[ben_w]

In retrospect, I wish my secondary school French had been as you suggest.

The tables of verbs and conjugations into tenses whose group-names made little sense, and my difficulty with them, was a permanent source of woe at the time.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Ugh, the conjugaisons are a torture. I was lucky and knew how to speak and read and write in French before I had to study them or I'd never learn the language.

I learned to read and write in French before I started school; I'm not a native French speaker btw, but Greek. I learned by reading Asterix and Tintin and I'm not half joking. That's how I also learned to read and write in Greek (by reading Disney comics in that case), also before starting school.

I don't know if it was just me, but the combination of text and images in comic books is almost as good as being immersed in the culture of a language. Illustrated books, that simply have a few images along with the text aren't as good for that purpose. With comics you get to read text that directly relates to the goings-on in the images, and it's the next best thing to living in the real world and observing people speak as they go about their day.

It also helps that text in speech bubbles tends to be short, and the things said aren't too complex, but not too simple either. There's some puns in Asterix that I only ever got much later, and one in particular (a Roman named Oursenplus) that I only finally got when I heard a French colleague say it out loud (with a "sh" sound at the end rather than "ss").

Of course, no school is ever going to stoop so low as to teach kids to read and write in their language or a foreign one with something as base and vulgar as comic books. Or it'd be something along those lines. Even in France where comics are big they wouldn't think of doing that. And yet, in my case at least, that worked out much better than all of school taken together.

I bet computer games would also work in the same way. Good luck convincing educators that kids can learn anything useful from playing mere games. Unless it's chess I guess.

[deckeraa]

I think that the comic books worked well because they provided extra context with the illustrations. And, as you point out, the text is directly tied to the illustration in each panel. With that extra context, the texts became more comprehensible, so you were able to learn more advanced and interesting sentences earlier.

Some other examples of high-context sources: - TV shows in the target language (subtitles may be helpful) - stories that one is already familiar with (in my case, I was already really familiar with the plot of the Vulgate). - stories that aren't familiar, but where you can read the same plot repeated in several sources. For Latin, John Piazza's Narratioines Faciles de Historia Romanorum does this well https://archive.org/details/piazza-john-narrationes-faciles-... . For living languages, probably looking in a kid's library section for books all on a similar topic would be good. - Talking with someone in the language, since they'll give you real-time context.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> I think that the comic books worked well because they provided extra context with the illustrations. And, as you point out, the text is directly tied to the illustration in each panel. With that extra context, the texts became more comprehensible, so you were able to learn more advanced and interesting sentences earlier.

Absolutely!

[acqq]

> one in particular (a Roman named Oursenplus) that I only finally got when I heard a French colleague say it out loud (with a "sh" sound at the end rather than "ss")

Be kind to us who still don't know enough and explain it here.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Of course. "Oursenplus" sounds Latin because it ends in "-us", like "Gaius", "Julius", etc. It's a standard joke in Asterix to make up "Latin" names that are in fact French words or short phrases with an "-us" (or other Latin-like) last syllable. e.g. "Gaius Faispaslgugus" (appearing in "Le Devin") - from "ne fais pas le gugusse" which translates roughly to "don't be ridiculous".

The same goes for making up Gaulish names, except the last syllable is usually "-ix" e.g. Abraracourcix, from "[prendre quelqu' un] a bras racourcis", which means to beat someone up. And the same with all the other cultures satirised in Asterix [1].

Now, "Oursenplus" (appearing in "Le Domaine des Dieux") sounds like "Ourse en peluche", meaning a plushie bear. "Peluche" is felt. In a native French accent it is pronounced with a silent "e", so more like "plush" with a long "u" as in "heuristics". Well, OK, it's hard to explain the pronounciation without sound.

The funny thing is that I know the word "peluche" and what it means (I learned it from another comic book, Bob & Bobette) but just seeing "Oursenplus" written, I didn't get it, because I was confounded by the "enplus" at the end, which could as well stand for "en plus", or "one more"; as in "one more bear". Or, more unlikely "en plus, c'est un ourse", as in "also, it's a bear". I figured that was some kind of saying I didn't know and I only caught on to the actual meaning when I asked a French colleague whether the knew the character in Asterix, and what the name meant. My colleague in turn, who didn't know the character, misheard the name and asked me "Comment, ourse en peluche?". And then I started laughing with the confusion of decades finally lifted, the joke finally understood :)

___________

[1] See: Epidemaïs, a Phoenician merchant, from "épis de maïs", "ear of corn"; Okéibos a Greek javelin-thrower, from "OK Boss"; Soupalognon y Crouton, the Iberian chief, from "soupe à l'oignon avec des croûtons", oninon soup with croutons, etc.

Many more here:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_personnages_d'Ast%C3...