Genre: Folklore
Summary
Salle de Lecture is one of the best French resources I've found so far! The website offers various stories from French folklore in both audio-book and written form, meaning that you can listen along to a story while reading it. Salle de Lecture offers the following stories: La Barbe Bleue, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Cendrillon, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Les Fées, Peau d'Ane, Le Petit Poucet, and Les Souhaits Ridicules.
Mini-Critique
Because Salle de Lecture offers stories in both audio-book and written form, which means that you can listen along as you read the story, a strategy that helps build listening and reading comprehension. Folklore in itself is a great resource for language learners, as the stories are often relatively short (easy to read) and offer insight into the culture of the host country. Salle de Lecture's archive is pretty small (it only has eight stories in all), but I guarantee that you'll get a lot out of each story. I would highly recommend this website to all levels of French language-learners just because of how helpful the website is. The only thing to keep in mind is that French folklore tends to be rather gruesome, so some stories may include gore or horror (specifically La Barbe Bleue, which is essentially France's Vlad the Impaler story).
Difficulty Rating
★★★✩✩ Intermediate
See our "About" page for an overview of our difficulty ratings!
The great thing about Salle de Lecture is that you can choose your difficulty level! If you want a challenge, simply listen to the audiobooks without the textual aid. Because of the host's moderately fast talking speed and slight accent, listening to the audio books can be a slight challenge. To make the story easier to understand, read along with the audio book (you might learn some fun new pronunciations!). And if you read along with the audio book, you can easily stop the audio in order to look up unknown words and phrases. Voilà, a perfect listening and reading exercise!
Check out Salle de Lecture!