Looking for good French reading material online
June 25, 2011 3:48 PM   Subscribe

Seeking some French reading material online. What I am aiming for: blogs with good discussion like mefi, publications with long-form articles such as one might find in the New Yorker or the like, or I don't know, surprise me with something I haven't thought of!

I had four years of high school French about 20 years ago, and somehow I've managed to remember quite a lot of it. I would like to read some French online to refresh my skills, and improve them.

To give you an idea of the type of thing I am going after, I have been reading some French wikipedia articles, and found them very enjoyable. I have just been looking at the featured articles so far, and they have been quite interesting and well-written.

I installed the firefox addon gTranslate, which lets me highlight just a word or a phrase and right-click to instantly translate just that little bit (it uses Google Translate on the back end). It makes it pretty easy to keep the flow going as I read, I find. This is why I am keen on finding more stuff online and not so much yet in books - it's just a lot easier to deal with the words I don't know or don't remember.

I guess I am looking for a couple of different types of things:

- blogs with good discussion ("good" meaning intelligent, civil, interesting, and preferably somewhat deep)

- long-form news articles (similar to the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, that kind of thing)

- in general something pretty meaty to read, more so than the average newspaper article, and less imposing than a book.

I ordered a bunch of French grammar review books and such from Amazon, but they haven't arrived yet. I will read some books later on, but I want something sort of medium-sized to sink my teeth into to learn and re-learn more vocabulary before I do that.

Can you think of any good sites to point me to? Thanks for any help you can provide.
posted by marble to Media & Arts (6 answers total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Le Monde offer excellent email subscriptions, daily emails are great for keeping fresh.
posted by fire&wings at 4:22 PM on June 25, 2011


Le Monde Diplomatique gets assez weighty sometimes.
posted by fantasticninety at 4:29 PM on June 25, 2011


Not sure how you feel about the American version but Slate has a French sister site that has a mix of original pieces and translations from slate.com.
Seconding Le Diplo, also maybe Rue89.
posted by villanelles at dawn at 4:38 PM on June 25, 2011 [1 favorite]


quebec very well written newspaper: http://www.ledevoir.com/

and if you ever want to try offline stuff and have an e-book reading device, this site offers French and international classics for free that are public domain, quality translations or original French material.
posted by kitsuloukos at 8:53 PM on June 25, 2011


I suggest LeMonde - http://www.lemonde.fr/. Bonne chance, cherie.
posted by sushrob at 10:29 PM on June 25, 2011




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