Quote:
Originally Posted by jadis
What the French call l'Âge classique (from late 16th to early 18th centuries) does have the advantage of "linguistic purity": the vocabulary is "soutenu" and restricted (Roland Barthes called Racine "l’homme aux deux mille mots") so knowing the few thousand Latinate words that are used in the literary registers of English gets you a long way. On the flip side, it's highly stylized and many of the words are used in ways that are subtly different from contemporary French, so I wouldn't focus on that era unless you want to be a scholar of French classicism or something.
I would avoid the 19th century: everyone thinks they're going to enjoy Madame Bovary or the Three Musketeers but it's full of lengthy descriptions of stuff like taverns and horses and chapels where you'll have to look up 5 words in every sentence. Impractical.
Many of the people I know who made the biggest progress in French started by reading plenty of nonfiction: it's just simpler than literary fiction and you can get it from wherever. From news agencies on Twitter to biographies of celebrities you like. Someone I know took herself to a new level by reading on her phone a French translation of an English-language Cure biography she found as an ebook (on Google's book app, whatever it's called) cause she was a Cure fan and knew a lot about them already, so she could figure out a lot from context as opposed to looking up every single word she didn't know.
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Thanks, that's good advice. I don't read much non fiction but that seems like a good place to start. I also ordered the first Claudine novel by Colette.
In the mean time I'm reading another French book, l'ultime secret by Bernard Werber. A French friend of mine lent it to me; the book is bad but the French is easy to understand with a little help of Google translate.
And on the side I finally started reading Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex (in English because that's beyond my level of French). I've only read the introduction but so far it's excellent.
edit for update: her take on biology is at times very dubious though. About pregnancy: '[...] loss of appetite and vomiting [...] signalise the revolt of the organism against the invading species' ...um sure Simone
Another update which I forgot about
: a while ago I read the Mischa Mengelberg book that someone gave me, and it was great. Very funny, very playful. Lots of whimsical writings about music, absurdist little plays and poems that twist language and play with it. His Dutch is beautiful; he also writes in German and English occasionally (his English is adorably off-kilter, as happens when someone tries to cast English in the grammar and idiom of another language)