I have Camus - The Stranger assigned to me this semester (in

Yeah it's one of the most common starter texts assigned because it's easy and subdued prose. Read Sandberg's Reading for French (pirate it) and try snippets of The Stranger in French as you go through the chapters, and in a few weeks you should notice real progress.

Google idioms you don't understand and try to use an annotated language learning version of the book.

>>9182491
yes, french and english share like 80% of verbs etc, just sit with a dictionary and go to work, google some cheat sheet for tenses

>>9182499
Thank you. I guess I'll take the plunge.

>Sandberg's Reading for French
I have been eyeing this one intensely for the past few hours based on the glowing Amazon reviews. I think I'm going to buy it so I can scribble in it.

>>9182502
>google
What could possibly go wrong?

>>9182511

it's still going to be kind of hard.. i recommend its not your first text... maybe use a beginner book before you hop into it

>>9182511
Have you ever learned another language seriously? If not I really don't think this is a good idea. French grammar may not be complex for an English speaker but that doesn't mean there isn't a fair bit to learn. You will need to learn a variety of tenses and moods that don't exist in English: you will have to learn about their greater number of conjunctions that have much more specific uses, you will need to learn there more complicated and varied pronouns, as well as coming to grips with their more complex verb conjugations, especially the first 30-40 which are heavily irregular.
Unless you have a reasonable handle of the grammar going through a foreign language book with be close to impossible. You will get confused by sentence order, by word endings, you will have no grasp of tense, you won't understand the French words that are only serve a grammatical function that don't really mean anything, you will have a very poor understanding of negatives, you will get confused by pronouns (since many are used for reasons too difficult to explain adequately in a dictionary definition) etc.

Even after getting a handle on grammar, which to be generous, if you were good with languages would take a good 3-4 weeks (and more 8ish if you aren't so good) you will only have a vocabulary of maybe 300ish. You will be needing to look up every third or fourth word. That's not even including having to look up bits of grammar that you sort of have a handle on but get stumped on sometimes. That 100 page book will probably take you as long to read as an 800 page book.