Can you learn French by reading?
Yes — on two conditions most people who try it do not meet. The words have to be to hand, so that an unknown one costs nothing; and what you read has to repeat its vocabulary, so that a word met once is met again before it is forgotten. Both can be measured, and on this shelf the second one turns out to be more interesting than it first looks.
Why reading unaided stalls
On these eight tales 812 of 1,610 distinct words — 50% — are printed exactly once. A reader without help stops for each of them. Stopping is what breaks a reading: by the time the word is looked up the sentence has gone, and a word met once and looked up once is a word you will not keep.
Repetition, counted — and its limit
Reading teaches by meeting the same words again in new sentences. Across the whole shelf, 608 of 1,610 dictionary words (38%) appear in more than one tale. The two halves of the shelf are not alike in this: 40% of the dictionary words in Perrault's five come back in another of his tales, and 28% of those in Daudet's three come back in another of his. The two authors share 426 words, while 697 of Daudet's never appear in Perrault.
So the order matters. Read Perrault's five first and they reinforce one another; come to Daudet after them and his new words arrive into a reading habit rather than onto a blank page. Here is what each step costs in words you have not met:
| # | Tale | By | New words it asks | Words held by the end |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Le petit Chaperon rouge | Perrault | 178 | 178 |
| 2 | Les Fées | Perrault | 153 | 331 |
| 3 | Le maître Chat ou le Chat botté | Perrault | 207 | 538 |
| 4 | La Barbe-Bleue | Perrault | 196 | 734 |
| 5 | Cendrillon | Perrault | 171 | 905 |
| 6 | La Dernière Classe | Daudet | 207 | 1112 |
| 7 | Le curé de Cucugnan | Daudet | 220 | 1332 |
| 8 | La chèvre de monsieur Seguin | Daudet | 207 | 1539 |
What reading will not do
It will not make you speak, and it will not drill the endings of a verb into place on a schedule. What it does better than anything else is build the vocabulary and the feel for a sentence that everything else rests on — while you are enjoying yourself, which is the only reason anybody keeps at it for the years this takes.
The two conditions, made concrete
Words to hand: in the reading room every word carries its dictionary form and meaning where it stands, and the English sits under the sentence until you ask for it. A shelf read in order: the eight tales are read in the order that costs least, which the reading order sets out step by step.
«Le petit Chaperon rouge» is 683 words, free and entire, with no account — an evening, and enough to find out whether this works for you. How many words you actually need is counted on the same eight tales.