I'm currently learning French. What is some required reading for this beautiful language?
lay miz
>>8156956
Le petit prince,
L'étranger (prose nothing special for most of it but a good starter),
Godot
a couple stories from Maupassant,
Montaigne if you can handle it
>>8156989
>L'étranger (prose nothing special for most of it but a good starter)
I agree with this guy and cannot stress this enough. It was the first book I read in French and I found it much easier than le petit prince. After a year of French in college and prior knowledge of Spanish, I could read this book pretty easily with a dictionary.
That really sent me ages ahead. I also recommend that you read Françoise Sagan. All of her books are about bored bourgeois sexual deviants but it is a good level of difficulty for someone learning to read French.
I don't consider myself able to read good literature yet and I only really read in French and understand a little. For example I started Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise and had to put it down. I did pick up some Ballsack and plan to read him later.
>>8156956
Start with l'etranger. When the narrator doesn't care about something, he uses simple SVO sentences with few pronouns, and even with only a little French you can probably read those sections with minimal dictionary support.
After l'etranger I battled through Sartre's la Nausée which was hard as shit but incredibly rewarding, and now I'm reading Les Fleurs Du Mal. I'm thinking Flaubert next but I'm undecided
>>8157002
By the way could anyone recommend how to go about studying German? I find it honestly pretty strange and obscure. I really want to study Italian and German now.
>>8157037
One small thing is with German you can't dispense with at least familiarising yourself with some of the grammar first like you could (as an English speaker) with Spanish or Italian. Because of the cases and sentence structures mostly, you'll have to be able to parse them in an intuitive manner before you can learn by reading.
Nature Noire by Pianitza (unknown book)
Amazing story, new vocabulary and a bit of slang but also easy to understand without loads of french skill
>>8156956
Newspapers and French TV with subtitles
> tfw I now know how to say "I dare say..." after watching a Bible reading show
>>8157002
i thought ballsack would be way tougher than jean jacket
>>8158508
"si j'ose dire" might seem like a literal equivalent but it doesn't have quite the same connotation as "I dare say"
>>8157028
How is fleur de mal?
>>8156956
look at art instead
>>8159898
Difficult but in a different way. Part of reading in a foreign language is learning to skim. When I started I couldn't skim it would take me about an hour to read only 2 or 3 pages, now I can read about 8 or 9 because I know which words to stop on and which to push through.
Because fleurs du mal is a collection of short poems, you have to know about 95% of the words before the meaning becomes clear, thus you can't skim, and it takes much longer to read.
On the other hand, with the novels, occasionally I couldn't finish a chapter in one sitting, and when I picked the book up again I would be lost; you can definitely read a poem or two in one go.
It's a very different experience; I recommend you finish at least one novel before you start fleurs du mal
>>8159949
Will do, cheers mate
>>8159853
Luckily I heard it in context.
I've found in general that journalistic type writing, French directly translated would come across a bit wanky (to use the technical term) in English whereas in novels and literature it's the other way.
get some stuff of the realist mov. tbf
fastidious but easy to read
lo 'pti prans
