Kindle
The kindle - and other similar electronic readers - make it possible to read books that in paper form would be much more difficult. This is because it is possible to access a dictionary simply by touching the word briefly. You can easily switch between one of the pre-installed dictionaries - either the English-English or the English-French one. The dictionary options on the basic model are limited, so you should go for the Paperwhite or Voyage model.
It's necessary to have an Amazon account to buy books.
You can choose amongst hundreds of thousands of books in English. Many out-of-copyright books are free and recent ones are usually slightly cheaper than the paperback version.
It's possible to download a free sample of the book, typically the first chapter, before deciding if you want to buy it.
You can find out more here.
Youtube
Artificial intelligence has made huge advances recently. Google, the owner of YouTube, has invested enormously in the automatic transcription of speech and the results can be seen today.
Machine-generated subtitles have become very accurate and are a great help for non-native English users. You can turn them on with the sous-titres button at the bottom of the video. You may have to click on the paramètres button to turn on the subtitles and adjust their size.
Audio Books
In the history of the world, very few people have read a book. But stories seem to be a fundamental human need - children demand them, and adults satisfy the need largely with films and television.
Today, technology has made it possible to return to the ancestral practice of narrating stories. Listening to a story can be easier than reading - a good narrator explains the story with their voice and pulls the listener along.
The market leader is Audible.fr ( menu "le catalogue > langues étrangères" ). It's possible to have a free trial with one book. Subsequently, the subscriber takes one book per month for €10 monthly. It's also possible to buy individual audio books on Amazon, but the price will be higher than €10.
We recommend audio books very highly for non-English speakers with a good intermediate level who want to move up to the next stage.
It can be very interesting to combine listening with reading. If you do this, be careful to select unabridged ( not abridged ) audio books so that you can match the audio and printed texts.
Audio books can best be combined with electronic readers such as the Kindle, rather than paperbacks, because of the search function.