If only Georges Simenon had been a bit more like Maigret

Post by sprafa » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 7:38 AM UTC

nferracin wrote: post #29

sprafa wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find French books in some places, but you can find cheap Portuguese books virtually anywhere, but particularly so in Porto, close to where I live. We call local/old/second hand bookshops “alfarrabistas” and they are very common around the country. Some have closed with the savage turistification that’s hit the country, but most are still around for now.

Do you have any favorite you feel like suggesting? I've been there several times but never noticed them and even my Portuguese partner wouldn't know where to find one after many years living abroad.

Post by B1FF_PSUVM » Fri, Sep 06, 2019, 8:38 PM UTC

nosianu wrote: post #20

lrc wrote: post #15

I lived in France for a few years and wanted to become fluent in the language. One part of my strategy was just to try to brute-force through some novels with the aid of a dictionary and a conjugation chart. I started with _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ but found the diction too difficult to slog through. I made it through _Le Petit Prince_, but I really clicked with Simenon's detective novels. Since it was a familiar, mo…

I did something similar as part of learning English. For me the best author for this purpose was Stephen King (not that I spent much time searching, just random trial and error; I don't even like horror stories). After mastering Stephen King I moved on to J. R. R. Tolkien. For the first fifty pages or so of The Lord of The Rings I had to look up words pretty much one for every other line of text. It was amazing to se…