Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Time to read some French novels

I have yet to finish reading a French novel. I started some but they were not interesting enough or too difficult for me to finish. In fact, I only started reading English novel when I was in US, when I learnt enough vocabularies.

So, it's time to go through the pain again: read ten lines and have to check dictionary for at least 40% of the words. But no pain no gain right? Another reason that just keep pushing me away from French novel is the usage of past simple tense. While reading I like to analyze how a sentence is structured. Since I have never learnt past simple tense (some professors said it is seldom used in conversation), sentences become unfamiliar compared to those in newspapers.

Another channel is by reading blogs and forum, which usually have topics that interested me. I realized that I picked up some vocabularies here and there when reading someone's blog or forum (in English), but less effective when reading newspapers, as they sometimes use fancy words that you won't see them again.

I joined a forum in French a while back but was disappointed at the quality of written French. Some people just don't bother to put the French accent, respect the punctuation rules or simply use short form for a lot of words. Worst they included profanity which really turned me off. I read some French blogs from time to time but to find someone who write correctly as compared to some English blogs I read is just too difficult.

If you happen to know of French blogs who use quality written French please let me. :-)

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:06 PM

    To improve my French, I started reading Harry Porter in French - pretty interesting and the tense is repeated many times to let me get it in my head ;)

    I totally agree with you that in forum, most of them either abbr. or didn't bother to write or can't write in proper French (most of them are worst than us foreigners I discovered). Here's an interesting blog called Le Blog du chat, sans tchat' to read and it is written in very proper French. :)

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  2. hey, can anybody tell me where i can get french storybooks/novels for beginners in malaysia (klang valley)?
    i'm a beginner in french. anybody wanna sell to me online i accept that. thanks. :)

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  3. hi hakim,

    I don't know it personally. I will ask around and if I get any info I will let you know.

    If not, I'm coming back to Malaysia for holidays so if you are really interested, I can bring some storybooks back for you.

    Let me know

    Bee Ean

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