How to learn French by reading

Many of the most-read novels in the world were written in French. Dumas gave us d’Artagnan and the Count of Monte Cristo, Hugo gave us Jean Valjean and Quasimodo, and Jules Verne sent readers around the world, under the sea and down a volcano. Learning to read French lets you meet them in their own language.

French also starts closer to English than you might expect. After the Norman Conquest, English absorbed a large part of its vocabulary from French, so a sentence like Le capitaine arrive avec une lettre importante is half-readable on your first day. The difficulty lies elsewhere: in the gap between how French is written and how it sounds, and in a layer of grammar that lives almost entirely on the page.

Why French is easier to read than to hear

Written French keeps letters that speech dropped centuries ago. Ils parlent, “they speak,” sounds exactly like il parle, “he speaks”: the -ent is silent. Temps, tant and tend are pronounced alike. Liaison joins words across their boundaries, so les amis sounds like “lay-zah-mee.” For many learners this means a page they understand perfectly turns into a blur when it’s spoken aloud. Reading while listening closes that gap, because you see every silent letter while you hear the sound it doesn’t make.

Then there is the grammar that readers meet and conversation rarely uses:

• The passé simple. French novels tell their stories in a past tense that has almost disappeared from speech: il fut, elle alla, ils dirent, nous fîmes. Learners who know only the passé composé (il a été, elle est allée) meet it like a wall in their first real novel. The good news is that you only need to recognize it, mostly in the third person; first-person narrators, like Axel in Journey to the Center of the Earth, add the je and nous forms.
• Gender, with traps. Le livre is a book and la livre a pound; le tour is a turn and la tour a tower. The article tells you which one you’re reading.
• Small pronouns. Y and en stand in for whole phrases: j’y pense, “I’m thinking about it”; il en a deux, “he has two of them.” And pronouns stack before the verb: je le lui ai donné, “I gave it to him.”
• A negative that means “only.” Written French keeps both halves of the negative, ne… pas. But ne… que means “only”: il n’a que dix-huit ans means “he’s only eighteen,” not “he isn’t eighteen.”
• The subjunctive. Il faut que tu viennes, “you have to come.” Older novels also use the imperfect subjunctive (qu’il fût, qu’elle eût), which, like the passé simple, you only need to recognize.
• Dialogue punctuation. French novels open speech with guillemets, « like this », and often mark each new speaker with a dash instead of a new pair of quotation marks.

French reading at each level

The levels page explains the CEFR scale, and CEFR levels explained goes deeper. Here is how it looks in French.

• A2, elementary. Short sentences in the present, the passé composé and the futur proche (il va partir), with the imparfait for simple descriptions. Common verbs, concrete nouns, clear dialogue.
• B1, intermediate. The passé composé and imparfait working together, the plus-que-parfait, y and en, relative clauses with qui and que, and the present subjunctive after common expressions. This is a good level to start recognizing the passé simple, because so many of the novels you’ll read later narrate in it.
• B2, upper intermediate. Narration in the passé simple, the full range of conditionals, dont and lequel, the passive, and a richer vocabulary for feelings, places and period detail.
• C1, advanced. Close to the original, lightly condensed: long, rolling sentences, quick-fire dialogue and the literary tenses in place. C2 is the complete novel.

The Three Musketeers at A2 and at B2

D’Artagnan’s first days in Paris, written at two levels for this page:

A2

D’Artagnan arrive à Paris. Il a dix-huit ans et il veut devenir mousquetaire. Le lendemain, il se dispute avec trois mousquetaires : Athos, Porthos et Aramis.

D’Artagnan arrives in Paris. He is eighteen and he wants to become a musketeer. The next day, he quarrels with three musketeers: Athos, Porthos and Aramis.

B2

À peine arrivé à Paris, d’Artagnan réussit, en une seule matinée, à se faire provoquer en duel par les trois meilleurs mousquetaires du roi, qui devinrent bientôt ses plus fidèles amis.

Barely had d’Artagnan arrived in Paris when he managed, in a single morning, to get himself challenged to duels by the king’s three best musketeers, who soon became his most loyal friends.

The A2 text stays in the present, with three short sentences and everyday verbs. The B2 text compresses the same events into one sentence: a past participle doing the work of a whole clause (à peine arrivé, “barely arrived”), a causative (se faire provoquer en duel, “to get himself challenged to a duel”) and two verbs in the passé simple, réussit and devinrent. Notice that réussit looks exactly like the present tense. Only the context, and devinrent beside it, tells you it’s past.

A reading habit for French, step by step

1. Read first, then listen. For French, the page is the easier channel. Read a section on its own, then play it with the text highlighted as it’s read and watch the silent letters go by.
2. Listen once more without the text. On a walk or on the train, play the same section again. The sounds now attach to words you already know.
3. Look up only what blocks you. Tap a word when the sentence doesn’t make sense without it, and leave the rest. Most unknown words become clear after a few more appearances.
4. Keep a short list of passé simple forms. When you meet an irregular one (fit, vint, prit, naquit), note its infinitive. The common irregular verbs are a small, closed set, and they repeat constantly.

The level matters more than the routine. Stephen Krashen argued that we acquire language by understanding messages slightly beyond our current level (Krashen 1982, Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition). For French, that means books where you can follow the story without stopping every line, even if a few words and the odd passé simple are new. Our guides to comprehensible input, reading while listening and extensive reading go further.

Classics to start with

French is unusually well served, because so many of the great adventure novels were written in French to begin with.

• Around the World in Eighty Days is perfect at A2 and B1: short chapters, a clear goal and a new country every few pages.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth has three characters, one long descent and a lot of suspense.
• The Three Musketeers is a joy at B1 and B2, where Dumas’s dialogue carries you from one chapter to the next.
• The Count of Monte Cristo offers revenge, disguise and a treasure: the perfect long read at B2.
• Les Misérables is enormous in the original. An adapted edition at B2 keeps Valjean, Javert and the barricade, and C1 keeps nearly all of it, lightly condensed.
• The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux’s mystery under the Paris Opera, is a good page-turner at B1 or B2.

Reading French with Lexo

In French, the narration may matter even more than the text. The whole book is read aloud, with different voices for different characters, and each word lights up as it’s spoken, so you see the silent -ent of parlent while you hear what’s left of it. Any word can be played on its own, and sentence-by-sentence mode gives you one sentence at a time with its audio and translation.

Tap a word and the card explains what it means in that sentence. Tap devinrent and you get its base form, devenir, and its part of speech; tap en and you get the meaning it has right there, which is the only one that matters. Phrases and idioms are explained as a whole, every sentence has a translation into English one tap away, and words you want to keep go into your Words list.

Each book exists at five levels, so you can read The Three Musketeers at B1 now and return at C1, close to the original, later. Many French editions are written the first time a reader asks: chapter 1 appears within minutes, you can watch its opening lines being written, the rest follows as you read, and the first reader keeps a dated “First edition” mark. Books download for offline reading, and purchases go through your Apple ID, so there’s no account.

Reading other Romance languages too? See Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.

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