The French reading room
La chèvre de monsieur Seguin — Monsieur Seguin’s Goat
How long «La chèvre de monsieur Seguin» is, and how hard
| Length in French | 2,059 running words · 149 sentences · about 8 printed pages |
|---|---|
| Time to read | about 19 minutes at a learner's pace, with the glosses to hand |
| Different words | 572 dictionary words, averaging 13.8 words a sentence |
| Words glossed | 572 of 572 — every one that appears in the tale |
| Words that appear once | 356 — 62%. A word met once is a word you will not learn from this text alone |
| Where it stands | 7 of 8 by length in the French room |
470 of this tale's own 572 words, most frequent first, carry 95% of it; 189 carry 80%. Hold those and the reading is close work rather than decoding. French glues its small words to the next one, and these counts take them apart the way a dictionary does: «l’» and «d’» are words of their own here, filed under «le» and «de».
Its chapters
The room reads «La chèvre de monsieur Seguin» in 6 scenes. The headings are the house's own; the sentence counts are the tale's.
| Scene | In French | Sentences |
|---|---|---|
| A Letter to Gringoire | Lettre à Gringoire | 15 |
| The Seventh Goat | La septième chèvre | 28 |
| Let Me Go | Laissez-moi aller | 32 |
| The Mountain Rejoices | La montagne en fête | 31 |
| Nightfall and the Wolf | Le soir et le loup | 38 |
| Farewell, Gringoire | Adieu, Gringoire | 5 |
How it begins
À M. Pierre Gringoire, poète lyrique à Paris.
To Monsieur Pierre Gringoire, lyric poet, in Paris.
That first sentence is the free sample, and the only one on this page. «La chèvre de monsieur Seguin» is part of the library — the eight French tales and the Italian, Spanish, German and Russian shelves, every word glossed, sentence-by-sentence English — for €5 a month or €39 a year, cancel whenever you like, one subscription for all five rooms. What the library costs. «La Dernière Classe» is free, entire, if you would rather read the room before you buy it, and the opening scene of «Le petit Chaperon rouge» after it.
Shorter and longer in the same room
La Dernière Classe — 1,755 wordsLa Barbe-Bleue — 1,804 words Cendrillon — 2,208 words
All eight French tales · Alphonse Daudet · the shelf, counted