Useful books for IB French and Spanish B

[Tufty]

Does anyone know any good books I can buy to help with French and Spanish Language B????

[Bishup]

FOr French B don't read anything classical, it is so heavy and lame, you don't want any of that. Choose something contemporary, if in terms of a novel or a book I recommend something like 'Le petit Prince' and 'L'étranger'. Good useful vocab which isn't extravagant and plus they're very good books.

If you want to improve your french, your approach to french and your sentence structure I advise you fml in french (**** my life) which in french is called (Vie de merde.) Even if ocassionally they might use slang it's an enjoyable way to drastically improving your french + it's funny.

Hope this helps.

[Jacqui]

Does anyone know any good books I can buy to help with French and Spanish Language B????

We use a really good set of books for SL and HL. Facettes de la France Contemporaine (we have 2 different books) and also Bien lire bien ecrire. Bien lire bien ecrire goes through all the text types and gives loads of really useful exercises. With facettes de la France contemporaine you also get all the answers which is good if you want to work on your own or if you get stuck when your set a homework!

I don't have the books at home with me but if you want more details I can find them out tomorrow. Let me know if youdo.

Jacqui.

[sweetnsimple786]

This was -the- most amazing grammar book for Spanish. Everything is in Spanish, so it's really a concise review of the grammar and all the intricacies. It's not tailored around the IB curriculum, but it's still really useful. [unless you're trying to learn rather than review/refresh and this is your first/second year ever of the taking the language]

We also read short stories from a compilation called Album, but it apparently costs over 70USD, so never mind.

[Sandwich]

It depends how advanced you are in terms of Spanish and French, but I know I wasn't able to read books properly at B -- at least not "normal" books. I did invest in some Penguin simultaneous translations of short stories which I found very helpful for improving your ability to read and write. There's quite a bit you can learn subconsciously in that respect

Being honest the very best way to learn is probably not through a textbook. Listening to/watching the news in Spanish or French (you can find websites online which allow you to do this) or reading things you already know/are simultaneously translated worked very well for me as it takes something you're familiar with (presuming you know a bit of what's on the news in English already!) and then that allows you to get a grip on it because you already have some idea of the context. Then practising speaking to people (and of course writing, but for enlarging your vocab. and brushing up on your grammar and phrasing, speaking is much more efficient and allows you to learn new things rather than just exercise the same knowledge you already have).

I did have a BRILLIANT spanish grammar book to recommend, but sadly it seems it went out of print some years ago. It was perfect for grammar, idioms, sentence construction, colloquialisms and all that sort of thing but I don't think you'd be able to get hold of it. Which is annoying because none of the standard grammar books we used at school were anywhere near as good! xP

[Redwarrior]

I'm not sure if it's too late to reply or not but I usually go to the French Yahoo news site and read their daily news.