>Been teaching myself French for four months >Still can't

>>8409872
learn french by reading proust not for reading it

>>8409882

I'm not sure this advice is entirely right...

>>8409882
you are a memester.

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>>8409872
You must not be putting enough time into it, or are doing it right. Write down all new vocabulary. Skip tutorial books and read fiction. Read translations of books you've already read. Stop being a lazy cunt and work harder.

At your rate, it'll be three or four years before you can read Proust without a dictionary.

>>8409872
Read Proust to learn French, then read Proust. It works.

>>8410028
>Skip tutorial books and read fiction.
So should I, as a monolingual pleb literally just start reading french books?

>>8410041
oui

You fucked up by trying to learn French in the first place. It's the most lawless and fucky language in the West, filled with so many exceptions to rules that reading it is almost as cocksprainingly painful as trying to speak it.

>>8410046
Trump?

French is so idiomatic I have no idea how people understand reach other. That's why I switched from French to Russian. Many rules and few exceptions.

>>8410058
>I have no idea how people understand reach other
cute

>>8410041
yes. when you see a new word look it up. start with children's books.

>>8410058
>>8410046
>thinks French is too confusing
>speaks English

>>8410052
Oh, Trump would never be so composed.

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>>8409872
>>Still can't read Tintin
>Will I ever make it to Proust?

you might, but once you've read Tintin, you've read the best thing ever published in French anyway, so you might as well just stop. it doesn't get any better after that.

i was also going to say Asterix, but the english translations are funnier than the originals anyway, so don't bother

>>8409872
read more grammar

>>8409872
listen here buddy, first make sure you have the grammar down, because it is your framework. find someone who speaks the language to converse with you, even if once a week, just to make sure you are putting the words in the right order. listen to french being spoken, watch youtube videos or films, and try and understand without subtitles, so you can get an understanding of the diction and intonation (french is particularly tricky in regards to this) finally, make sure you learn new vocabulary every single day. make a list of 20 words you dont know in a day, learn them, and put them in a sentence. pick up a few children's books and go through them, for example, le petit nicolas. bonne chance :^)

>>8410449
>Asterix, but the english translations are funnier than the originals anyway,
Are they? I need to read more good translations.

>>8409872
Nigga you're not doing it right.
What you need for tintin is
>pronouns
>being able to tell présent, participe passé and imparfait apart
>a dictionary
>time enough to go through a text where ypu don't know the actual meaning of a lot of stuff
English and french have a lot of words in common. Sure some jokes will fly over your head, but that's okay.
If you want to cheat read the english version when you've gone through it once and read it again.

>>8410501
French grammar = english grammar.
Only difference I remember is the verb-adjective combo is inversed.

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>>8410667
>Are they?
native french speakers may disagree, i guess. but the english translations of asterix by bell and hockridge are a masterpiece. they manage to retain the sense of slapstick humour of the originals and the latin puns and wordplay in the names and so on.

i think it helps that they have done (almost) the whole series from beginning to end. sometimes if you read translations of a couple of books by the same author where the translations have been done by different people there is a noticeable difference in style.

apparently there are also some "american" translations done by different people but they are probably best avoided

>>8409872
>did it in six months

>>8409872
>Proust
There are English translations for most of his works

Just read those

>>8410449
>i was also going to say Asterix, but the english translations are funnier than the originals anyway, so don't bother
I'm fairly certain you don't realize how many puns, innuendos and cultural references there are in the dialogue itself... but as for OP, those are not accessible to someone learning the language anyway.

>>8410747
i'm fairly certain tu es plein de merde mate
you know we learn french at school?

>>8410769
>you know we learn french at school?
Is this the post-post-irony I've heard so much about?

>>8410449
>english translations are funnier

no way man

>>8410714

>reading translations

>>8409882
>How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren't Real

>>8410785
what? maybe you don't live in a civilised country where you learn languages at school

>>8410802
yes way. read e.g. asterix and the goths in both french and english.

>>8410769
>>8411580
>I'm not missing anything about the original language because I learned it at school
Okay

>>8410449
The English translations of Asterix are seamless. I don't know if they can be said to be funnier than the originals overall, but I do remember certain individual puns being cleverer.

>>8410046
I don't speak a lick of French, but I've been told that it's a lot simpler to learn and speak than English. We got a lawless fucked up language right here mang.

>>8411650
native english speaker who has studied french for a long time here, the most frustrating thing about more rigid languages is their rigidity.

When you construct sentences in French you really have to think about the sentence in French, you can't just think of what you want to say in English and translate it in your head. You have to order your thoughts in specific ways to create grammatically correct sentences. In English you can just kinda let it rip and come out with something coherent.

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>Been learning French for two weeks
>Can already read the news at near fluency

>>8411979

You can literally read 90% of French news headlines just by knowing English.

>>8410041
What I did is I learned the real basics first. I taught myself the conjunctions, pronouns and the like. Doing this forced me to learn how the grammar worked. Learn the four or five most common verbs and their conjugations. Voila, you can read a hell of a lot of French. Start by reading the news and reading non-fiction articles. Every time you are unsure about something try to figure it out with the internet. The time it takes to solve it helps it stick in your memory. You end up solving the more common problems you find more often so they stick in your memory making the next most common problems the ones you memorise next. Non-fiction (at least the the level you should be reading) will lack a lot of what you need to be fluent. So when that becomes easy enough start reading short stories. The introduction of intentions and different tenses as well as some idiomatic writing will seem strange and will mean you have to learn a lot of new rules. When those are becoming easier you are ready for a novel. From here on out you can just read novels to learn (assuming you are learning French to read).

>>8411984
That only works for nouns so more like 15%.

>>8409872
I don't think you really want to read Proust, OP.
I taught myself French in 6 months because I had a goal.
Find your goal and you'll learn French in a breeze. It's way easier than German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and other /lit/ languages.

You don't start with reading books. Learn all conjugations,grammar rules, a solid set of vocabulary, et cetera from a textbook first. Read the short stories the textbook offers, since they are adapted to your skill level at that point. Anyone telling you to start with novels is an idiot. As a rule, only start reading novels when you can read in the language and understand it in that language, without resorting to your mother tongue

>>8412110

>without resorting to your mother tongue

What do you mean?

>>8412233
For example, I can read both Spanish and English. When I started learning Spanish, I would always have to translate the Spanish to English in my head in order to make sense of it. Once I had studied it for a few months, I was able to read AND comprehend it in Spanish, and use context clues to pick out meanings. Even farther down the learning path, I learned to picture objects and ideas and attach them to Spanish words, instead of relating them to the English equivalents. Translating into your first language is a crutch for beginners, basically

>>8412110
Baaawring. Only listen to this if you're linguistically retarded.

>>8412272
>Translating into your first language is a crutch for beginners, basically
speaking of this, does anyone know what the authoritative French dictionary is? Like what is the Merriam-Webster of France?

>>8412598
>authoritative
That would be the dictionnaire de l'académie française, which is always outdated.

>Like what is the Merriam-Webster
Littré will do

>>8412649
merci famille

>>8412598

>Merriam-Webster
>Authoritative

Get the fuck out

>>8410747
I was going to say Asterix in French has way better wordplay.

>>8411650
There are a handful of issues to do with words that would be the same in English almost seem to randomly change around in French. These are mostly down to convention tho. And by the time they start to become an issue it's not too much of a problem to learn them by osmosis.

>>8412772
Colins Hachette for Physical fuck off dictionary.