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Assimil lessons in a different order ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Evanitious Triglot Newbie France Joined 4510 days ago 36 posts - 39 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1, Italian | Message 1 of 6 02 January 2014 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi,
I would like to know if anyone has studied a language with assimil not following the usual order ? Random order, reverse order, etc... And if you recommend it. I was thinking of jumping after maybe the first thirty lessons ? Most of the time I never finish the books. I didn't need it for Italian, but I'm French and I understood later that it was a very easy language for a French guy. With some other languages I have a lot of motivation during the first month and then it goes down. And I realize that I've spent time learning useless vocabulary : To be honest, it depends on the books but sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time and energy learning sentences like "this tie with giraffes", "this tie with small grey elephants"... Or this kind of dialogues : "your hotel is called "the silver deer ? _no, sir _so it's called "the old mill" ? _no, sir _the happy miller ? _no sir... It's a real dialogue... and it's lesson 10 or something.... I don't know what you think, but to me, this is totally useless. Instead of learning something like "I need help", "In my opinion this is a good idea", etc... With Russian assimil I went maybe to lesson 50-60 and then I switched to watching TV shows with no subtitles. A few weeks ago. I wanted to try from lesson 100, it was not that difficult, and it seemed to get easier and I found the same vocabulary in lessons 99, 98, etc... I was thinking it might be worth to study "harder"(more useful ?) lessons when I'm really motivated ? So I just wanted to know if you'd recommend studying in a different order, or even in the reverse order ? The new generations of assimil aren't that long compared to the old ones. Or maybe going like doind the first 30 lessons, and then randomly, or I don't know. I just feel frustrated with this method. Thanks in advance. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5551 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 2 of 6 02 January 2014 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's hard maintaining motivation towards the end, because you realise that finishing the book wont actually make you a fluent speaker after all, but is just a small step on a long journey.
Some of the dialogues, like the one you quoted, are a bit iffy, but you're still going to need to learn those words sometime, somehow. I like the fact that they're not based on all the usual learner themes that all the other courses opt for. 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 3 of 6 02 January 2014 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
The way I figure it, Assimil is just a nice way to build up some basic structure before tackling native materials and real conversations. If you can wade straight into native materials, nobody's going to come and say, "Hey you! Why didn't you finish your Assimil course?" I'm finding Assimil especially useful for Egyptian right now, because my other choices all have major drawbacks: - Too many traditional courses include only tiny snippets of Egyptian surrounded by pages and pages of English explanation. But I learn mostly from examples, and these courses rarely include enough. - Actual Egyptian inscriptions are a fun challenge, but they tend to hit me with way too many strange things at once: New characters, new verb forms, unfamiliar vocabulary, and so on. Plus, the only available translations are usually far too loose to be helpful. Assimil hits a nice middle ground: It has lots of examples, with precise interlinear translations, but it only shows me two or three new things at a time. That way I can get used to sentence-initial discourse particles and adverbial sentences without having to worry about negative verb forms. The goal is to learn the language. Courses are tools. As an experienced language learner, you should of course feel free to pick up, discard and re-purpose those tools as you wish. So if doing Assimil out of order seems like a good idea, why not go ahead and try it, and tell us how it works? :-)
I've heard people say this many times at HTLAL, but it bears repeating: Assimil is a lousy "phrasebook" if you plan to travel in the next month or two. Assimil's goal is to get you a level where you can converse and read a bit. They don't make any attempt to fill the first 20 lessons with essential survival phrases or anything like that. Edited by emk on 02 January 2014 at 4:55pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4245 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 6 02 January 2014 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I still haven't 100% completed an Assimil course (though I'm getting close with some) so others might have more experience on the subject. But I've had similar frustrations at times with Assimil courses, and have played around with them in different ways. So I'll share my experiences and perhaps some part of them will prove useful.
I'm a tad hesitant about completely skipping lessons, because often you're practicing a lot of small grammar details in addition to the vocab that's not always as apparent. And sometimes when I move too quickly through material I think is pretty easy, I find that there are certain grammatical points that I haven't paid enough attention to and these deficiencies only become apparent to me once I've advanced. I think I've been happiest with sticking to the 1 lesson a day in order rule, but allowing myself to be a bit playful with how I study them. For example with French I used to write out every lesson with the scriptorium method, and I found it became more and more of a chore and sometimes I would zone out and find that I had copied out a complete lesson without paying any attention to the content. So I've started doing selective scriptorium, where I only write out sentences that have vocabulary or grammar I feel are challenging. I find this makes it a lot more fun, and just the simple act of evaluating a sentence "do I really understand all the vocabulary and grammar at work here?" does a lot to improve my focus. If a lesson is too easy and I think I've mastered the content pretty fast, I might go back and review a difficult or more interesting lesson, or I might try listening to or shadowing some future lessons just to get a taste of whats ahead. Edited by YnEoS on 02 January 2014 at 4:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6900 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 02 January 2014 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm sure I've seen somebody here suggest a reverse approach by starting with the last lesson (typically #105) and the progresseing backwards to the first lesson. However, I don't remember who said that, and what the benefits were.
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| fireballtrouble Triglot Senior Member Turkey Joined 4515 days ago 129 posts - 203 votes Speaks: Turkish*, French, English Studies: German | Message 6 of 6 02 January 2014 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Of course it can be done but one needs at least the essentials in order to benefit from latter dialogues. In lesson 80, you'll naturally come across much more varied grammar bodies than you may in lesson 40. This may lead disappointment and mainly loss of interest. I browsed last lessons of my current Assimil book and just couldn't enjoy the dialogue at all. I think that's why it's called "progressive" method, as your knowledge acquirement is based on accumulation.
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