I have some news, which has been over a year in the making: I added to my book collection! In August of 2023, one of my friends told me about a company who publishes language learning proficiency books for learning French, Spanish, and other languages. She told me I should give it a shot, since I speak French. The company’s premise is that exposing language students repeatedly to the most frequently used words in a language will most effectively help them acquire proficiency. I’m no expert in this method, or in the principles of learning languages, but the concept makes sense to me.

The method is identified by the acronym TPRS (of course there’s an acronym), which stands for Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. You can read all about it on their website here. In my relatively uninformed terms, students will do better learning French (or any language) if the lessons have three key elements. First, they’re interesting and fun, next they reinforce (through repetition) the most important principles (in this case: vocabulary and grammar), and finally they allow the student to actually use what they’re learning.

The approach to provide students this experience is to write short, fun, stories with only the fewest (say top 100) most frequently used words in the language. Those 100 words are used in 75 percent of all communication. Therefore, reinforcing those few words will help propel the student towards learning French with proficiency. I didn’t understand all of that at first, though.

Learning French with My Book

I took my friend’s advice and wrote a short story in French and sent it to the people at TPRS. They sent it back. No thanks. You missed the point. This story was supposed to be about language learning proficiency, and I was way off track. So, I went back to the drawing board and tried again. TPRS was nice enough to send me some instructional information to guide me. I hadn’t understood one of the key ideas at first. Although, I used 100 unique words to write the story, they weren’t frequently used or common enough. The vocabulary was too difficult for a French learner.

I bought a special kind of French dictionary called a frequency dictionary, which lists the vocabulary for the language in order of usage. Then, I made a list of the most-used words, and tried again. This time, TPRS connected me with one of their editors—Françoise—one of the most helpful and nicest people I have ever worked with anywhere. We spent the next four months revising, discussing, and exchanging emails as I wrote, and re-wrote, and re-wrote. Finally, around February of 2024, we reached the final draft…for the words.

As it turns out, since one of the principles of TPRS is to make the story fun, we needed illustrations. I will tell you, visualizing art isn’t my strong suit. I can write it, but not picture it. Fortunately, TPRS assigned my project an incredible artist, Nami, who was very skilled and helpful. By June we had interior illustrations and cover art. Cover art definitely took the most time and effort (and probably patience by TPRS). But as we all know, despite the adage, we judge every book by its cover. The combination of the story and art should make learning French much  more fun.

And so, after all of this work, we arrive at: Qui est Élise? (Who is Elise?), which TPRS published and made available on their website on October 30, 2024.

My French Story

I wanted to write something that would interest high school and older middle school readers. “Qui est Élise?” is a level 1 book in terms of language learning proficiency, intended for readers learning French who are at the beginning of their linguistic journey. TPRS created an excellent blurb:

Meet Élise, a curious elephant who longs for adventure and dreams of being different. One day, Élise decides to leave her family and explore the world beyond the herd. Along her journey, she meets fascinating animals—like fast, striped zebras—but quickly learns that fitting in isn’t as easy as it seems.

Join Élise on her quest to find her place in the world and discover what it truly means to embrace who you are. Will Élise find the happiness she’s searching for, or will she learn that sometimes, being yourself is the greatest adventure of all?

I hoped with the story I’d crafted to reach the adventurous and exploratory side of the readers. Also, to help convey the message that being unique and understanding who we are can help contribute to our inner peace and self awareness. That’s the subtext, though. The story is about fun interactions between some animals of the savannah on an adventure.

My hope is that this book will be of use to teachers in the classroom.

How to Write in French

As it turns out, writing a book for helping students who are learning French is both easier and harder than I thought. The language level for me is fairly basic, in that I know all the vocabulary and at least have a working knowledge for the grammar. I’ll just say, the grammar is the harder piece of these two items. So the building blocks were not especially hard.

However, writing an interesting story while limiting my vocabulary to only 100 unique words is very challenging. Fortunately, we get the free use of cognates, which are words that are the equivalent in English and French. Two examples are “couleur” and “éléphant”, which you understand instantly whether you speak French or not. It’s hard to move a story forward while each sentence is at risk of repeating the exact same thing from a few paragraphs earlier. Also, getting into complex scenes and situations with my characters became a balancing act between active storytelling and understandable vocabulary and grammar.

At the same time, it was fun. I haven’t used my French language skills a lot since returning from France back in 2000. I took about six classes at university, which was nice but not an immersive experience. And since then, I’ve had limited chances outside of a vacation or two, some emails with friends, and reading. I was very grateful for this outlet and opportunity.

If You Want to Learn French (or some other language…but why not French?)

Learning French (or another language) is something I think benefits everyone. If you’ve always thought about it but never moved forward, give it a try. You can order my book here, along with many other books in French, Spanish, German, English, and Chinese. Learning French can be really fun, especially when it doesn’t feel like a classroom, but more like an adventure as you enjoy a fun story with cute pictures.

 

 

Also, you might like to read one of my favorite blog posts entitled All the Light.

Photo credit: Rob Shenk on VisualHunt.com