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Languages and reading

Read French

Read French sentences, news, fiction, and informal developer posts. Trace references, events, and qualified claims through original passages and guided practice.

Prerequisite: Basic familiarity with pronouns and common verbs. No systematic grammar knowledge assumed. Speaking and listening are not prerequisites. Twenty-eight lessons and 56 worked reading exercises progress from sentence structure to independent reading. Original French passages, closed translations, sentence-role tasks, chronology practice, vocabulary review, and local reading records support news, fiction, and informal posts. Includes a short attributed @pgllmt excerpt. Understanding is assessed through evidence in the text, not automatic grading of your writing.

Lessons

  1. 1

    Find who does what

    Read a short French scene by finding the subject and the main verb.

  2. 2

    Read noun groups

    Use articles and agreement to find which words belong together.

  3. 3

    Recognize the present

    Connect common written verb forms to their meaning without reciting a conjugation table.

  4. 4

    Find negation and questions

    Notice the small expressions that deny, restrict, or question a claim.

  5. 5

    Join sentences into a paragraph

    Use connectors and repeated references to recover the paragraph’s meaning.

  6. 6

    Decode à, de, and their combinations

    Read relationships, quantities, and contractions in context.

  7. 7

    Follow object pronouns

    Recover who receives an action and what the action concerns.

  8. 8

    Interpret y and en

    Recover the phrase a short pronoun replaces.

  9. 9

    Follow a longer relative clause

    Recover the main statement even when descriptions interrupt it.

  10. 10

    Read groups of verbs

    Distinguish what happens from what is planned, required, or just completed.

  11. 11

    Recognize completed past events

    Read an auxiliary and participle as one past event.

  12. 12

    Read background and repeated past activity

    Recognize a past situation without turning every verb into a new completed event.

  13. 13

    Put past events in order

    Use tense and temporal expressions to reconstruct a narrative.

  14. 14

    Read futures and conditionals

    Distinguish a future plan, a hypothetical result, and a cautious report.

  15. 15

    Recognize the literary past

    Follow narrative events written in forms uncommon in beginner conversation.

  16. 16

    Find the actor in news prose

    Separate the grammatical subject from the person or institution performing an action.

  17. 17

    Separate claims from established facts

    Track who says something and how the report qualifies it.

  18. 18

    Follow the argument

    Read contrast, purpose, and causal claims without strengthening them.

  19. 19

    Decode headlines and compressed prose

    Expand shortened reporting without adding missing facts.

  20. 20

    Read a complete short article

    Combine structure, reference, time, and attribution in one account.

  21. 21

    Recognize the subjunctive

    Read unfamiliar verb forms after expressions of necessity, purpose, and concession.

  22. 22

    Unpack dense verb phrases

    Recover participants and time relationships in compressed clauses.

  23. 23

    Track voice, reference, and chronology

    Follow a narrator’s knowledge without treating every remembered detail as certain.

  24. 24

    Read a literary passage continuously

    Keep the scene and references intact while leaving some details unresolved.

  25. 25

    Decode compressed informal French

    Expand omissions and abbreviations without losing tone or negation.

  26. 26

    Separate literal meaning from context

    Use surrounding information to interpret a post without inventing its missing context.

  27. 27

    Read a new article independently

    Compare two accounts while retaining their shared facts and distinct emphasis.

  28. 28

    Build a reading portfolio

    Assess news, fiction, and informal posts separately on unfamiliar material.