Lessons for English speakers
Learn to read French
A short, active path into reading French: decode real words before revealing their sound, learn the silent endings and the joins between words, follow where the pieces of a sentence sit, and read a small story before opening your first book.
13 core sections · ≈ 34 min + 3 optional lookups · ≈ 51 min with everything
13
Into your first book
≈ 2 min
What you'll learn
- Start with the Green Hill fables, which use deliberately limited language — very nearly the word list you have just read.
- Read the French line before looking across at the English; tap an important unknown word once and move on.
- Three things this path left out are named below; none changes what a sentence means.
- After Green Hill, move to Winnie-the-Pooh, then Doctor Dolittle — in that order.
A real book has longer sentences than these, shapes nobody showed you, and words you do not know. All three are normal and none is a reason to stop. You now know what to notice while you look things up: the silent endings, the joins, the little word in front of the verb, the two halves of the negation, and the two pasts a story is told in.
Three things this path left out, and what to do about each
| What you will meet | What to do |
|---|---|
| yee and enah(n) — “there” and “of it” | Read past them; the sentence works without them. |
| flipped questions and speech: Où vas-tu ?oo vah-tew“where are you going?” · dit-ildee-teel“said he” | The shapes you know, turned round — sometimes with a -t- pushed in to keep two vowels apart. |
| short pasts of verbs this path did not teach: il fiteel fee“he did” · il puteel pew“he could” | Same shape as the past-tense section — a person word, then something short. Trust the shape. |