Short Stories in French for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn French the fun way! (Foreign Language Graded Reader Series)

I recently ordered a number of Olly's books for myself and family/friends. The books arrived in very good condition and on-time.I am greatly enjoying the Brazilian Portuguese book, using it not only for reading but for spoken practice also.There are a couple of minor misformattings (keyword lists having the odd word in the wrong order) but nothing to disrupt the StoryLearning method. I'd definitely recommend this series to an A2 learner as a way to accelerate their learning.One unfortunate aspect of the series is that each of the stories is the same across all beginner books - each one features the same 8 plotlines - and therefore I assume for the intermediate books also. I was hoping to use the French books following my use of the Brazilian Portuguese one, however I won't be able to engage with them in quite the same way as I will unavoidably remember each of their twists and turns.

Been studying French on line and needed that something extraPerfectAddresses my elementary level with easeThoroughly recommend

All the stories are interesting and most of all will improve your reading & understanding skills. The way the book is laid out on the kindle format are particularly good. If there's a word you are unsure of, you just click the word & it tells you (not in the normal translate app).

I’m learning French on an app but wanted to take it to the next level. This book is fantastic for getting a real feel for the language and makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.I LOVED the instructions and guidance from the author at the beginning about how to work through it.J’adore ce livre!

The learning format was great. There are links and vocabularies for new words.A very good learning book.

It is a good book, but it might be helpful if the description gave a minimum age range to clarify “For beginners”.I bought them for primary school leavers ahead of their move to secondary French, but the books were more GCSE level.Thank you.

As mentioned by only one other reviewer - I'm suspicious of this - the trumpeted glossary is not good. Odd selection of items, in which difficult constructions hard to fully appreciate for non-French speakers are left out, but single words that any beginner would already know are listed. A few of the bold words have no translation, as has been said or, Irritatingly, the context often is not translated with the correct tense, nor with the correct English language nuance. I don't know about the naturalness of the French, but the English is often slightly misleading or doesn't take account of the context of that instance of the word. 'Se rendre compte' is a French expression meaning 'to realise' but sometimes in certain contexts that translation doesn't work in English, and anyway the word 'realise' has two meanings in English. I therefore spent quite some time researching the expression under its component parts in various larger and larger dictionaries, which I had to buy, before I really learnt the phrase or trusted it. So the whole context learning effect of learning from stories has misfired. This book doesn't make it much easier for you.Repetitions are used, but not in a way which would teach you the meaning, although if you want something drilled into you, you'll probably be satisfied. For instance, the narrator tells us that they arrive in the suburbs of the city, where there are lots of parks and they can have a barbecue, and one character then asks where they are and the main character says "We are in the suburbs of the city where there are...... " etc. you get the idea. Naturally I had to look quite a lot of that up in my dictionaries.Finally, some of the stories are quite good, the first and last ones particularly, but you are also going to learn a lot of useless vocabulary about pirates and being invisible and time travel and a monstrous fierce beast and science fiction etc. And for learners, couldn't we be protected from the past historic? I know it's a French thing in stories, but we're mostly reading to learn conversational French and the Past historic most certainly is only used in writing.

My main complaint is the author’s choice of which French words to include in the vocabulary, giving the English translation eg l’animal = animal, la potion = potion, exotique = exotic, l’aventure = adventure, serieux = serious etc. In other words - obvious to anyone with no French knowledge. At the same time, more difficult words & phrases are left to the reader to try to translate. I do like the précis after each story & the questions.