I have no gift for foreign languages but due to having grown up overseas can limp along in bad French. I usually get to France once every year or two and after a few days find that I am limping faster. I just realised that Libération, the newspaper I read while in France, has an RSS feed, so I subscribed and now I’m reading a few hundred words a day en Français (with occasional help from either this French-English dictionary or this one). Why is Libération my paper of choice? Among other things, because it’s a tabloid and easy to carry; if you walk into a café or restaurant or store in France with a copy of Libération stuffed under your arm, the locals will instantly assume you’re not a gringo and you’ll probably get treated a lot better. Try it, it works.
