Disclaimer: Not looking for language exchange partners or to contact anyone personally.
After living in Japan for over three years and obtaining high proficiency in the language to the point of working full-time in it, I’ve recently considered revisiting French. lol
If we have any French-speaking members or anyone else learning French, would you recommend I pursue it if I wish to only read in the language?
I don’t wish to document my learning progress in the forums, but I would love to hear any input from the French community or fellow members also learning/have learned French. Especially in regard for reading (and not for work purposes).
I learned French in school wayyyy back when, then I forgot it completely, then I revisited it (and found that I still remember quite a lot) and at some point I considered reading my first book in French… which left me in quite a shock as I had to look up each and every verb because I did not recognize any of them The reason is that in books and such a tense called Passé simple - Wikipedia is used, which I had not encountered yet… So you might want to brace yourself for that impact. Other than that, why not? It’s a beautiful language in my opinion
We learned that in school with the teacher saying “You don’t need to know how to use it, but you need to recognize it or you will not be able to read.”
Oh and… I think it’s always worthwhile studying a language even if you “only” use it to read. And honestly, with French there are enough similarities with other languages that, if you don’t have to make your own sentences or fix your pronunciation, it will probably only take you a couple of months to be at a level where you can read easier books.
Yes, this is what I found – it’s much easier to read a book in French because so much of the vocab is guessable.
If you like Tintin then those comics are a mostly straightforward read. Asterix is harder because there’s a lot of jokes and wordplay in there. For adult fiction I liked the Maigret detective novels.
I’m French
I’m not sure what your question is, are you asking if you should start learning French again? Or if we think you could eventually get to a point where you’re able to read books?
In both cases, my answer is why not! Sure, if you’re interested in learning French then by all means get back into it! And if you enjoy it, I don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to read at some point. Maybe French learners are better suited to tell you how long it might take, because I have no clue.
Very true, we very rarely use this tense when speaking, but it is the tense you will see the most in books. I never thought about how hard it makes things for learners. “You’ll never use it, but if you don’t understand it, you’ll never read” is not something you want to hear when learning a language
I had to think about it for a minute, and couldn’t come up with any examples… So I turned to Google… And it looks like you’re right, it is pretty much extinct That threw me for a loop for some reason haha, it feels weird to kind of “witness” the death of a tense… I guess I never fully realised it because I’ve been living in Spain for so long, where the tense is still in use.
So yes, no passé simple when speaking, only when writing.
If you do start French and want a learning buddy, I recently started myself using French in Action and Busuu.
In comparison to Japanese and Korean, as a native English speaker it’s so far been quite a bit easier. It’s also a LOT easier to get books, as EN Kindle unlimited and even my library (or Hoopla/Libby thru my library) has tons of books, audiobooks, and comics in French.
I’m learning French at the moment - I started back in May. I’ve been documenting my progress in my log (latest update here, recap of June) and this month I’ve reached a point where I’m able to read the first Harry Potter text with audio accompaniment and feel like I’m getting enough meaning that I can officially leave graded readers behind now.
I personally found the graded readers on Alice Ayel’s site incredibly helpful for getting my foot in the door coming from absolute zero, but if you have some background already you might be able to just start by reading the Inner French podcast transcripts if you wanted that ‘graded’ feel, or just…jump right in? Reading in French, even with the different verb forms, has been a complete breeze compared to Japanese. Yes there will be struggle, yes there are soooo many idioms that are kind of a pain to look up, but it gets easier pretty quickly and if all you care about is reading you can probably do it faster than me. I’m at around ~160 hours of study currently and that’s split across reading, explicit grammar study, speaking practice, dictation drills, and TONS of listening practice.
I still sometimes use “Il fut un temps, …” (en: There was a time when …) even in oral conversations. The only other usage example I can think of is quoting the Bible when turning on the lights in a room: “Et la lumière fut!” (en: And there was light) (I can’t be the only one doing that right? )
7 Likes
As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
The reason is that in books and such a tense called 
