Product Summery
INTRODUCTION
We all know that immersion is the tried and true way to learn a foreign language. After all, it’s how we got so good at our first language. The problem is, it’s extremely difficult to recreate the same circumstances when we are learning our second language. We come to rely so much on our native language for everything, and it’s hard to make enough time to learn the second one.
We aren’t surrounded by the foreign language in our home countries. More often than not,our families can’t speak this new language we want to learn. Plus, many of us have stressful jobs or classes to attend. Immersion can seem like an impossibility.
What we can do, however, is to gradually work our way up to immersion, no matter where we are in the world. The way we can do this is through extensive reading and listening. If you have ever taken a foreign language class, chances are you are familiar with intensive reading and listening. In intensive reading and listening, a small amount of text or a short audio recording is broken down line by line, and every new word is looked up in the dictionary.
Extensive reading and listening, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. You read a large number of pages or listen to hours and hours of the foreign language without worrying about understanding everything. You look up as few words as possible and try to get through material from start to finish as quickly as you can. If you ask the most successful language learners, you’ll find that the best results are delivered not by intensive reading and listening but, rather, by extensive reading and listening. Volume is exponentially more effective than total comprehension and memorization.
If you cannot understand native French speakers, it is precisely because of a lack of volume.You simply have not read or listened enough to be able to instantly understand people like you can in your native language. This is why it’s so important to invest as much time as possible into immersing yourself in native French every single day.
To be able to read extensively, you must practice reading in the foreign language for hours every single day. It takes a massive volume of text before your brain stops intensively reading and shifts into extensive reading. Until that point, be prepared to look up quite a few words in the dictionary.
This book provides a few short French-language dialogues that you can use to practice extensive reading. These conversations were written and edited by native French speakers. They use 100 percent real French as used by native French speakers every single day.
We hope these dialogues help build confidence in your overall reading comprehension skills and encourage you to read more native material. We also hope that you enjoy the book and that it brings you a few steps closer to extensive reading and fluency!