Wednesday, February 23, 2005
(10:42 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Wednesday Book Recommendation: Reading French
Following the instructions on this page will not teach you to speak French, nor to write it -- only to read it. If you're a grad student or just a lover of literature, that should be good enough.Karl Sandburg and Eddison Tatham, French for Reading
I can't imagine how a language-instruction book could be better formatted than this -- it requires no separate notebook for writing out exercises and no flipping through the dictionary at early phases. Each lesson takes about a half hour to forty-five minutes, and as long as you're conscientious about following their directions, you'll come out the other side of this as a confident beginning reader of French. It also has a nice little collection of extra readings at the end. This would also work as an intensive review for those who squandered four years in high school French and have forgotten it all.
Cassell's French Dictionary
It's not the best dictionary in the world, but it's good enough. The chart of irregular verbs in the back, greatly hyped by my teacher, really is a great thing. If you're just reading, it should basically meet your needs, but I wouldn't rely on it for translation work intended for public consumption. For that, you really need to move up to this beast:
Harper Collins Robert Unabridged French Dictionary
I'm torn about whether the idioms are better laid out in this or in the Cassells. The Robert categorizes them, but sometimes it's quicker to have them alphabetized, as in the Cassells.
Alain Badiou, Manifeste pour la philosophie
The real key, once you get the infrastructure in place, is to set aside some time each day -- even as little as a half hour -- to actually read French. Neither an exercise book nor a class can achieve this task for you. The Badiou isn't the text I initially used, but it's relatively short and easy to read. Badiou's French as such isn't difficult (as in overly idiomatic), even if the ideas he is working with are, so his shorter works in general seem like a good first stop for reading material -- plus, you'll be on the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy. I tried to use Bergson's book on religion at first, and that was just a bitch for some reason, so I don't recommend that. Late Derrida is probably a good choice, too, because he stopped being so aggressively complex in his writing style.
And now, I ask the Internet at large: Is there a similarly useful text for "Reading Italian"? I was thinking of doing Italian this summer. Hopefully it will go a little more quickly since I have a pretty firm grip on French and still have some vestigial Spanish floating around in the back of my mind. If there isn't a good Italian book out there that meets my needs (and I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't, actually), I'll just do German instead, but German kind of scares me, to be honest.
Or maybe I'll just ditch the whole thing and play the latest Grand Theft Auto every night instead.
