Good books to learn French?

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on February 14, 2012 at 4:16pm

If you're in London, then by far the best bookshops is Foyles, just up from Leicester Square tube station. There's also a branch of Blackwell's just across the road, though you probably won't find much there that you can't find in Foyles. If you happen to be planning a trip to either Oxford or Cambridge (which are an hour or so on the train), they have more grown-up branches of Blackwell's. The other main bookstore chain is Waterstone's, of which you'll find several branches in London, though they tend to be less academically-focussed.

You will find some books of the type you mention, based on passages of text. If you do go for such a book, then I would say:

- be careful to make sure the book is actually based around text you're interested in, not just text that the publishers chose because the copyright fees were cheap;

- be careful to make sure that the each text in the book is actually chosen to demonstrate specific grammar points and not just points at random from a bunch of cheap-copyright texts.

I would personally suggest that you instead find some French web sites dedicated to topics you're interested in (and preferably ones with discussion fora where you can interact with people and practise writing in French).

You might want to consider:

- a comprehensive grammar book (one edited by Glanville Price is popular among UK university students)

- quite a good pragmatic choice for checking your knowledge of basic grammar is a book called Correct Your French Blunders which I reviewed a couple of years ago. Like many basic grammars it can be a little simplistic and prescriptive at times, but is quite pragmatic at getting across the basics.

But above all, the advantage of going to a place like Foyles is to have a browse for a couple of hours and see what you find...

And remember Amazon can surely deliver whatever book you choose, be it from the UK, French or Japanese branch. If you don't want to fly back to Japan with a rucksack full of books, a strategy could be to buy a couple of not-too-heavy books in the bookshop and then note down any other interesting ones to have delivered later.

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Permalink Reply by Claire H on February 14, 2012 at 10:39pm

Hi, 

The best books out there are the CLE series. So, grammaire progressive du francais, vocabulaire progressif du francais (if you really have learned and thoroughly know all the tenses and moods then go for the advanced set, but I think there's no harm in brushing up on the basics, so maybe try the intermediate. Conjugaison progressive might also be useful from that point of view. 

There's also littérature progressive du francais, extracts of French novels and questions for you to answer.

All those books are great for self-study, because they have one page of clear explanations and then exercises you can do. 

For reading, try something called "Easy Readers". If you ask at Grant and Cutler and tell them your level they will be able to help. Grant and Cutler and the European Bookshop are both good places to check. (Better than Foyles and Waterstone's, which are not specialised language bookshops though they may have good language sections.)

But if you type in "grammaire progressive du francais" to Amazon, all the other books should pop up. 

Also, you might find my book q useful - it has lots of useful pointers for this kind of question: it's called Conquering Babel and you can get it on amazon.com. My blog is conqueringbabel.wordpress.com and you might find that useful too, and you can contact me via there if you have further questions.

Hope that helps! 

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Permalink Reply by joll on February 16, 2012 at 4:44am

Thank you very much, Neil and Claire.  I'll keep your advice in mind, and I think I can find a nice one with it!

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