After an interesting exchanges with my sister on Facebook I managed to track down an example of the text boom from which we were taught French. The illustrations are quaint, and the attitudes are old.


Here's the "famille Marsaud".


So while Mr Marsaud "est dans le jardin"


His wife and younger daughter are "dans le cuisine" doing kitchen type things.


In a photo, "grand-mere" prepares food in a health-hazard styled kitchen. She has "les side burns".

I "learnt" French from that book too. IIRC the second book was coloured blue…

My French teacher was allegedly something to do with the resistance during WW2. He taught as though the class were collaborators being interrogated. It was possible to get out of homework in other subjects simply by explaining that your French homework had taken too long and you'd run out of time to do anything else in the evening. None of the other teachers ever questioned this. The end result was B in an O Level that I would have most likely otherwise have failed followed by forgetting everything I had ever learned within 6 months.

We learnt from a book called French For Today. The family concerned were les Bertillon. I remember one gripping story where the daughter - Marie-Claude - was caught cheating during an exam. Quelle horreur!

Yes - the second book was blue, and co tuned in the same style. Books 3 and 4 over to photographs, following the exploits of a journalist (or photographer) working for a local paper. Exploits contrived to get us to learn new vocabulary and conjugate verbs.

It's odd - I remember the illustrations in these books having more detail, and the text more tightly packed. That was probably my experience of learning the language colouring my memories. Even though I did well in French (motive: being able to read French comic books), I found the process of learning it troublesome.

Sadly, my French has descended into Franglais. "M. Marsaud est dans le pub even un pint de wife beater." Etc..

The only good thing about French class in my school was that the teacher was fond of letting her breasts brush against you, bending over, and sitting there with no knickers on and opening her legs as far as she could get away with. Do you know nobody complained...