Tag Archives: writing

Save the Date: Free Beginner French Comic Book

27 July, 2026Current Offers, My Comic Books, My Publications, Resourcesbeginner french, books, comics, easy french, Easy French comics, easy french graded readers, education, extensive reading, free, free stuff, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, reading, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

On Thursday, Gnomeville Episode 1 will be available for free for 5 days.

What is Gnomeville Episode 1? It is arguably the easiest first read for people with an English-speaking background wanting to learn French. It achieves this by using a comic book format, exploiting the thousands of words that are the same in French and English (cognates), and introducing one new word per page. By starting with the most frequently occurring words, you will quickly know a larger proportion of the words in any French text than if the words you learn are of some random frequency. For example, in English, the word “the” makes up about 7% of any English text. This skewed distribution is similar in every language.

That’s all very well, but for it to be useful for learning, what you read has to be interesting. The main comic story is an all-ages fantasy story about a mage, a couple of gnomes, a human and a griffon going on a quest to capture a rogue dragon. The style is a cross between smurfs, Astérix, and Uncle Scrooge comics, with a slight artistic influence from Mr Men. The first episode relies a little on sight gags until more text is possible. I have seen people chuckle as they read the comic.

In addition to the main story that introduces the vocabulary, there is:

A revision story that ensures that you see the vocabulary enough times for it to become more familiar.
A crossword for extra reading and active use of the vocabulary.
A song
An extra easy story about a taxi driver.

Episode 1 has over 300 words of reading in a 28-page comic book, introducing 12 frequent words and many French-English cognates.

As you progress through the series, your receptive vocabulary gets larger, the stories get more complex, and the text length per comic increases (Episode 2: 700 words; Episode 3: 1200 words; Episode 4: 1800 words). The recommended reading rate for complete beginners is one comic per day for the first three episodes and optionally two days for Episode 4. Then, if you are still interested in reading to improve your French, try some of the books on this Amazon store specialising in beginner reading books for French learners or books from Wayside Publishing or TPRS, and build from there.

Meanwhile, you can try Episode 1 for free from Thursday to Monday. Save the date!

Different Ways of Beginning with Graded Reading

14 July, 2026Personal, Researchcomics, comprehensible input, education, extensive reading, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

There isn’t really just one way of starting out with reading in a language that you want to learn. Through my observations and reflections, I have found the following different approaches for absolute beginners and near beginners.

All new words are illustrated. This can be a book that is like an illustrated dictionary, such as some board books I have read. Alternatively, it can be like Le Français par la méthode nature, where new words are slowly added and the text slowly becomes more complicated.
Assume exact cognates (words with similar appearance and meaning) to give a starting pool of vocabulary, then introduce new words gradually. This is the approach in Gnomeville. Unlike the previous option, this one requires an assumption about the first language of the learner. But the benefit is a greater starting vocabulary, allowing for more interesting content. It only works well with related language pairs, like French and English.
Small vocabulary stories with much repetition. This is the TPRS/Wayside publishing approach, and it’s valuable for absorbing language thanks to the repetition. These also tend to use cognates, which mean there is an assumption about the first language of the learner.
Parallel texts. Some people are really keen on these. It can be like your own personal Rosetta Stone (the stone, not the app), which can be fun – especially where there is a different writing system. I think these are most useful where the text in the language being learnt isn’t too hard, so that the translation is just used to check things occasionally.
Reading a story you know well in your first language. This is a bit like using parallel texts. I think it is too difficult for starting out but some people like to intensively read (that is, slowly, with translation and lookups of unfamiliar words) a favourite book rather than fluently read something easier. The argument against the approach is that very little text is read per minute, reducing the opportunity to be exposed to more text.
Bootstrapping a text. This is an idea that I have explored a few times. The idea is to filter a book’s sentences based on difficulty, starting with the easiest sentences and gradually adding more complex sentences and vocabulary. Finally, you read the full book. My earlier experiments with this idea were not successful. My current version is “Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers“, which starts with mostly one-word sentences consisting of names, interjections and a few cognates, and slowly builds vocabulary. As more is added, the book snippets get a bit longer, being either multiple sentences or longer sentences. The bootstrap book is organised like a form of spaced repetition, where new words occur several times in the chapters. So far, the extracts are not long enough to allow people to deduce the meaning of words through context, so there are short (5-8 word) glossaries at the start of each chapter.
Another approach that has been used on occasion is to start a story in the person’s main language and slowly add more of the target language words, resulting in a mixture of both languages. I have seen this done to teach Chinese characters in a story written in English. I’ve also read a paper on the approach being applied to English-German. In a way it is not too different to the Gnomeville method of adding a new word periodically, in a cognate-rich text, except in Gnomeville you are reading the target language immediately. For more distant languages, such as Chinese and English, the approach is necessarily different.
Related to the previous idea, it might be possible to have text that is in the learner’s main language but structured according to the target language. This might only work where there is enough similarity or simplicity in the target language. For example, you could have sentences like “I it to him have given”, to provide the flow of the language but with fully understandable vocabulary. Then, as for the other graded readers that incrementally increase their difficulty, words could be switched from main language to target language.

Is there a best approach? The research emphasises that time spent reading and interest in what you are reading are the most important factors. As for level of difficulty, the optimal is considered to be 95-98% knowledge of the vocabulary in the text. But there is quite a spread for this across individuals. The main factor seems to be whether you are comfortable with the amount you don’t know, and are happy inferring meaning despite not knowing the definition of some words. It is a skill worth developing. I think we have it as children and lose it at some point, and then need to regain the skill for language learning. Certainly my recollection in childhood was of happily reading comics in Dutch without knowing the meaning of every word. Then a couple of decades later, being frustrated that there were so many words I didn’t know in Dutch children’s books. I’m now back to reading books without stressing about unknown words in Dutch, French and German. For other languages, I still need beginner material.

Repetition in Graded Readers

16 May, 2026My Comic Books, My Publications, Resources, Reviews, Writingbook-review, books, comics, extensive reading, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, reading, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

There is a class of graded readers that make much use of repetition in order to give learners the best chance of picking up vocabulary via their reading. This is the approach used by TPRS, Wayside Publishing, and the Old English book Osweald Bera. On re-reading Otto Bond’s Sept d’un Coup, published in 1936, I noticed that a similar technique was used, albeit more subtly, so it is not a new idea.

My observation of reading books with lots of repetition is that on the first read this is fine and helpful, but on rereading it becomes extra tedious. If things get too dull, the learner won’t engage. It occurs to me that my approach in the Gnomeville comics saves people from rereading unless they really want to, via their design.

The first couple of episodes of Gnomeville are moderately repetitive, in that they are not the most repetitive French graded readers around (Bootstrapping the Three Musketeers is the most repetitive I know of, followed by Le français par la methode nature, followed by Édi l’élephant), but they are more repetitive than other books, based on analyses of the first roughly 100 words. I try to ensure at least five occurrences of each new vocabulary word in the comic but I don’t force it into the Gnomeville story. Instead, I have a separate story (La Question du Moment), which uses any words that haven’t had enough repetition yet. Then the following episode has a revision page at the start, which recaps the story so far, using all the vocabulary and grammar used so far. Learners can read this and decide whether they are familiar with everything or need to revisit the previous episode. When revisiting, learners can skip La Question with all its repetition and just reread the Gnomeville story. Or they can use some other method of checking the words that are still unfamiliar.

When rereading the first few chapters of Osweald Bera, which I do periodically because I only dip into the book occasionally in my world of many demands, commitments and distractions, I have been wishing for a summary for each chapter, which summarises the story so far and includes all the vocabulary I should have picked up from it without the additional repetition. I consider it my “homework” to create this for my own use. For languages like French, Italian, German and Spanish, there are quite a few options for reading material, so it is probably better to read something else instead of trying to reread these often long, verbose, repetitive books. For Old English, however, Osweald is the only reader of its kind, so rereading is likely to be inevitable.

Gnomeville Comics are Easier than I Thought

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

On reviewing my readability measure results for various items in my collection, I suddenly thought, “hang on, how can the expected vocabulary size for Gnomeville Episode 1 be 25 when only 12 very frequent words are introduced?” Clearly something had gone wrong somewhere.

I blame the fact that part of my analysis is manual, and I probably didn’t follow the procedure very well. I run various scripts to produce a ranked list of words in the text in the frequency order of a large corpus of written French (mostly from Project Gutenberg). The manual bit is counting up cognates, or at least starting at the least frequent word end and counting up until I find 5% of the words that are not cognates or names. I think I went astray previously by having a less reliable process.

Results can differ depending on decisions that are made, such as whether to include titles (which I treat as sentences), the “Présentation” section that has brief notes about each character, and what is counted as a cognate. It is reasonably clear-cut for Gnomeville, but for other texts, it is less clear. Should “habiter” be considered a cognate due to its similarity to “inhabit”? And there are other words that are cognates in the linguistic sense but not particularly obvious from a learner perspective. The choice of general frequency list will also make a difference. Spoken text has different characteristics to written text, especially in French. Also, the very frequent words used for Episode 1 and 2 are the 20 most frequent in French newspapers, which is not the same set of words as any other corpus of text. The text I use for calculating expected vocabulary size has some of those words at lower ranks (“se” at 25, “au” at 31, and “on” at 40), which explains why there was the potential for the expected vocabulary size to be larger than the number of words introduced. But unless those words made up about 5% of the extract it was unlikely they would receive those scores.

Anyway, on revisiting my incorrect assessments of the Gnomeville episodes, I have the following updated vocabulary sizes.

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

You may notice that Episode 4 has a lower expected vocabulary size at 95% and a lower readability score than Episode 3. There’s not a lot in it, but Episode 3 had longer sentences in the extract.

Well, there you are. Gnomeville’s expected vocabulary size is much smaller than originally calculated – at least for Episodes 1 and 3.

Gnomeville Episode 4 Soon to be Released!

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

Slowly (6 years!) but surely, my next comic for learners of French has been completed! I am holding a launch party for it on Sunday, where attendees will hear the Gnomeville songs performed, and have the opportunity to buy the comics at greatly reduced prices. Then, the physical comics will appear in the Square store, and not too much later, I intend to publish the ebook “wide”, as they call it, meaning it will be available from Kobo, Apple, and other ebook platforms. I intend to make Episodes 1 to 3 available in a bundle format for the platforms that haven’t had the comics before. So, more work to do. But first, we have the launch on Sunday!

A Tale of Three Three Musketeers and Another One or Two

7 November, 2025Reviewsalexandre dumas, books, education, extensive reading, fiction, FLE, français facile, français langue étrangère, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, mousquetaires, musketeers, reading, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

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

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

OK, now to details…

The CLE version

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

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

The CIDEB version

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

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

The FLC version

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

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

Summary and Another Mousquetaire

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

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

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

Common One-Word Sentences in French, Revisited

29 August, 2025Resourcescomputational linguistics, extensive reading, French, French language, language, language acquisition, literature, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

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

Ah !
Oh !
Eh !
Hélas !
Oui.
Non !
Non.
Oui !
Comment !
Quoi !
Bah !
<name>. (most likely names of characters in a play, the first one being Bonaparte.)
Pourquoi ?
Bon !
etc. (probably an artifact of how things were processed)
Allons !
Ha !
Tiens !
Hé !
Moi.

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

Beginner French Resources

23 March, 2025Resourcesapplied linguistics, computational linguistics, easy french, education, extensive reading, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

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

1 March, 2025Research, Resources, Reviewsbook-review, books, comic books, comics, extensive reading, French, French language, graded readers, language, language acquisition, language learning, readability, reading, vocabulary, writingSandra Bogerd

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.

Musing about Ratings

5 September, 2023Writingfeedback, ratings, reading, Reviews, writingSandra Bogerd

My comics get the full range of ratings and that’s ok. Sure, the first time I got a 1-star rating it hurt, and I did some soul searching to try to figure out why someone would do that. But it is a reader’s right to rate as they will.

A year or two ago I read a BookBub blog written by a successful independent author. He was very passionate in his belief that nobody should give low ratings to books, even if that is a sincere rating. It can have a negative impact on the author, both in their ability and motivation to create, and on their income. In my experience, my motivation to follow my creative spark is easily impacted by both negative and positive comments that I receive. Fortunately the positive comments can counteract the negative ones.

Having gone through the academic life of submitting research papers to be reviewed, I have developed a more philosophical stance regarding ratings. As long as someone is given feedback that they can act on in order to improve, a negative review is ok. Therefore my preference is this. Give a 1-star rating if you honestly feel that way and want to express that for whatever reason, but please give a review with it, so the author has some idea about why you feel that way. It can be just one or two words. Here are some one-word examples:

boring
dated
unoriginal
clichéed
inconsistent
blokey
girly
kid-lit
misleading
plotless
characterless
suspenseless
unedited
illiterate
ungrammatical

Given one of these one-word reviews, the author will know whether to work on plot, characterisation, writing, or factual content. If the review is “blokey”, “girly”, “kid-lit” or similar, the story may still be ok. Perhaps its nature wasn’t clearly indicated in the blurb for the story, leading to the wrong audience finding the work. The better the blurb gives clues as to the type of work, the greater the chance that reviews received will be higher, since those who are not the intended audience will give it a miss, and its intended audience will be more likely to find it.