Salut, mes dopers! I learned French for six years in school until 1986. That sounds much, but my level then wasn’t much better than being able to read easy books or newspaper articles and getting by somehow when visiting France. But unlike with English, I never kept the ball rolling, and my French grammar and vocabulary was immensely degraded before I started to fresh it up by starting to learn the language anew with the help of Duolingo about a year ago. I started there from the very beginner’s lessons, so the first batches were quite easy (I hadn’t forgotten everything, after all), but right now I am at a level where I want to start testing my abilities. A regular French newspaper site is still somewhat too difficult for me, but I think I’m also above the level of stories for children, so it should be something in between.
So does anybody know good sources for relatively easy to follow French reading material? My interests are broad, it can be stories, essays, newspaper articles, scientific, cultural or historical themes.
I took three years of French during high school. In our third-year class, our teacher got us copies of the French Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest, which we used for doing translation and proficiency work. It looks like they have some online content now: https://www.selection.ca/
PPS - while I remember, I find this very useful: If you use Microsoft Edge to read (say) French newspapers, you can select text for autotranslation (in a box on screen) using a free extension called Mate Translate. This means that if you get stuck on a single word or phrase, you can select and translate it.
The […] icon in top right of the Edge browser is where you can find extensions to download.
Wow, that’s fantastic! I’ve loved Asterix and Obelix since I was a child and have read all issues up until about 1980 and even got me the latest one, “Asterix in Italy” for nostalgic reasons, but those were all German translations. How can it be that they are already in the public domain?
Thanks, though I use Chrome (wouldn’t touch a MS browser with a ten foot pole, still burned by versions 2-11 of IE I had to involuntary deal with as an IT guy), there’s certainly something similar in Chrome. I used to have such an extension many years ago for Firefox.
I would not assume that it is in the public domain (Goscinny died in 1977). The terms of use of the Internet Archive say that it is for research and scholarship purposes only, and that you agree to limit your use to fair use etc. etc. So, pretty much, you may read it online or on your e-reader devices but you cannot publish it, sell it, adapt your own Asterix comics, or whatever, and if you want a physical copy you will have to go to the comics store and buy one. The situation is the same as if you encountered a copy at the public library.
Ah I see, thank you. I was under the impression that everything on archive.org was in the public domain, but I mostly only looked out for movies and music there. But I have to admit that this seems to be a very lenient interpretation of fair use, definitely much wider than here in Germany. That wouldn’t fly here, and that’s probably why archive.org has a handful of French Asterix issues and many American, but no German. A similar case is the ongoing trouble of gutenberg.org with the German justice which forced them to block their site (temporarily? I think there are ongoing processes) in Germany.