Nothing too high-brow here, and you can even find translations of your teenage favorites. Furthermore, many YA novels are written in a series format, which is highly advantageous for learners. If you want to achieve fluency, kicking up your feet and digging your nose into a book is one of the best ways to get there.
In short, the more material the better! But first, a quick primer to get you ready for breaking out those full-length texts. This leaves you more brain power to concentrate on getting a handle on unfamiliar tenses and vocabulary. In addition to being able to look up words, you can highlight and make notes. While you can do this in a regular old book, e-readers make it easy to look up your notes later on.
If you like this modern day update to old-school reading, mix FluentU into the mix, too. Just search any new word you encounter in one of your French books and FluentU will show you real French videos that use the wordβfrom movie trailers to funny commercials to news reports to inspiring speeches.
As you watch, click the word or any word in the interactive subtitles for an instant definition, grammar info, memorable picture, isolated pronunciation and example sentences. There are also flashcards and fun quizzes built into every FluentU video.
French has certain tenses that are only used in literature. Here are two additional literary tenses that may baffle you upon first glance. The past past! Note: Gender and quantity agreements still apply here since the past anterior is a compound tense. The imperfect subjunctive is used when the main clause is in the past. Example: Il alla He went. Example: Il finit He finished. Note: The same usage rules that apply to the regular subjunctive also apply to the imperfect subjunctive.
