Montmorency wrote:But looking around in general, I do wonder if many people are reading books nowadays. What I see all the time is people on their smart phones, and yes. some of them might be reading books on them (I don't envy them frankly, on even the best of phones), I think most are on Facebook or Twitter or some other relatively trivial thing.
I read a
lot on my smartphone, but it has a large screen and a very high-resolution display. The text on my phone is actually sharper than what I find in some paperbacks, and most importantly, I can control the font size. It's not for everyone, certainly! But I really can't buy any more paper books anyways, because my wife says that 10 large floor-to-ceiling bookcases with books double-shelved uses up enough of our limited wall space (which is true and very fair), and therefore if I want more paper books, I need to get rid of some of the existing ones. Except I've already done that plenty of times, and the remaining books are pretty good, and I don't want to get rid of them.
So, yay for books on smartphones, because they can easily hold several lifetimes worth of books.
Montmorency wrote:But back to what someone upthread was saying, or quoting: I realised quite a while ago, that you got much more bang per buck with the combination of book+audiobook than you could from any movie or TV series. Whether it helps you with using language "out in the wild", I'm really not sure about.
Well, maybe French is a bit of a special case, at least for me. As an English-speaker, I've always found written French to be relatively easy, thanks to the transparent
grammar vocabulary. But idiomatic spoken French is trickier, and in my experience, books are a surprisingly inefficient source of dialog, because so much of the text is actually narration. What's worse—from the perspective of somebody looking for sources of spoken French—is that French narration uses verb forms that are never used in speech.
Oh, and when French speakers write casually online, their spelling is usually
terrible. So at least in the beginning, I couldn't use Internet discussions as a source of "spoken" French, either.
So if I want good sources for spoken French, my best choices are BDs (but only if I can buy them really cheaply, as via Izneo) and TV series. French books are wonderful, but they mostly help with the formal, written register.