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No. 240
Over the last couple of years I have effectively taught myself basic French. I was 'taught' it in school but the teaching was so bad all I left with was a bunch of useless classroom vocabulary.
I started with Michel Thomas; tbh I think the student-teacher format, and the way he gets you building sentence from the start, is second to none.
I would finish all the Michel Thomas Foundation and Advanced courses first. Then I think it is worth doing Pimsleur. Pimsleur doesn't explain how the language works like MT but it is more good practice, and once you have done MT you will be able to figure out how the grammar is working anyway.
Pimsleur 1 will be pretty easy after MT, you can race through it almost without pausing, but IMHO it's still good to get speaking practice anyway, and to hear native speakers. It's often useful to hear something taught in a different way. Pimelsur II and III are a little more challenging.
As you say comics are a good way to get into reading, partly because they have the pictures to help understanding and because 90% of it will be speech, which will be most familiar to you if you have learned to speak the language first (and oracy is the most important skill to have). A while back I read the Akira manga in French. I have read it several times and each time I go back I understand it a little better.
Also on my smartphone I download French ebooks. I tend to download books that I already have read in English, so I can figure out the plot even if I get a little lost. I often download classics, e.g. Great Expectations, Voyage au centre de la terre, Germinal.
I also try to find French subtitles for French movies; if I have the subtitles I can pretty much understand most French movies as I can always fall back on my reading people talk too fast.
I keep a French vocab book too that I add useful words to here and there and revise sometimes. On the recommendation of a friend I also bought a French Grammar workbook too, the sort they give to high school age students.
This is just basically me rambling about how I have tried to learn some French. :P Thanks for the website link btw!
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