🇫🇷 French · Français

French, book by book.
From Beauty and the Beast to L'Étranger.

Start at A0 with sentences a child could read aloud. End at B2 reading Flaubert without a dictionary. One book at a time, fifteen minutes a day.

French Fairy Tales
La Belle et la Bête
Mme Leprince de Beaumont
Modern French
Le Rouge et le Noir
Stendhal
Existential
L'Étranger
Albert Camus
Modern French
Madame Bovary
Flaubert
Why read in French

A shelf that does not stop.

French has the rare property of being one of the most readable literary languages a beginner can pick up. Camus wrote in the spoken French of his childhood in working-class Algiers, deliberately plain, no flourish. Saint-Exupéry, raised on aviation reports, wrote The Little Prince in sentences a six-year-old could read aloud. The reputation French literature has for being inaccessible does not survive contact with the actual books.

The language also has fewer phonetic surprises than English and a steadier rhythm than German. The connectives are short. The two tenses you need for narrative look obvious after the first forty pages. A book that takes two months to read in English will take three weeks in French once you are above A2.

And the shelf is large enough to last a decade. Hugo, Dumas, Flaubert, Stendhal, Maupassant, Proust, Camus, de Beauvoir, Duras. None of them stand in line. They are all on the shelf the moment you finish the previous one.

The path

A0 to B2, book by book.

Each level has a target session word count, a known-word baseline, and a Storica book that sits at exactly that level. Tap any card to see the book.
A0
200 words / session
Known-words target: 300
Greetings, the present tense of être and avoir, common everyday nouns.
Example book
The Neighborhood
by Storica
A French village waking up, in sentences of seven words or fewer.
A1
400 words / session
Known-words target: 800
Past tense (passé composé), basic prepositions, descriptive adjectives.
Example book
Beauty and the Beast
by Mme Leprince de Beaumont
The 1740 fairy tale in its eighteenth-century French, adapted by Storica editors.
A2+
700 words / session
Known-words target: 1800
Imparfait vs passé composé, subordinate clauses, formal vs informal register.
Example book
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Stendhal's 1830 novel of provincial ambition, in the deliberately plain French he chose for it.
B1
1000 words / session
Known-words target: 3000
Subjunctive, conditional, idiomatic phrasing, free indirect speech.
Example book
L'Étranger
by Albert Camus
The most-quoted opening of twentieth-century French literature, in a vocabulary you can read.
B2
1400 words / session
Known-words target: 5000
Literary tenses (passé simple), Flaubert's style, irony detection.
Example book
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
The novel that broke the nineteenth century, in the Norman French Flaubert spent five years polishing.
Metrics

What the CEFR says, and what Storica readers actually do.

~30 days
After your first A1 book
Words read
35,000
Words written
4,000
CEFR A1 sits at around 600 active words.
Storica learners who finish a first A1 book in French typically end with roughly 1,400 receptive words and about 900 they can use in writing.
~90 days
After three A1 books
Words read
130,000
Words written
14,000
CEFR A2 expects around 1,500 active words.
Three finished A1 books place most learners comfortably inside A2 territory, with the leverage to start A2+ material like Stendhal.
~180 days
Through A2+ into B1
Words read
380,000
Words written
32,000
CEFR B1 is roughly 2,500 to 3,500 active words.
Six months of daily fifteen-minute sessions places most Storica learners at solid B1. L'Étranger in the original is readable by the end of month six.
Grammar reference

The rules, in plain English.

Don't drill grammar. Read your book. Open the reference when something genuinely stops you, not before.

Browse the full French grammar reference →
Articles
French almost never lets a noun stand naked. Three article families, three jobs, choosing constantly.
Read →
Le Passé Composé
The everyday French past. Two pieces, an auxiliary and a past participle. The first thing you build a story with.
Read →
L'Imparfait
The other half of the French past. Backgrounds, habits, ongoing states. Half of every past-tense paragraph lives in it.
Read →
Object Pronouns
The little words that replace nouns. Once you have them, French sentences shorten by half.
Read →
Le Subjonctif
A mood, not a tense. What French does when the speaker is not asserting that something is true.
Read →
Le Passé Simple
The literary past. Camus uses it. Flaubert lives in it. The default for anything before 1960.
Read →
The native shelf

Books that belong in French.

Every Storica book reads in all seven languages, adapted by Storica editors. These ones were written in French first.
French Fairy Tales
La Belle et la Bête
Mme Leprince de Beaumont
A1 · in French
Beauty and the Beast
by Mme Leprince de Beaumont
The 1740 original. Storica adapts the language. The wolves stay.
Modern French
Le Rouge et le Noir
Stendhal
A2+ · in French
The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
1830. Provincial ambition in the small print of the Restoration.
History
La Belle France
Storica
A2+ · in French
La Belle France
by Storica editors
A French history primer in thirty chapters.
Microhistory
Martin Guerre
after N. Davis
A2+ · in French
Martin Guerre
by after Natalie Z. Davis
A sixteenth-century identity-fraud case from the Languedoc.
Existential
L'Étranger
Albert Camus
B1 · in French
L'Étranger
by Albert Camus
Algiers, an unbothered narrator, the simplest French Camus could write.
Modern French
Madame Bovary
Flaubert
B2 · in French
Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Five years of Flaubert polishing every clause.

Start your first book in French today.

Get Storica →
7-day free trial · No card upfront