, such as a type of animal, is substituted into a template sentence, and the sentence has an illustration of the concrete noun on the page. Even if the sentence isn’t fully understood, the substituted noun will be.
  • Where it is clear from the illustrations what is being said, the meaning of the text can be deduced.
  • In languages that I can read reasonably well I don’t like to read stories that I already know, but I was grateful for the known stories presented in Japanese, to allow me to deduce what the text meant. While the text may have been just as difficult as other stories, the fact that the story was already known meant that the text was better understood and learnt from.
  • What also fascinated me was how focused and absorbed I was in the reading and sense-making task – much as I have observed young children when they are following a story in a book that is being read to them. It was as though my entire brain was switched on – until I got to that frustration point recently.
  • Attractive illustrations make the experience much more enjoyable.

A take home lesson for me is: once an alphabet is known, it is possible to read something, such as illustrated vocabulary books. My Japanese collection includes colour+object combinations, transport, trains, illustrated loanwords in katakana, cities and countries. The difficulty is perhaps learning the alphabet in an absence of known vocabulary. In our first languages we have clues from words we know, such as B for banana. For languages we haven’t learnt yet, authors would need to resort to other tricks such as loanwords, cognates, international words and names and place names.This is one of the tricks I use in my comic book series for French.

The Kimono series simplifies the reading a little by rendering all words that would be in katakana in romaji (our regular western latin alphabet), but spelt as it would be when rendered in katakana. I like this idea for slowly ramping up the difficulty. Books for Japanese native speakers also slowly ramp things up. Children’s books might be in hiragana, hiragana plus katakana with hiragana support, or kana and kanji with support, depending on the target age group.

One study I read about extensive reading and vocabulary acquisition examined what happened if you re-read stories. Each time you re-read you pick up more of the vocabulary. I think I will explore this next, and see how many re-readings of the easier books will make it easier for me to advance to the more difficult ones. Stay tuned for the answer!

 

 

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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.

Ford & Hicks’s Elementary New French Reader – a review

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Ford & Hicks published this reader back in 1939, with the intention of making an easier graded reader than their other book, “A New French Reader”, by using present tense to start with, and introducing the other verb tenses in later stories.

The stories are mostly interesting, with a couple sourced from books I have not encountered before (“Deux jeunes aviateurs” and “Le secret du château”). It also includes Cosette, which had me sighing “not again”, since every publisher does stories from Les Misérables. However, Ford & Hicks may have been one of the first to make a simplified reader from it, so I shouldn’t grumble. What I will grumble about is the extract from Comte de Monte Cristo. You may recall in my review of Otto Bond’s series, that the escape episode of this was a highlight, and made me want to read more.

In the Ford & Hicks version, we get the initial backstory in English before reading the scene that led to the unjust incarceration of Dantès. The story then includes more English breaks between sections of French, and given the Otto Bond version, I don’t see the purpose of these interruptions to immersive reading. The Ford & Hicks version covers more of the story, and at the end summarises the remaining plot. Then they end the summary with the statement “The interest of the story weakens after the discovery of the treasure”. Unlike Bond’s version, which had me wanting to read on, this version annoyed me with the English interruptions and further annoyed me by taking away my interest in reading more of the story.

Recent trends in language acquisition research have focused on “translanguaging”, which seems to be what I’ve done most of my life, which is mixing languages together in order to keep communicating fluently with my level of knowledge (of Dutch). There seem to be benefits to doing so, but I’m starting to think it might not be so good for reading. This is the opposite of my previous thoughts on the topic, where I supervised the building of prototype bilingual ereaders that present foreign language stories, having the most difficult parts presented in the native language of the person reading it.

What may be more beneficial is reading foreign language text that resembles the native language of the speaker. That is, using cognates, simple non-idiomatic forms of expression and sentence structures that are not too unusual. This is what happens with stories in French written for native English speakers such as my Gnomeville series (Episode 1 and Episode 2 currently available), and the books by Otto Bond, and Ford & Hicks. It also happens to a large extent in stories by non-native writers. For example, I’ve seen some English graded readers written by a Chinese author, where the English is very Chinese in style, so would not be classed as “good English”. However, as long as it is known to not be “English” English, it is probably helpful to start with for people with a Chinese-speaking background. Then there should be a transition to more English-like English at a later stage. I’m somewhat more forgiving of this idea currently than I was previously.

It’s never as authentic as a native speaker

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I have my moments of doubt with my French comic book project. It is virtually impossible to write something that is absolutely correct French in terms of the expressions used if one is not a native speaker. Grammar is relatively easy to get right, apart from minor slip-ups, but having something sound like natural French, especially while intentionally writing in a constrained vocabulary is almost impossible.

I’ve been attempting to get Episode 3 of my comic book ready this month, spurred on by a potential launch date at the language-themed concert I’m involved with, happening tomorrow, as well as #inktober. However, before finalising my comic it was important to get it checked by a native speaker of French. This happened today, and as usual there are errors that need to be fixed, and unlike text that is free to vary without consequences, this means making decisions about whether to leave out phrases or whole sentences, find an alternative French-English cognate, or an alternative way of saying the same thing. As I also try to ensure there are a certain number of repetitions of key words, phrases, or grammatical points, further changes also need to be made. Then there’s the crossword… As a result, I will need to delay the release of Episode 3 for a bit longer.

Unfortunately, despite multiple checks by francophone proofreaders, some things do get missed. I appear to have an error in Episode 2, which has already been published. I may need to set up an errata page here, and perhaps release a second edition at some point. It’s all a little discouraging, but I’m not giving up yet.

A Lesson in Suspense

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Reading graded readers can be quite educational on how to write good stories. Previously I wrote an article about a graded reader “Hall of Shame“, in which I highlighted various problems I had observed within the genre, and then provided a summary of recommendations on how to write better graded readers. Elsewhere I wrote another summary of advice on writing graded readers (I called them Easy Readers in my earlier posts.)

In this article I’d like to talk about suspense. I think I was in my twenties when I first really thought about suspense at all when reading. A fine simple example that crystallised it for me was Dirk Gently’s Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Two memorable simple bits of suspense occurred in it. The first is the sofa stuck in the staircase, which is explained toward the end of the story. The second, which amazed me in its simplicity was explaining two of three things, and not answering the third one until late in the book. I was reading on, wondering what the third thing was. This illustrated that it didn’t really matter what the suspense is, as long as it’s suspense. It doesn’t need to be figuring out who committed a crime, or whether the romance concludes happily. It can be pretty much anything.

The next observation, which inspired the way I’ve organised my Gnomeville comics, was the use of cliff-hangers. I was reading a collection of X-Men comics, and noticed that they always ended with a cliffhanger and unanswered questions. By never fully ending the story, people get hooked and need to read the next issue. Soap operas seem to work the same way. It struck me that this is a very good strategy for graded readers, since we want to motivate people to keep reading to improve their language skill.

I buy and read graded readers by other authors, and I was struck by the contrast suspense made between two otherwise very similar stories by the same author, Sylvie Lainé.

Voyage en France tells of an English couple who go to France, because Louis is reminded of a creative project he commenced with his best friend decades earlier, who later moved to France, and with whom he had lost contact. The project was a movie about an old man trying to find an old friend, echoing the current situation. Louis wants to see how the story will end, by finding his old friend. We read the story of Louis and Melba as they follow a series of clues to find Louis’s old friend. This suspense worked for me, as I wanted to know how the story would end. I also wanted to know whether they tried to finish the movie, but that question wasn’t answered. I read the story quickly, despite many chapters of fairly mundane travel activities, all because of the suspense.

Contrast the above story with Voyage à Marseille. This contains the same two main characters, doing the same things, that is, travelling through France to get to a destination. However, it lacks the suspense of wondering whether they will find the person they are looking for. The first bit of excitement happens quite late, the disappearance of the car, and is resolved quite quickly. There is another unanswered question that had potential as a simple bit of suspense, the title of the biography of Louis’s friend that they were visiting. Unfortunately that wasn’t answered in the final chapter. It took me a lot longer to finish this story, because there wasn’t anything I wanted to know the answer to.

So, when writing graded readers, please provide suspense. It makes a lot of difference to the reading experience.

 

 

Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve – my kind of book

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I recently noticed an article in an issue of Reader’s Digest while in a waiting room. It was discussing the vocabulary of Green Eggs and Ham, and other statistical aspects of writing. It was an extract of Ben Blatt’s book “Nabokov’s Favourite Word is Mauve”. Since the article was about a lot of the things that I work on, I felt compelled to get the book, and immediately read it.

The book compares a set of literary classics, best sellers and fan fiction via quantitative statistics. The author used my old friend Natural Language ToolKit (NLTK) for Part of Speech tagging etc. for the text analysis.

The first chapter looks at adverbs, which are frowned upon in writing. The next looks at statistical differences in writing by each gender. Chapter 3 discusses the history of authorship attribution, as played out with the Federalist Papers. The relative frequency of different function words tends to be like a fingerprint for an author’s writing. He uses this on co-authored works to figure out who wrote what. Next up is seeing if authors follow their own advice on writing. Then comes the chapter I saw in Reader’s Digest, that discusses Dr Seuss and readability measures. In the same chapter he notes that the average reading age of bestsellers is decreasing, from grade 8 in the 1960’s to grade 6.

Next up is a comparison of UK and US writing, including an interesting comparison on the loudness of Americans compared to English people. Chapter 7 looks at clichés – another area I have researched, albeit in lyrics instead of novels. The remaining chapters look at book covers, first sentences, and text generation.

This book did a lot of things that are closely related to my own tinkerings, as well as some of my published research. The author is a journalist and statistician, and several of the chapters, if written in an academic rather than journalistic manner, would have made good quantitative linguistics papers, with the amount of research within the book possibly being enough for a PhD in the field.

I only had one gripe about the book, and that is one sentence in which he assumes his reader knows nothing about statistics and says so. It’s one thing to explain something clearly starting from scratch or to state that something is left to an appendix for those interested. It’s quite another to tell the reader that they don’t know enough statistics. While some readers may not be insulted (eg. the “for dummies” series was popular), I usually am. I may not be the world’s expert on statistics, but I have a working knowledge, and I am capable of learning. I had a similar experience when I wanted to learn about the premise behind the Zone diet, and read a book on it, only to be constantly told by the authors that I’m fat (I’m not). The moral is: explain things clearly, but don’t insult the audience.

All in all, this was a book that’s exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy.

 

Book review: Easy French Stories by Sylvie Lainé

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As someone who reads and writes books for language acquisition via extensive reading, I look with curiosity at any that are available. Today I came across books by Sylvie Lainé on Amazon.
The books aim to support language acquisition via extensive reading, and provide extensive glosses to prevent the need for consulting a dictionary. The stories are written by a native French speaker who has studied applied linguistics. Her biography on Amazon seems to indicate that she is unaware of the long history of graded readers for language learners, including those in French, published by both English publishers, such as Oxford University Press, as well as French publishers, such as Hachette. Or perhaps she was only referring to those available as ebooks when saying there were no suitable stories available. Nevertheless, it is great that she has published stories for learners of French. Given the amount of reading a learner should do, the more good stories of low to moderate difficulty available the better.
My assessment in this review is about the suitability of these stories for extensive reading. For this purpose, there should be at least 95% vocabulary coverage for fluent reading. That’s only 1 in 20 words that should be unfamiliar. This is difficult to do well for beginner readers. It took me years to come up with the initial story for Gnomeville, which takes a learner from zero French to a small vocabulary of common words and French-English cognates. Episode 1 of the comic doesn’t achieve the 95% coverage figure consistently until page 12 of the story, but maintains a 1 new word per page until then, with illustrations providing essential parts of the story. So the first few pages could be classed as intensive reading, rather than extensive. After that, and for all future episodes, the story has the 95% coverage level consistently, allowing people to practise guessing the meanings of words, with a reasonable chance of success, and still having a gloss to check guesses, for optimal vocabulary retention.
Let’s see how Sylvie Lainé‘s stories do. For this study I have assumed that the unglossed vocabulary is known, and that glossed vocabulary is unknown. To be generous in the analysis, I assume that a glossed multi-word expression is a single unknown vocabulary item, but still count the individual words of the expression when determining the total number of words read. This is a manual calculation, so I am using the first and last chunk of the free sample, where a “chunk” is a section of text that is followed by a set of glossed words. I do both of these chunks, as it is possible that the known vocabulary would be greater as the story progresses, as is the case with Gnomeville.
First up is Voyage en France. The first chunk has 16 glossed words out of 74, making a coverage of only 78%, which is very low, even when reading stories written for native speakers as a foreign language learner with a vocabulary size of 1000.
The second chunk is much better, having 92% coverage, but still a bit low.
Second story is Le Pendentif, which is actually the first volume in the series. This is truly simple French, and if we make the same assumptions of vocabulary knowledge as above, has only 2 glossed words for 74 words, giving a 97% coverage, which is perfect for extensive reading. The final chunk is a little low at 3 glossed out of 38, making 92% coverage, but overall, this story does seem to be a suitable beginner story.
Voyage à Marseille goes from 93% coverage to 91% at the end. Based on these three stories, I’d say that you can expect an average of 92% vocabulary coverage from the series, assuming your knowledge matches the assumption of the author. Comments from reviewers indicate that people reading these stories still need to consult a dictionary for some words, so these coverage figures are an over-estimate for some people.
So in summary, I believe that Le Pendentif (t. 1) should be a fairly comfortable read for beginners after a few lessons of French, and is good for those who are after stories written in authentic French for adult beginners. The other stories would be slow reads due to the vocabulary load, despite the glosses, so it would be better to come back to the series after reading other stories with a better-matched vocabulary level. Apart from my own comic that assumes zero vocabulary, there are series that go from vocabularies of 150 words onwards. Looking at my database of graded readers for French I can see that most beginner ones are indeed targeting children or adolescents. If you can’t face those (I quite enjoy some of them), there are some excellent simplified classics published by CLE International for vocabularies of 500 or more. Two of my favourites so far are Jacquou le Croquant (vocabulary = 600) and En Famille (vocabulary = 500).
A disclaimer for my review of these stories is that I haven’t read beyond the preview chunks available on Amazon, so I can’t comment on how they progress, or how entertaining they are. If you find them very interesting, then you may have the willpower to read on despite the vocabulary load. The Amazon reviews are mostly favorable.
onlyhavetwo_noteasy
People sometimes say “you can only have two” of the three for things. I think the original was probably the [good:cheap:fast] for projects, and I’ve seen [good grades:social life:enough sleep] for college life. I’ve also seen the somewhat dodgy [pretty:intelligent:sane] for girlfriends. The equivalent for graded readers seems to be: [easy:authentic:interesting]. The more authentic it is, the less easy it will be. The easier it is, the less interesting it’s likely to be. The more interesting, the more difficult, etc. So as authors of graded readers, we try to balance these three things. I also try to include a fourth element, related to “easy”, and that is, perhaps “effective”, in that I try to ensure that the stories are constructed in a way that ensures vocabulary growth, by using all the outcomes from extensive reading research:
  • 95%+ vocabulary coverage,
  • focus on very frequent words (eg. “le”/”the”) to give best coverage sooner,
  • repetition of new vocabulary,
  • glosses,
  • images to enhance recall,
  • high interest story (I hope).
Anyway, that’s all for this review. I recommend Le Pendentif, based on extensive reading criteria. The others may be useful for more advanced learners.

Challenges of Representation in a Language Comic Book for Beginners

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I often reflect on the content of my comic book, and how I have unconsciously absorbed the default story of a white male character (in my case a group of white male characters) on a quest. In addition I have a wise (white) female character (Chantal), who is an oracle that intends to change the likely outcome if the quest continues as it normally would.

I’ve been made aware that people of colour want to see more people like themselves in stories and movies. I must admit that I have yearned for more female perspectives in literature and movies at times, which is as close as I can come to imagining how people of colour feel about being left out of mainstream media. Similarly for people who are queer, obese or disabled.

The difficulty with comic books is that the illustrations are often caricatures that exaggerate features. It would be tricky to create a PoC character without it seeming racist. There is no opportunity in a comic book for beginners in French, which has an extremely constrained vocabulary, to make things nuanced. I think the best I can do is have a variety of skin colours across the cast of characters, and not make the bad characters the dark-skinned ones. Having a queer character _might_ be possible (more likely a queer couple, as that’s easy to do visually without resorting to stereotype appearances). Given it’s a fantasy world, I could potentially do a genderqueer character that magically goes back and forth between genders all the time. After all I have a python that can make itself look like a dragon and a large gnome. Theoretically, the same could happen with skin colour.

I received only one star from one reader on Goodreads for Episode 1, without explanation. I can only guess why, but my guess is it’s to do with it being an entirely white male cast in the first episode – apart from the griffon, which is a mixture of white, blue and brown. This is partly due to unconsciously absorbing this default – even though my various influences (mainly fairly tales, Astérix, Smurfs, and Uncle Scrooge) do have more female characters than I do in Episode 1, partly as an artifact of being a slave to word frequency lists and my rules about what to include in each episode. In Episode 1 I only use French-English cognates that look identical in both languages. As such I only use adjectives that are either identical for both genders, such as “visible”, an exact spelling for masculine nouns only, such as “certain”, or exact for feminine nouns, such as “complète” (first occurs in Episode 2). I also chose to use a very limited palette in the drawings, roughly equivalent to a typical 12-colour set of coloured pencils, crayons or felt pens.

I think my comic books will evolve to have more diversity through the series. Episode 1 is already published, so it is what it is. Episode 2 at least introduces a main female character, who, like me, tends to work on her own to solve problems – at least at this stage in the plot. Episode 3 includes new characters, but since they’re not “good” characters, I won’t make them PoC. I haven’t written the Taxi and La Question du Moment for Episode 3 yet, so there is a bit of scope there to increase diversity. At least now I’m more aware of this, and can consider it in my writing/drawing process. Stay tuned for Episode 3… Meanwhile, here is a first attempt at a PoC for my comics – a recolouring of a panel from Episode 2. Is it OK?

g2croppedp17excerptrecoloured
Recoloured panel from Episode 2’s La Question du Moment. I think this is ok. Let me know if it isn’t.

What is the target age range of your writing?

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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.

Episode 2 Launch Tomorrow!

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I’m launching Episode 2 of my French language comic for beginners in the French language that have English as a first (or accomplished) language. The launch happens three years after Episode 1’s launch, and both are associated with concerts of my choir. I use appropriate choir concerts as a deadline for me to push myself to complete things. It works for me, although it does wreak havoc with my health in the short term. Last time it was a concert of music from France. This time it’s a fantasy-themed concert featuring a dragon.

The concert is The Quest, an entertaining night of music interspersed with a fantasy narrative involving a dragon. Music from my second (La Potion des Pythons) and third (La Mission) comic books will be featured in the concert. The song La Mission is also available on my third album On the Rocks.

Episode 2 (and Episode 1) will be available on the night in large format comic book, which is roughly a standard comic book size. Episode 1 is also available as an ebook from Amazon, and I’m running a special countdown deal starting on the day of the concert (Thursday 1st June), so Thursday is the best day to get your copy of Episode 1 for US$0.99.

Episode 1 provides incidental repeated exposure to 12 of the most frequently occurring words in French, but also provides gloss support and explanations of the new word of the page at the bottom of the page. Episode 2 uses the remaining 8 of the 20 most frequently occurring words in French newspapers. All the rest of the words used in the story are French-English cognates, like “dragon”, or names, like “Jacques”. In Episode 2 the amount of text in the main story reaches a level that it starts to be possible to guess the meaning of the new word of the page before checking the meaning provided in the gloss. This is considered optimal for vocabulary acquisition.

Have a look at the preview on Amazon and get ready to be entertained while reading the easiest French books you’ve seen. Then perhaps you’d like to read Episode 2.

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