Short Stories in French for Beginners: Read for pleasure at your level, expand your vocabulary and learn French the fun…

I started learning French 119 days ago according to my progress report on duolingo. Great app by the way. I have bought a number of children's books to practice French with as well, but they are for kids so the stories were a bit corny. I saw this book and figured I would check it out. I've completed 47 sections on duolingo and have started Rosetta stone so my vocabulary is growing, but not huge. This book is awesome. I can understand 80-90% of the stories. I keep google translate opened for when I get stuck, but there are also bolded phrases that are defined at the end of the chapter you can go look at. there is a chapter review en francais at the end and a few multiple choice questions as well. Would I recommend it for learning? That's tough. That is a difficult way to learn. plus you have to have some French vocabulary as a foundation to even begin, but as a tool to practice reading and understanding as well as learning new words and phrases, its awesome. I have finished two of the stories so far. they are engaging enough to keep you interested beyond your desire to study French. If you are doing an app or rosetta stone and want to have something other than repetitive drills and single words or phrases, I highly recommend this book. its boosted my confidence with the language and I have learned a lot about sentence structure from it, like how things are said in the French language beyond a single sentence or phrase. I have a long way to go to be fluent, but they should write more of these and have them for multiple levels.

For those of you studying French, I've finally found a book to expand your vocabulary at your level. This claims to be A2-B1, and it's true! I've bought a lot of books claiming to be for the beginner to low intermediate, and I ended up disappointed. Not this time! I bought the hard copy off of Amazon. I also bought the audible version so I could hear the correct pronunciation and rhythm. I highly recommend the serious French student to purchase this book on Audible as well as the physical copy!

I bought this book on the day I found myself home with a cold. I wasn't sure what to expect. After all, most educational books are rather dreary. Not this one!Being new to the French language and a natural bookworm in my native tongue, I've swung back and forth between books that bore me but are at my current reading level and books I'm dying to read but have too many words I don't comprehend.This book is captivating, engaging and gives me a sense of confidence. At the end of each chapter, I can check my comprehension to be sure I understood. Buy this book, follow Olly's instructions and watch your language skills increase almost magically.

These stories start out so nicely. But every single story has either a moronic ending or a one-sentence pretty much non-ending!

I majored in French Lit many many years ago and this is the perfect book if you want a place to start reviewing and working your way back to previous fluency. I also bought the audio version. I am hoping that by first reading and then listening, I will be able to work my way back to the fluency I had in my 20's. If you do not know much of the language this is not the book to start with. It assumes you already have some knowledge of the language!!!

This summer I made it my goal to learn as much French as possible and this book proved to be an important part of my learning process. It helped me learn new words, review different types of grammar and sentence structures, and most importantly it gave me the confidence to keep pushing forward with my language goals due to it's short and extremely fun chapters. I found all of the stories to be interesting reads and I admit that the vibe of the horror story actually scared me a bit lol. I would definitely recommend this book to any French beginner who is looking for a fun language learning resource to use and I look forward to reading more of these books in the future. :)

Be warned!! All stories in these books are the exact same for every language. I bought three of these (French, Danish, and Russian) expecting a variety of stories, hopefully some culturally relevant/appropriate ones depending on the language, and a carefully catered approach based on each language's particular learning progression. But this is NOT the case. The stories between all three are identical (with some very minor changes for the sake of translation). Highly disappointed. This is extremely lazy, in my opinion. I guess If you only bought one, or you don't care about the repetition, it's fine.Amazon really needs to provide a book preview to avoid these kinds of situations.

I've been slowly going through these stories for the past two months -- along with additional exposure to the language -- and I find the storytelling method the best way for me to acquire French vocabulary and have a sense of grammar. The stories themselves are interesting, if sometimes a little weird. There are fairy tales, science fiction, mysteries, etc. The level of reading is probably advanced beginner, so you should have a smattering of basic French vocabulary before you undertake reading this. My method for reading is as the book suggests: read a paragraph or two and usually I miss several words, which I'll either pick up through repeated reading and therefore context, or if I can't figure it out I'll write it down to look up later. Because I'm also concentrating on being able to understand spoken French (which as I've recently learned, is different than written French), I also downloaded the Audible version and I listen to that and read along. Sometimes I just listen to those stories in the car, after I've read and become familiar with the text -- and my mind just goes along following the story that I'm listening to because I've already read it a few times. I'm taking my time to go through the stories in this book and re-read each one until I have the vocab and listening down, and it has been one of the best exercises in acquiring French.

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.

Badly written stories with not much logic. Obviously not written by a native speaker. Not authentic. Strange use of grammar and tense. Not at all suitable for students at any level. I feel cheated and would like to ask for my money back.

Really enjoyable and great for re-learning French with. The stories are each divided into three chapters separated by a brief summary of the chapter, some vocabulary, and some questions to help aid understanding. I've understood more than I've expected, picked up some great colloquial/conversational phrases, and there's some helpful advice on getting the most from the book included.My only minor issue is that the vocabulary section can be a bit... mixed. The occasional highlighted word or phrase is missing from the vocab, and the choice of words/phrases can be odd with some basic stuff included and some of the more unusual or difficult words not. Admittedly, no vocab section is going to be comprehensive and take into account the reader's background without turning the book into a huge dictionary.

I left school over sixty years ago, but always took an interest in improving my sparse schoolboy conversational French. Not having the opportunity to speak with any French people, my grammatical understanding left a lot to be desired. This book has helped me understand the application of tenses and gender by reading the short stories. It is encouraging to interpret the written word and then finding that one probably remembers much more than realised. Useful exercises at the end of each chapter help to fill in the gaps in one's knowledge.

These stories are really supporting my learning and are fun to read. They are pitched just right (I'm currently 38% fluent on Duolingo) so that I don't have to be translating every other 30 seconds. I get to the end of the short story - answer the questions and then read through the vocabulary list - when I re-read it is crystal clearer. There is a lot of meaning to be gained from intuition and gist making and this in itself is confidence forming. There are a lot of similarities between French and English and this also helps with learning French. I read the stories out loud in the car and my partner (driving) translates. This helps my pronunciation and spoken delivery and is also a lot of fun or to put it in French: Cela aide ma prononciation et la livraison partagee et est egalement tres amusant. I'm hooked and hoping there is a whole series.