Refreshing a language

[swtwentyman]

Eleven years ago I took the last of my seven years of French instruction and was more or less fluent; however I've done nothing with it in the decade-plus since. The other day I was reading some liner notes (to Dvořák's Slavonic Dances, both sets on one LP, mirabile dictu) and noticed that the French was different from the English; I gave it a look and found that I could read maybe 3/4 of it, much better than I was expecting, and got to thinking about brushing up on it.

Taking a community-college course is out of the question not only because of time constraints but also because 101 would be too simple but with 201 I might be missing or out of practice on some more basic things. Classroom education would seem to be too inefficient, as would teach-yourself-French courses. I'm looking to review what I already (or what I used to) know and learn the passé simple and other literary tenses that weren't covered in school, which was slanted towards speech and comprehension, and I'm really not that interested in either. What would be the best way to go about this?

[cb]

hi, if your aim is just to read (and not speak/converse, where courses or other lessons and then immersion are really necessary i found) i'd suggest you grab a grammar of french (around 100 pages or so, nothing huge like le bon usage) and spend a day or two reading it end to end. you'll skip the stuff you know, and see straight away the parts you need to learn. then start reading whatever it is in french that is making you think again about picking it back up and - with a dictionary - slowly start building back up vocab. the parts you need to work on will leap out by themselves. cheers, chad

[Hylander]

Get this dictionary:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss ... ins+robert

You can find it used on ABEBooks; earlier editions are equally good. Just make sure it's the unabridged edition, not the college edition. This dictionary has a wealth of idioms, which are key to reading and understanding French. It's the only French dictionary you will ever need.

Find a book in French that interests you (fiction or non-fiction) and read it, looking up all the words you don't recognize. If you really want to put some time into this, write them down in a notebook and review them, but that's not absolutely necessary.

The principal grammatical issues to review:

Verb forms
Clitic pronouns
Subjunctive and conditional

[jeidsath]

Buy a French audio book of a simple book that you know reasonably well in English. A translation of a children's book is good. Harry Potter A L'Ecole des Sorciers is available on CD from Amazon.

Listen to the first chapter as many times as you have to until you understand it. Then listen to the rest of the book, you probably won't have to repeat things nearly as often as that first chapter, but you may want to do a second listen to the entire book.

Make sure that this is active listening, of course. It's not worthwhile unless you are actually following along with the story, and can understand most of what's going on.

*****

Even better, make friends with a French person who speaks no English, and ideally has no interest in speaking English.

[swtwentyman]

Thank you all for the advice. As it happens I actually have a couple of readers that I picked up at a thrift shop a few years back "just in case". Being readers they'll probably be on the easier side, which is good. (This would be intended more as something to do on weekends)

I'll get that dictionary. What would be a good reference grammar? I can find a few on Amazon (including the improbably-named English Grammar for Students of French, which I guess isn't a French grammar, unless it is) but I'd rather get a recommendation rather than to roll the dice.

[Paul Derouda]

I'm not sure what you're exact aim is, and what advice you need depends on that. If I understood correctly, you mostly want to be able to read French fluently. In that case, I don't think you should spend too much time with a grammar. You'll learn actual French much faster by reading something interesting. My advice, for what it's worth:

1) Why read translations? Read something originally written in French and not too difficult, for example:
-Children's books. Le Petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is a classic. Le petit Nicolas by Sempé&Goscinny are funny little stories told by a little schoolboy, another classic (a bit naive but funny; I doubt you will find a single instance of passé simple in Petit Nicolas...).
-L'Etranger by Albert Camus is not too difficult (which is rare for "adult's" classics. Other books by Camus are not easy!)
-Comics. There's zillions of them, but you could try the most classic ones: Tintin, Astérix, Lucky Luke. Stay away from Astérix & Lucky Luke albums that have appeared after the death of Goscinny, they are low quality.
-Newspapers and magazines are a good way to learn a language. The problem with French newspapers is that some are written in a difficult style, especially the most prestigious and/or interesting ones (Le Monde and especially the weekly comical papers Canard enchainé and Charlie Hebdo are very difficult). But many others you'll find a lot easier.

2) I really don't know about reference grammars, I've only known monolingual ones many years ago. My advice is to pass only a minimum time with a grammar book and find something "real" to read instead! One nice resource though is Bescherelle: La Conjugaison Dictionnaire De Douze Mille Verbes. It's just what the name says, it just lists the inflections of about every French verb, a mess almost comparable to the Greek one. A true classic which brings back not-so-good memories from my school years!

3) A good dictionary. "Chien = dog" isn't enough, you need a real dictionary with idioms, examples etc. Hylander's recommendation is likely to be good, they always are. The monolingual dictionary I recommend is Le Petit Robert de la langue française, but it might be too advanced for you at this stage. But once get to the stage that you can read long stretches of French comfortably, I definitely recommend you get this one, which is probably what most educated French people use. (There's also a Grand Robert, a multi-volume affair – not even Hylander needs that (I've never seen it) – Le Petit Robert isn't "petit" in any common sense of the word.) There's also a Micro Robert, which is an abridged and simplified version of Petit Robert.

4) Sometimes you don't have time to look in the big dictionary. Still, don't use the "chien = dog" sort. Use Google translate! Copy the sentence you don't understand, and it will give different guesses at what the it might mean; quite often it interprets the context correctly (not always!). You can select individual words to see other possible translations. It also often helps to clarify multiword structures inside a sentence. My German is probably worse than your French, and I've often found help there. For instance, in "Ich komme um 15 Uhr in München an" we have the separable verb ankommen, and Google translate is able to tell you that (by moving the mouse cursor over the relevant word) – this is the sort of thing you can spend a lot of time to find in a dictionary, but Google translate can tell you in a minute.

[swtwentyman]

Thanks a ton, Paul -- we read Le petit prince early in high school before I cared enough about French to put forth the effort, and all I remember is the baobab. That would probably make an ideal "re-introduction". Your advice is noted and much appreciated!

[MarkAntony198337]

ἀπόλλυται

[swtwentyman]

I've ordered Harry Potter et l'école de sorciers. Maybe not being an original French work it might have less literary value but it's aimed at juveniles which suits me. I'll get Le petit prince afterwards if all goes well, though perhaps I'll be doing those in the wrong order.

I'm familiar with Wiktionary and it's a great resource: I've used it to get lemma forms of Latin words I couldn't figure out (it's wonderful for the reduplicated perfects) and it'll be a loss not having it in Greek. I have my phone with me basically at all times and it's very handy.

[Paul Derouda]

No need to be a purist about this sort of thing... If you've already read Harry Potter, that might be helpful. The stuff I recommended is basically part of what I'd call "shared experience" for French people, the stuff almost everyone has read at school or otherwise. (Except for the newspapers I mentioned – they're part of that "shared experience" inasmuch as everyone has an opinion on them, especially people who have never read them.)

If after you've started you feel you need something even easier, try Petit Nicolas. Now that's juvenile, and very funny! It's closer to the spoken language than most things you're going to read, and would be the ideal thing to read before a trip to France, when you actually need to open you're mouth once in a while. Plus it's a good conversation starter – "Oh, you're reading that! I always loved Petit Nicolas when I was a kid".

[seneca2008]

Purist. Mmmmmm. I have not read potter in English I cannot imagine reading it in French. Surely if you are going to go the lengths of learning a foreign language it would be to read it's literature rather than something which is almost unreadable in English. The potter books are very well marketed I grant you that.

[Hylander]

Better read something actually written in French, not a translation.

Camus' L'étranger and La peste are written in very good French, in a plain and clear style, and they're not too long.

If you want to hew close to classical interests, you might try Anouilh's play Antigone, based on Sophocles.

I've read a couple of novels or nouvelles by the recent Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano, who writes in very good French, with contemporary (or at least post-WWII) vocabulary, relatively short works, enigmatic and compelling, though I'm not quite sure he deserved a Nobel prize.

Stendhal's black comedy Le rouge et le noir is longer, but also written in a relatively straightforward, almost flat, style. Of course, it will require you to learn vocabulary for 19th century realia, but that will prepare you for the great masters of 19th century realism, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and, ultimately, Proust, who isn't as difficult to read in the original as you might think. Flaubert is much more difficult.

[swtwentyman]

Perhaps you're right. I dug out the French reader (actually two volumes: the first, the Middle Ages to 1800, with the medieval stuff translated into Modern French; the second, the 19th and 20th centuries) and there's too much stuff to list here, but being A Survey of French Literature (as it's titled) aimed at the student it shouldn't be too difficult and most of the selections are short. I took a look at the first sentence of the selection of Chateaubriand's "La vie au château de Combourg", from Mémoires d'outre-tombe ("Pendant la mauvaise saison, des mois entiers s'écoulaient sans qu'aucune créature humaine frappât à la porte de notre forteresse.") and then the rest of the paragraph and understood it without much difficulty, though I'd have to look up the form "frappât". That doesn't necessarily mean the whole selection is easy but it's promising, and the reader might be at the right level, at least while I'm refreshing the grammar.

[Hylander]

[qu'il/elle frappât this is imperfect subjunctive, a form that has mostly disappeared in contemporary French. Only the third person singular is occasionally used by purists/pedants.

If memory serves, there was a case in the past 10-20 years where a French psychopath convicted of cannibalism prided himself on his supposedly impeccable French, and especially his command of the imperfect subjunctive in everyday conversation, which in his view demonstrated his intellectual superiority. Anyone remember this?

[Paul Derouda]

Hmm, I didn't hear about any of my teachers actually getting caught... No but seriously, I haven't heard that story.

Having lived in France, I've scarcely ever heard l'imparfait du subjonctif used in actual conversation except perhaps by someone who expressly wants to make a display of obsolete language (you could almost compare English thou/thee, ye etc.). Even passé simple is very rare in conversation, a middle-aged or elderly person might rarely use it in a special situation, but I think that's about all (I remember a politician in an interview after the French team won the soccer world cup in 1998 solemnly commenting "Cela fut remarquable." (not sure if he actually said "remarquable", but he did use the passé simple)).

In grammar books you also encounter forms like passé surcomposé. I've never seen it in the wild.

I'm not sure Stendahl is so easy but I could remember wrong. But I agree the names suggested by Hylander are all worth reading (I don't know Patrick Modiano – a recent French writer I've enjoyed (in a way) is a misanthrope called Michel Houellebecq. The French is not easy and he's not easy on the reader in other respects either.)

[swtwentyman]

I'm going to try L'étranger, then, after spending a bit of time with the reader to reacquaint myself (though I've taken a peek at the first work in both volumes and have opened them to a random page a couple of times and found that I seem to have lost very little). I was assigned it some year of high-school English but don't remember much about it -- I may have just used the Sparknotes (I do remember "mother died today, or maybe yesterday: I don't remember"). This would of course be more for the weekends -- Latin and Greek take priority.

My favorite band (the Fall) are named after a Camus novel.

[Scribo]

Remarkable, I've just finished his Soumission which has caused an extreme amount of fuss internationally. I actually found it to be rather well put together and I admire him for being willing to discuss, and profit from, a problematic feature of our modern society. I'm not sure the French is particularly difficult but then keep in mind I often have poor taste. But do read it lol.

Modiano: won the Nobel a year or two ago, I've read one of his, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, I found it interesting. Certainly worth reading. Camus' L' Etranger is one of the standard texts encountered by school children in the UK, a common first French book since its complexity lies elsewhere.

Never underestimate Harry Potter. Previous generations utilised the Bible when language learning, for mine its Harry Potter. Seriously when I was picking up Lithuanian I only had that and Twilight. If I ever have children I will be happy to introduce them to Rowling alongside Dahl, Blyton et al.

Now, regarding refreshing a language, my advice would be something like...just do whatever you can. I've been there more than a few times unfortunately and there's little you can do until you're thrown in. At some point anxiety over doing things the correct way just eats into time spent studying.

Not a useful point, I know, but I just thought it a funny coincidence someone mentions Houellebecq just after I've finished it and then felt guilty posting nothing else.

[seneca2008]

Previous generations utilised the Bible when language learning, for mine its Harry Potter.

Eheu fugaces Postume, Postume!

[Hylander]

Aha! I found it. He wasn't a cannibal, just a serial killer who specialized in young girls. Scroll down to Michel Fourniret:

https://pratiques.revues.org/2732?lang=fr

« Il fallut bien alors que je l’enterrasse.»

I think his odious flaunting of his mastery of the temps perdu put the final nail in the coffin of l'imparfait du subjonctif, so to speak.

[Bart]

One more vote for Patrick Modiano.
André Gide isn't difficult either, for example La Symphonie Pastorale, which also has the advantage of being very short. Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier is also a good point to start: a classic, and very readable.

And yes, comic books: all the ones Paul mentioned plus Gaston Lagaffe, a personal favourite. If you want something more up to date: Quai d'Orsay by Cristophe Blaine is very, very funny and very French.

And yes, why bother with translations?

Actually, I have the same question for Italian: any suggestions for readable Italian novels?

[Paul Derouda]

One comic I'd like to add to the list, my favorite: Achille Talon. It's not so well known because it's untranslatable (but it has been attempted). It is not easy, quite the opposite, but those who are up to challenge should give it a go! Knowledge of Greek and Latin is certainly helpful when reading Achille Talon, which you mght call the Thucydides of French comics. It's very wordy and very funny. Avoid albums made after about 1980. About half of the albums are collections of gags, but I prefer the longer stories; my favorite albums are maybe Le Roi des Zotres and Le Grain de la folie.

[Hylander]

"any suggestions for readable Italian novels?"

La noia by Alberto Moravia. I read this to learn Italian. Well-written, not too hard or too long, compelling story.

Not novels, but Se questo è un uomo and La tregua by Primo Levi. An account of his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz and as a refugee in Eastern Europe after liberation. Again, not too difficult and very well-written; neither is too long, but read them both because they complement one another.

[seneca2008]

Hylander have you read any of the Montalbano books by Andrea Camilleri? I am addicted to the TV series.

[Hylander]

No, I've not read them. In fact, I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't read anything in Italian for a decade or so. At 70, I'm desperately trying to hold onto French and Russian, in addition to Latin and Greek.

[seneca2008]

Thanks. Nothing to be ashamed of there! I regret that my russian, which I learnt long ago only at O level when it was thought appropriate for masters to greet their charges with a hearty Здравствуйте товарищи in the morning, is probably beyond recall.

I looked at the first few pages of a Camilleri and it looked like it was peppered with sicilian (or neapolitan?) dialect. I may make an effort if I can pick up a cheap copy when I am in Italy next week.

[mwh]

For Italian, If you’re at all interested in 20th-century Italy I’d recommend Cesare Pavese. Anything by him is worth reading, but if you read only one of his novels, let it be La luna ed i falò. It’s a wonderful work. Camilleri is entertaining and easy. You don’t need Sicilian to get the dialect words and phrases. For superior but somewhat older gialli, try Leonardo Sciascia, another Sicilian. He’s more political and plots beautifully (almost as well as Raymond Chandler). Mind you, all these writers are better if you’ve lived in Italy, as I did for a few years. My current bedtime reading (following on Kazuo Ishiguro’s strangely appealing Buried Giant) is Moravia’s La Ciociara, set in the 2nd world war but hardly a war novel. Very readable, humane, as Moravia always is, and good for my Italian vocabulary.

In French, I have to admit I found Patrick Modiano difficult. I’d never heard of him before he won the Nobel. I tried La Place de l’Étoile (geddit?), but didn’t manage to get through it. Houellebecq I can’t stand. Flaubert, a great writer, is more my cup of tea. Come to think of it, I really haven’t read much French literature much more recent than Sartre and Camus and the rest of that crowd. Even L'élégance du hérisson I read in translation—overrated, I thought. I expect I’d read more if I knew what to read. So I too would welcome recommendations. On a series of train journeys in France I read Les Misérables, not exactly cutting edge but it kept me within the language and went fast (just as well, given its insane length).

For Russian, I recommend—but no, I don’t read a word of Russian.

[bedwere]

Giovannino Guareschi describes an Italy that is no more, a much better one though. His satire will never fade away.

[Bart]

Thanks for all the suggestions for reading Italian. I started reading Primo Levi, whom I already read once long ago in translation.

@mwh: detectives and French, you must know Maigret by Simenon, right? Simenon's more 'serious' novels (Lettres à mon juge, La veuve couderc, L'homme qui regardait passer les trains, L'évadé) are less well known but very good.

[Paul Derouda]

This is turning more into a "books I liked in other languages than English" thread, but I suppose it doesn't matter, as long as we try to indicate how easy or difficult each text is for the learner...

Anyway, French books. I haven't read too many very recent ones either. I agree L'Élégance du hérisson is overrated. But not as overrated as Le Clézio, whose Le Chercheur d'or I found so boring I couldn't finish it. Endless and pointless "poetic" descriptions of how big the sea is, or something like that, I don't remember so well as this was well before he got his Nobel prize in 2008. I couldn't stand it. Haven't tried anything else by him.

A pretty recent, and not too difficult, book is Anna Gavalda's Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part – a short collection of short stories. The title says everything. It's the sort of thing on the ironies of life especially women like to read (I don't mean to pass judgement, I just say this as a matter of fact), but I too enjoyed it despite being of the opposite sex. For someone who is not entirely tired of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil etc., I'd recommend Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes. The book is too long but not uninteresting if you don't find a book on state murder too grim (I suppose this is the sort of book men like to read, on war and killings...). Plus the title is a reference to Aiskhylos.

I'd definitely and most emphatically recommend two somewhat older "modern classics": 1) Boris Vian's L'Écume des jours. A fantastic love story set in an absurd parallel reality that starts as a comedy and turns into a tragedy. I can't describe this any better, but everyone should read this short book. Much better than the recent movie adaptation. It's not very difficult, but maybe not the first or second book to read in French. Some acquaintance with Sartre is recommended but not compulsory, as an important side character is called Jean-Sol Partre! 2) Albert Cohen's La Belle du Seigneur. A very long book, but worth every minute spent reading it. This too is supposedly a love story, but as all truly good books it's really about Everything. Not the easiest book in French there is, but not extremely difficult either. One thing I remember about it is that it's one of the few books I've read where the "stream of consciousness" device (passages without any punctuation) is used (but not overused) in a way that seemed perfectly natural to me. Although Cohen (sparingly) uses some modern devices, I think this book would appeal more to someone who likes Flaubert than someone who likes James Joyce, not to talk about Houellebecq. Personally, I like diversity.

I agree with Bart suggestion of Gide's Symphonie pastorale: short and not too difficult.

[jeidsath]

Add me to the Houellebecq and Giovannino Guareschi fan clubs (each of whom I have only read in translation).

How useful do you find looking up words versus skipping? In German I often content myself with getting the main import of a statement, and try to limit myself to looking up two or three words per page (or fewer). And I try to choose texts that let me do that.

[swtwentyman]

How useful do you find looking up words versus skipping? In German I often content myself with getting the main import of a statement, and try to limit myself to looking up two or three words per page (or fewer). And I try to choose texts that let me do that.

Is that really reading, though, or is it just skimming? Admittedly I sometimes gauge the difficulty of a work by opening it at random and seeing how much is intelligible in any given sentence without looking words up, but it's at the very best an unreliable method, and whenever I'm actively reading a text I have a dictionary or lexicon handy. More-difficult-looking sentences often make perfect sense when you know all the words (and context, of course, but you've got that covered).

[jeidsath]

It's skimming if I don't understand, reading if I do, I suppose. I don't have the patience to skim. I doubt I have ever looked up even 1% of the German words that I know. If I find myself having to look up every word in a sentence, I ditch that book and choose something easier.

[thesaurus]

Greek and Latin enthusiasts seem generally to fall into the camp of "look up, annotate, and memorize every unknown word and construction" but I agree, jeidsath, that sometimes it's best to just get on with the reading. If I get tripped up here and there, so be it. If it's something you need to know, you'll probably encounter it again soon and then you'll look it up. I now take the same approach with my Latin reading, but that's because I don't have the patience or time these days to toil over a few sentences or paragraphs.

This may depend on whether you're reading something to learn the language or because you are absorbed in the story and want to know what happens next.

I read all of the Harry Potter books for the first time in Spanish. Say what you will about them, but these books had me hooked and allowed me to demolish thousands of pages of Spanish without feeling like I was "studying." I'd of course look up words when necessary, but I'd try not to let that sidetrack my enjoyment. I did the same thing with the Lord of the Rings series (which, by the way, contain much more elevated Spanish vocabulary than Harry Potter).

The benefit of reading something in translation is that you can reread books that you know you already enjoy; and since you're already familiar with them, you can pick up a lot more vocabulary from context.