I was on lesson 30 of the Harry Potter book and now it won’t load. I have been getting this message for the last 5 days:
There was an error opening this lesson. We have been notified and will investigate this issue. You will be redirected to the home page where you can try opening another lesson.
— Is it no longer available?
It’s very likely been pulled for copyright reasons. I was surprised to see it last as long as it did.
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If you want to read a novel in French, I would suggest that you read a French novel written by a native French author, not a British novel translated into French. Like anything written by Patrick Modiano. Nearly everything Modiano has written over the last 50 years (he is 73 now) has been translated into English, if you feel the need to read something in both English and French.
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It depends… Books like Harry Potter and The Hobbit are good to use as bridging material if you have already read them in English, because the story and concepts are already sufficiently familiar that you can acquire a lot of vocabulary incidentally through mere exposure. In addition, they’ve been translated so widely, with audiobooks in many of the languages, that they have proved to be extremely useful intermediate-level material.
I also find there are books in English I wish to read, perhaps non-fiction, or autobiographies and the like, but for which a foreign language translation is available. In these cases, I sometimes use the translation as a way of minimising English exposure and increasing my reading hours in the foreign language.
Of course, if you’re reading for pleasure, it goes without saying that there are vast quantities of fantastic things to read in the original French!
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