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Some questions about Assimil Using French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| LaserArrow Newbie United States Joined 3960 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 10 27 January 2014 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have both New French with Ease and Using French, but I hear people talk less about Using French, so my questions pertain mostly to this book.
1. Anyone who has completed the book, how helpful did you find it? 2. How much did it advance your French? Did it bring you to C1 (how else were you studying alongside the book that maybe also helped you get to C1?) 3. My plan for studying at the moment is to listen to the dialogue, write down what I hear, listen while reading, practice speaking the dialogue using Audacity, and to take note of any new vocab etc. I plan to go through 2 lessons a day and review older lessons from time to time, but I want to go through the book twice, so I'm not too worried about the fast pace. Does this sound like a good plan to all of you? Edited by LaserArrow on 27 January 2014 at 12:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 10 27 January 2014 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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1. Many years ago, I did Using French through level 15 or so, and hit the wall when the lessons got more difficult starting around lesson 15. When I came back to it a couple years later, it didn't seem especially interesting or useful to me at that point, because I had already done a fair bit of reading in French.
2. There's essentially no chance whatsoever that Using French will get you to C1 on its own. To be fair, I can't even imagine how any book-based course could get you to C1. (Serious, full-time immersion courses are obviously different.) C1 just involves too many real-world skills: you need to be able to read fluently, speak at a "professional" level, write ably, and understand nearly all of what you hear. And those skills all require a lot of real-world practice. In the short run, you should probably worry about getting to B2 first: good enough to live your life in French, and to be admitted to a French university as a foreign student (albeit one who's going to have to work really hard and take easy classes). (I have a DELF B2 certificate. If I sat the DALF C1, I'd probably do fine on the reading section. I might get away with bluffing my way through the listening section, depending on how much background noise was in the room. I could probably get my writing up to a C1 level with a couple months of intense practice. Speaking, well, on my very best days I might not fail too horribly. On a bad day I'd crash and burn.) Anyway, Using French would make a pretty nice supplement for a B1 student working on B2, and I'm sure that a B2 student might find some interesting things in it. The most advanced Assimil French course for English speakers is Business French, which would prepare somebody surprisingly well for the DELF B2 Pro, the business version of the DELF B2. To reach B2 and above, you need to make the courses only one part of your study plan, and spend lots of time actually using your French in the real world: read books, read the newspaper, watch TV series, write lots (and get it corrected), and carry on lots of conversations. Course books are great, but past B1, very few people will ever progress very far without doing lots of other stuff. Edited by emk on 27 January 2014 at 2:37pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LaserArrow Newbie United States Joined 3960 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 3 of 10 27 January 2014 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the detailed response ^^ Yeah I realize I'll need to do more than just Assimil, but I'm hoping it'll be a very useful supplement. I need something to help give me that first push speaking. I read, write and work with French quite often, but have never practised speaking at all >.<
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| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 10 27 January 2014 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK, cool! Have you by any chance gone through a CEFRL self-assessment checklist? If we could get a rough idea of your reading/listening/writing skills, we might be able to suggest some useful ideas for speaking. EDIT: Sorry, I keep getting called away. My guess is that if your reading and writing are already pretty strong, then Using French will be of somewhat limited utility, because: 1. Assimil's "passive wave" is mostly useful for learning to read and listen, and it's much less useful for learning to write and speak. 2. The texts in Assimil Using French are very long and complicated, and I think that if you tried to do an "active wave" with them, you'd probably struggle to successfully recreate, say, a 6-minute passage of complicated 19th-century literary French. Sure, reading it is no problem, but reproducing it? I'm not sure that's useful. Honestly, what helped my speaking the most was simply putting myself in situations where I was forced to speak. I spent several hours a day talking, and within two weeks, the words came a lot easier. Within 6 weeks, I could generally express anything that I actually needed to express, though my grammar was still a bit dodgy and I had to be clever about how I used my vocabulary. If you don't have access to French speakers, Skype parters, or iTalki, you might want to look into a drill-based course like FSI. These will give you far more speaking practice than Using French ever will. Edited by emk on 27 January 2014 at 2:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 5 of 10 28 January 2014 at 2:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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Using French is a course I use on the regular and I find it helpful, but it is only one course. It introduces some vocabulary, idioms, and lots of culture.
There may be some lessons that if one was hitting them once without a translation, one might need to be C1 to completely get, but that's different from saying the course will take you to C1. I really like the Assimil French courses, but they overrate the level the course will take you to. If your goal is speaking, take a look at FSI Basic French. FSI Basic French involves a lot more speech generation than Assimil. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4702 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 6 of 10 28 January 2014 at 4:11am | IP Logged | |||||
If, generally speaking, FSI courses are best for speech production, what are Assimil courses best for? Reading comprehension? Listening comprehension? Both? Neither? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5253 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 10 28 January 2014 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
Both are good courses but courses are guides to a language, not blueprints.
A course can take you part of the way down the road but you have to practice driving the car along with reading the driver's manual. The good thing about learning a language, unlike driving a car, if you screw it up you're not going to kill anyone. So read the manual, and, drive the car. Drive slowly at first, not very far. The more you drive the faster and farther you'll go. The more you drive, your manual (course) will be more useful to you because it will be helping you to solve problems instead of trying just to teach you from scratch. You'll be a better driver (speaker of the language). Depend too much on the manual (course) to do everything for you and you won't get the car very far from the garage. If you're interested in an alternative view, have a look at the multi-track approach. Edited by iguanamon on 28 January 2014 at 4:51am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4880 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 8 of 10 28 January 2014 at 4:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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I used Using French, and mostly liked it. I only did the passive phase. It's a nice
bridge from the standard beginning courses to independent reading. Afterwards you should be able to tackle basic novels without much problem. However, a good part of the book is taken up with idiomatic phrases, and I don't trust any book to teach me slang. And a lot of chapters revolved around a poorly written and horribly boring romance between two dull characters. Use it if you have it! I just would make it an adjunct to your studies, and wouldn't devote a huge amount of time to it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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