French Short Stories for Beginners: 20 Captivating Short Stories to Learn French & Grow Your Vocabulary the Fun Way! (Easy French Stories)

By: Lingo Mastery

Narrated by: Noelia Gouty

Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's Summary

Do you know what the hardest thing for a French learner is?

Finding PROPER reading material that they can handle...which is precisely the reason we’ve written this book!

Teachers love giving out tough, expert-level literature to their students, books that present many new problems to the reader and force them to search for words in a dictionary every five minutes - it's not entertaining, useful, or motivating for the student at all, and many soon give up on learning at all!

In this book we have compiled 20 easy-to-read, compelling, and fun stories that will allow you to expand your vocabulary and give you the tools to improve your grasp of the wonderful French tongue.

How French Short Stories for Beginners works:

• Each story will involve an important lesson of the tools in the French language (verbs, adjectives, past tense, giving directions, and more), involving an interesting and entertaining story with realistic dialogues and day-to-day situations.
• The summaries follow a synopsis in French and in English of what you just read, both to review the lesson and for you to see if you understood what the tale was about.
• At the end of those summaries, you'll be provided with a list of the most relevant vocabulary involved in the lesson as well as slang and sayings that you may not have understood at first glance!
• Finally, you'll be provided with a set of tricky questions in French, providing you with the chance to prove that you learned something in the story. Don't worry if you don't know the answer to any - we will provide them immediately after, but no cheating!

So look no further! Pick up your copy of French Short Stories for Beginners and start learning French right now!

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
 

©2018 Lingo Mastery (P)2018 Lingo Mastery

Great for beginners & those wanting a refresher

The structure of this audio is very simple – a story in French, a summary of the story in French, a summary in English, a review of the key vocabulary, and a quiz. It works brilliantly. If you have some familiarity with French, it is a great refresher. If you are new to French, I encourage you to download the PDF and follow along. If you can’t, you may be a little lost during the stories, but don’t worry, the summaries will help you catch up.

I have some knowledge of French and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Of all the stories, I enjoyed the third one the most. The story of a woman who goes to speed dating and comes away with much more than she had expected. There are cute stories, funny stories, while some are short, and some are a bit longer. All in all, they are enjoyable.

Noelia Gouty is a fabulous French narrator because she does not have a strong regional accent – she is as neutral as one could wish. Her speaking in English is not as strong and she mispronounced several words. Not a big deal and certainly not enough to detract from the book.

Overall, I enjoyed it and can recommend it to someone contemplating plunging into the beautiful romantic language that is French. For myself, it was a wonderful and engaging book.

16 people found this helpful

Great way to learn French

This is a great way to learn French. It is challenging and if you are serious about learning French you are going to have to put in the study time and not just drive around listening.
They first read a story in French and give you a brief summary in English. The story lasts approximately 5 minutes. They spend about another 10 minutes on vocabulary words. I think there are 20 stories. They say the word in French then English twice. I have found it more effective to go back and listen several times rather than move on to the next story. As you practice saying the words and you hear them over and over you can start to pick them out of the story.
In addition, you can download the book in pdf. This is where you need to go if you are serious. Listen as you read along. Also it helps to see how words are spelled. I have gone through the first story and translated all of the words I didn't know. As you go along and learn you will need to translate fewer and fewer words. After following along in the book, you will hear so many more words.
This is not an "easy" way to learn French. There is not an easy way to learn another language. Language is hard! But this way is effective and it is fun.

7 people found this helpful

Pretty great!

It had been a while since I took French in college and this is the perfect way to get back into it! Well done and quite enjoyable!

6 people found this helpful

Great for learning French, but could be better

Great way of learning French; but there’s room for improvement:

1- When the title of the book says “short stories”, they mean dialogues, not stories.

2- At the end of each dialogue, the narrator repeats the French words twice, and their English meanings twice. I don’t think that repeating the English meaning twice is a good idea. After the first time, I get it. This is OK the first few minutes, but it gets annoying after several hours of listening. After all, I’m trying to learn French, not English!

3- If I were putting this book together, I would’ve had an English-speaker do the translations. The narrator has a heavy French accent, and at times mispronounces the English words.

With that said, it is obvious that much effort was put forth to compile this book. And I don’t regret purchasing it.

3 people found this helpful

I did enjoy all the stories ..

It is through this book I learnt that the French language is been considered as an official language in 29 countries across the world, though Rwanda said NO to it. How it will reach 500 million people speaking it worldwide by 2025.

This will be very soon. Writing and teaching French short stories: It is very much entertaining. Never mind the French accent in the English introduction and the interpretation of the narrator, but it is worth praising her too for making it easy to listen.

In this book, the narrator even recommends that you find a likeminded person to improve your new French language and the materials are here on this link: www.lingomastery.com/audible pdf. Not only how to read but also how to write. 20 French stories. One of these stories that touched me in a particular way, the scene between neighbors wherein one took the other to court for making him to be paying high electricity bills for at least half a year(6 months).

The story of Jean and Martine’s love relationship for over 30 years when Martine was preparing gala diner for the arrival of their two grandson’s send my mind into the future for my own relationship with my wife, Rose. She likes cooking. This book really, not only taught me new French expressions, but very good life lessons. It’s an awesome book that I will recommend for anyone to get a new language, should consider this book.

Go get it and listen to it. It’s a fit for purpose for beginners of French language learning.

I cannot close without putting at least two expressions that grabbed through my listening.

Here you are the two expressions:

Ne voit que du feu - to not notice a thing; &

En cœur - in unisson.

There is a lot of good things meticulously put in place to let the listener see the value for their money in the book.

May God bless the book; bless narrator and bless the author for this selfless initiative.

3 people found this helpful

Almost as good as being in France

They say the best way to learn a language is to move to that Country that uses that speech,but this course and others
like it is among the best tools available to learn French.

With a good Narrator you can be on your way to gain command of the Language of love without actually being in France.



This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.

2 people found this helpful

Very Fun Way To Learn!

My wife and I have been learning French together for a little over a year now and this audiobook was definitely around the skill level that we are at. Each story has key words you can look up in the pdf file that comes with the audiobook which I highly recommend looking at as you listen I would have been lost without it most of the time. It is a very fun and easy way to learn French and hone some of the vocabulary. With a few questions at the end to help you make sure you understand what the story was about. I will definitely be listening to this over and over as I learn more of the French language!

1 person found this helpful

Very helpful

This is a great addition to your language learning lessons. I find it hard sometimes to understand oral French and this audiobook really helps to improve your comprehension. The stories are varied and are a great way to learn new words as well. It includes a pdf with the dialog of the stories to help either follow along or improve your reading comprehension as well. Highly recommend this audiobook if you are looking to improve your French skills.

1 person found this helpful

Great tool

This is great for brushing up old language skills or for bridging the learning gap between basic communication skills and full conversation. I learned French immersively when i was young and once spoke it extremely well but 10 years later my skills are very much lacking.
I did find that narrator speaks rather quickly. This was frustrating at first but I think it actually could be good - you can begin by following along with the pdf, maybe at a slower listening rate and then eventually graduate to just being able to listen to the stories and understand her as she speaks like a regular French person.
For full disclosure, I did receive this book in exchange for a review, however my review is honest and was not influenced by this.

1 person found this helpful

Great Product

I was given this audiobook for free by the author, and because they were wonderful enough to give me this book, I am leaving a review with my honest thoughts about their product.

I really enjoyed this book. It comes with a PDF that is exactly what is said in the audiobook, which makes following along simple and easy. The stories are cute and fun, filled with useful vocabulary. It also has tests and vocab lists. I actually knew most of the vocabulary in the lists but found other words that I still needed to learn, which is good because that means it was a challenge level in French where I am still learning. I would definitely recommend this book for someone who has a working knowledge of French and wants to continue learning.

1 person found this helpful

Really useful resource for anyone learning French

This is a really useful resource for anyone with a pre-existing knowledge of French who wants to practise their listening and reading skills. Twenty amusing stories set in different contexts that will help you expand your French vocabulary and let you see working examples of different grammatical structures. The audio book comes with transcripts in French and English to support your learning. An advantahe when using an audio book to learn a language is the flexibility to rewind, fast forward and play around with the speed. The recording is clear and the French is clearly enunciated. I really enjoyed using these stories and look forward to exploring other recordings by the same publishers.

6 people found this helpful

Fantastic for starters

This is a great audio book to test your knowledge. It progresses in a natural and way way. I did end up referencing other materials to get to grasp with some specifics. Overall this stands on its own as a great way to hammer in your French knowledge

2 people found this helpful

A really handy learning tool

I really try but struggle with learning languages and I'm sure that to those more gifted than me in picking these things up this would be a treasure.

I am however, improving slowly after listening and going through the synopsis, the stories are short and enjoyable and I will continue to use and learn from this book ... one day I will master the questions!

Many thanks to TBC Audible Listeners for the opportunity to listen to this educational book

2 people found this helpful

Disappointing

Not really for beginners.
Narrator talks very quickly (in french and English) and the little bit of translation has a very poor English pronunciations that some words are difficult to make out.

Better as a reading book I would suggest.

There are much better french audio books out there.

1 person found this helpful

Useful but only if you're an advanced beginner

These are nice little stories which are helping me with my French. They come with a helpful PDF transcript.

I wouldn't say they are for beginners though. The language is getting on for intermediate. Right from the start you have not just the present tense but also the perfect, imperfect and future. No really complicated sentence structures but it's read fast enough to make it hard for a beginner. The reading is clear but could do with pauses between sentences to help.

I would question the worth of adding the vocab lists. It is bizarre that the lists contain the very simplest words (even le, la, aller etc) when if you don't already know those words then you truly don't have a hope in hell of following the story. Yet there are more unusual words which are missed from the list.

For instance, from this sentence: 'il cherche un foyer d’accueil, la pension affiche complet', the word they choose to put in the list is 'complet', which is just about the only word a beginner would NOT need to look up in a dictionary!

Furthermore, the nouns in the lists are not given with any clue to their gender, which is a very frustrating omission. Rather than record the word list, it would have been more helpful to record the story again, more slowly, so the beginner can hear the story that way if they are struggling.

1 person found this helpful

Good

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and I have voluntarily left this review.

This was a good book for beginners, and I quite enjoyed it. I really like the vocabulary sections, especially with a gendered language like French. The stories were nice and varied.

good stories but disappointing as a learning tool

No accompanying text so you only have the audio to go by and can't read along at the same time which is massively ungelpful. Secondly there are no genders given in the vocab lessons so you can't learn the definite or indefinite article. Thirdly some of the translations I suspect are a little "off"

Handy for improving listening skills

I found this really useful for focusing on practicing my listening skills. The PDF that comes with it means that when you miss a word, or can't make it out, you can check what it looks like, figure out the translation, and give it another listen.

I'd certainly recommend giving this a go if you're wanting to improve listening comprehension, but you'll probably get the most out of it if you're around the top of "beginner" level - i.e. CEFR/DELF A2 level.

Brilliant audiobook learned a lot of new stuff.

Brilliant audiobook learned a lot of new stuff. that is actually usefull in real life conversations.

Excellent way to develop your French

I purchased this book via Audible so I have both the pdf version of the book and the audio tracks.

This book contains 20 short stories (Chapters 1 - 20). The stories are in French followed by a short summary in both French and English. Following this are 1-2 pages of vocabulary related to the story and then a short multiple-choice Q&A (4-5 questions in French) to ensure you have understood what you have read.

Each story covers a different aspect of the French language. e.g. Chapter 1 - On the Road to Summer Vacation (Basic vocabulary), Chapter 2 - The Wedding Plans (Time & Units), Chapter 3 - The Speed Dating Evening (Basic Introductions and Simple Conversations), Chapter 4 - The Scapegoat (Pronouns), Chapter 5 The Inheritance (Numbers), Chapter 6 - The Domestic Dispute (Adjectives), Chapter 7 - First Trip to London (Verbs – Infinitive) etc.

In all the stories, certain words are highlighted in bold, and these words can be found in the vocabulary section along with their English translation.

You will need some basic comprehension of French to understand these stories but you shouldn’t be put off purchasing it. I’m a complete beginner and although I am struggling with some parts of these stories, the more I read them and learn French from other sources the more it starts to come together.

Purchasing via Audible makes a huge difference as you get to hear what you are reading. You get to hear the correct pronunciation of the words and with Audible, you can slow down the speed of the audio so you can hear the pronunciation very clearly. You also get the read along at the same time to practice your spoken French (I think this is the best way to learn).

My only disappointment with this book is that the contents pages only list Chapter numbers without the title of the story. I don’t know if this is a restriction caused by Audible as all my books purchased have the same issue. It would be nice to have the titles next to the Chapter numbers.

I’d highly recommend this book and the other Lingomastery books on French, especially Conversational French as you get a full English translation of the French text rather than a summary.