The Urge to Read in French: Consolidating the French I Know with New French Vocabulary

I am reading a book on how the brain works: “Connectome,” by Sebastian Sung. It’s about how the brains wiring makes us who we are. I admit it’s a little more technical that most people might want to read but it has gotten me to think about why I want to spend time on reading in French instead of mostly improve my speaking and grammar.

I’m only half way through the book but I’ve concluded that what I just naturally want to do use the language so that I can imbed the language more deeply into my long term memory. I am also learning new words as I go but I think more vocabulary is secondary in my mind to consolidating what I already know.

More and more I have the urge to read in French as I learn more. It's hard. No doubt about that… especially when I tend to choose classics, such as "Au tour du Monde en quatre-vingts jours” by Jules Verne, written in passé simple and passé interior.  These are those tenses that one only need to recognize, not speak.

The equivalent effect in English would be recognized as something like this: “Thou wouldst not be angry.” Or, “Where dost thou goest?” as Shakespeare would have written.

English speakers and the French have discarded these older forms in everyday speech but the French seem to have used them for two or three centuries longer in their literature.

However, I am finding that once I recognize the very irregular verbs in it, I can read these texts quite well. An illustration of these verb conjugations for “aller” in passé simple and passé interior are

Did you know Aller is a font? dzineblog360.com

allai
allas
alla
allâmes
allâtes
allèrent

and

fus allé(e)
fus allé(e)
fut allé(e)
fûmes allé(e)s
fûtes allé(e)(s)
furent allé(e)s

It seems there is always going to be one more tense to learn about in French.