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Assimil x4 for Film Studies - TAC’14

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YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4247 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 17 of 99
19 January 2014 at 4:28am | IP Logged 
Well, my language studies are becoming more and more intertwined, so it looks I'll be writing bigger sections in the front end of my log about my overall progress, rather than keeping everything nice and divided in it's own section. I'm going to try to stick to updating every 2 weeks though, so hopefully there won't be too much reading to keep up with.

Hit a bit of a small milestone this week, I'm officially half way done with my first wave of my main Assimil courses for all my languages. Of course learning a language takes much more than Assimil, but I still take it as a pretty positive step forward for me. Last year I spent a lot of time trying out different languages and courses, finding which ones I liked and what methods worked best for me. This year I feel I've stabilized a bit, all the languages I'm studying are the ones I'm most interested in, and I really enjoy all the courses and methods I'm using. There's still a long way to go, but I feel like I'm in the thick of the learning process now, no more experimenting or trying things out, just a matter of staying consistent and pushing forward.

Also, though I had dabbled a bit last update, these were the first 2 weeks of trying out L2-->L3 Assimil courses for my second wave. And so far it's been incredibly fun! It's really nice to review all the familiar dialogues, but still keep learning new things with the new language base. But the best part is often reading the grammar notes, sometimes they can be equally as informative about the base language as the target language, as in this example from my French --> Russian course "время est le temps qui dure, погода le temps qu'il fait.". Other times they are nice reminders of some of the concepts we get free from our language base that might be completely new for other learners. 2 examples I found fairly amusing "зачем нужны артликли?" (Russian --> German) and "Hans ist Heute Hier: Hans est ici aujoud'hui. Répétez-le plusier fois pour vous exercer à l'h." (French --> German)

I've also amended my scriptorium practices since I've taken on more Assimil courses. Now I'm only using scriptorium for my L2-->L3 studies for my big Assimil review book. I'm noticing more and more that my mental state plays just a large or maybe larger role in the learning process than how many times I repeat or write out dialogs. Just writing out everything was really helpful at first for connecting the spoken and written languages together. But once I became more comfortable with the writing systems it became more of a chore. Just the act of evaluating each sentence and deciding if I'll want to review it later makes a big difference in my focus and involvement with my study. And the fact I know that what I write now, I'll have to review later makes me take a lot more time and care instead of just rushing to copy down the whole lesson.

I've also started using Subs2SRS anki decks for French and German to start getting used to using native materials. I'm starting with some old musicals first, cause they usually have lots of talking, and I think it would be fun to get some more songs stuck in my head. I'll keep a list of the films I'm going through in my log, though I'm starting out a bit slow until I finish all my basic courses.

Team Start

French

Completed: Pimsleur Plus, Advanced Michel Thomas & Foundations, FSI Basic Course I, French In Action (1 Pass)

Current Tools: Assimil French Without Toil Lesson 126, Using French Lesson 18, Францукий без труда сегодня Lesson 17 (2nd Wave), franciául könnyűszerrel Lesson 17 (2nd Wave), Reading For French Chapter 10 lesson 63, Duolingo

Subs2SRS Films
*Le Million (René Clair, 1931)

Thoughts: The only big change this week was I dropped the German base New French Assimil course I was using, because I only had it in Anki form, and doing Assimil in an anki deck was becoming more and more annoying, but now I'm doing a fun native material anki deck to make up for it and I'm still covering the course in the Hungarian and Russian base.

Reading for French is probably my favorite course ever, it's helping tons with my grammar comprehension and it's really fun to use because almost everything in the course is adapted from native materials. Previously I started doing 1 chapter a day but as I got deeper into the course I realized this was going to take way too much time to do, so I slowed down to 2 lessons a day (each chapter has 5-6 lessons). This is a much nicer pace and also lets me test how well I retain what I've learned because there's a test/reading at the end of each chapter and I think it's better to do these on different days from the lessons. And the tests conveniently points you to the lesson that covers each question, so if you get something wrong, you know where you have to go back to to review.

French studying has been a bit more relaxed lately than my other languages, but it's involved in so many of my other studies that I feel the language ringing in my head all the time.

German

Completed: 5 years of public school German

Current Tools: Assimil Les Nouvel Allemand Lesson 66, L'Allemand Sans Peine Lesson 17 (2nd Wave), Немецкий без труда сегодня Lesson 17 (2nd Wave), Lyrics Training

Subs2SRS Films
*Die 3 Groschen-Oper (G.W. Pabst, 1931)

Thoughts: Nothing terribly exciting going on with German, I'd like to increase the intensity of my study a bit, but I think it's more important to focus my main efforts on Russian and Hungarian for now. I think when my other routines settle down a bit I might pick up FSI German and Reading For German.


Team Катюша

Russian

Completed: Pimsleur III, Michel Thomas Foundations, Madrigal's An Invitation to Russian

Current Tools: Assimil Russian Lesson 56, Le Russe Lesson 7 (2nd Wave), Le russe sans peine Lesson 19, Beginning Russian Volume 1 Lesson 3, Modern Russian Lesson 4, Anki

Thoughts: My Russian routine has still been undergoing some revision, and it's not 100% stable yet, but I think it's settling. Finding out that the Modern Russian course is basically the exact same thing as an FSI course was an incredible discovery, and I think drills will help a lot with digesting Russian Grammar.

The other big discovery was Beginning Russian by Richard Leed and Alexander Nakhimovsky, which so far has the best grammar explanations I've come across, and a solid amount of dialogues and practice than other courses I've tried. The lessons are incredibly long though, so I haven't really integrated it into my routine comfortably yet. I think I'll probably focus more on Modern Russian for the time being and just pick this book up from time to time when I want to change up my routine a bit.

Despite the instability in secondary courses though, my primarily Assimil studies have been progressing pretty smoothly, and I'm incredibly excited to have started the second wave of the most recently Assimil course, this time via French base.

Oh and I also finished Madrigal's An Invitation to Russian course, which was a pleasant course, but only barely touched on the very basics of grammar.


Team *jäŋe / *ledús

Hungarian

Completed: Pimsleur I, FSI Basic Course I

Current Tools: Assimil Lesson 49, FSI Reviewing Unit 5, Anki, Lyrics Training

Thoughts: I've been leaning really hard on Hungarian studies and I have to say it feels like it's been paying off. I finished going through the first half of FSI though I'm only using it to get comfortable with Hungarian grammar, I think it would be pretty difficult to completely master the course, as there's a lot of excess vocabulary that's only used in the Unit it's originally presented in. So far the course has been extremely helpful and the content has actually been pretty interesting despite FSI's baffling reputation as "the boring course".

It was pretty hard to know if I was progressing or not when going through the course, so I decided to review the first half again really quickly, just to reinforce everything I've learned, and to try and gauge my progress. As mentioned before I haven't absorbed 100%, but just by charging through the course and getting familiar with everything I can say the early lessons are way easier. Despite not focusing much on active skills, I have an easier time completing the active exercises in the earlier lessons so long as I'm familiar with the vocabulary. I also understand a lot more of the listening exercises than when I was first going through. After I finish review I think I'll continue my usual routine through the second half, and then do another big review just as a final measure.

Assimil has been pretty fun and stable, I'm starting my second wave tomorrow (this time with a French base) and I have to say I'm really excited to review some of the earlier lessons that so utterly perplexed me when I first started out.

Edited by YnEoS on 19 January 2014 at 6:32am

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YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4247 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 18 of 99
19 January 2014 at 8:08pm | IP Logged 
A few small things I forgot to mention.

I finally got my Cyrillic stickers for my keyboard and set everything up. However when I attempted to start using Lyrics Training for Russian, I realized that they skip over the Cyrillic characters so you can only watch along with the lyrics scrolling, but there's no function to test your listening ability and practice writing. So I still might upload Russian songs to lyrics training as a way of syncing up lyrics, but it looks like I'll have to come up with other exercises if I want to study them in more depth.

Also I thought I'd post my favorite song from Die 3 Groschen-Oper, the German film I'm using for my first Subs2SRS deck. Seeräuber Jenny with English subtitles.
1 person has voted this message useful



YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4247 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 19 of 99
23 January 2014 at 11:59pm | IP Logged 
I decided it should be easier and clearer if I post any changes or interesting stuff with my routine when it happens, and leave just statistics and some overall thoughts for my my bi-weekly update. Hopefully this will cut down on their length a bit and also avoid me having to remember everything that happened in the previous two weeks.


Anyways, recently I've been so happy with my French and German Subs2SRS Anki decks, that I deleted my vocabulary Anki decks for Hungarian and Russian and decided to start doing Subs2SRS decks with them as well, but with fewer cards per day since I'll probably spend more time analyzing each sentence

For Russian I'm starting with a 1934 film Строгий юноша (A Severe Young Man) directed by Абрам Роом which was banned after it was originally made. I haven't watched the film myself but the director has made other films I like in the silent era, so this seemed like a good place to start, though I primarily picked it for the matching russian English subtitles.

For Hungarian I'm starting a bit easier with a 1973 animation, János Vitéz, based off the poem by Petőfi Sándor. The dialog is a bit slower and clearer than my other decks, and I believe most of the lines in the film are taken from the original poem, so it will be fun to commit to memory.



I was kind of on the fence about anki vocabulary decks, on one hand I almost always get bored of them, but on the other I do find them quite helpful at times. But I think ultimately Subs2SRS decks will be much more helpful for the audio and grammar components. Plus they have the added bonus of contributing to my film studies by allowing me to memorize entire dialogs of films, which I think is pretty cool.

Edited by YnEoS on 24 January 2014 at 12:01am

1 person has voted this message useful



YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4247 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 20 of 99
24 January 2014 at 10:36pm | IP Logged 
Decided to switch decks for my German and French Subs2SRS, though I was getting a lot of good use out of my old ones, I picked the films I wanted to study over films that had L2 and L1 subtitles. After starting Hungarian and Russian with L1 and L2 subs, I realized what a huge difference it makes to have both as a beginner.

I might start decks with only L1 or L2 (or L3) subs in the future and probably will return to this. But I think for now it's better to focus on expanding my vocabulary.

For French I'm now doing Le Grand Jeu (Jacques Feyder, 1934) which isn't a musical like I hoped, but it has pretty good quality subs, so that counts more.

For German I'm doing Der Kongreß Tanzt (Erik Charell, 1931), which is a musical.

I haven't watched either of these before, but so far they're both absolutely hysterical. My favorite exchange so far (opening lines of Le Grand Jeu)


(Man and woman driving in a car)

Woman: Tu va trop vite.
Man: Jamais trop vite quand nous rentrons chez toi.
Woman: Nous n'habitons pas dans un arbre.

Edited by YnEoS on 24 January 2014 at 10:37pm

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Tollpatchig
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4000 days ago

161 posts - 210 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Maltese

 
 Message 21 of 99
25 January 2014 at 1:58am | IP Logged 
Where do you find the films?
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YnEoS
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4247 days ago

472 posts - 893 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 22 of 99
25 January 2014 at 2:43am | IP Logged 
Some I rip from my own DVD collection. But there are also certain online communities I visit that circulate old films that haven't been released on DVD (recorded from European television or other random sources), and these usually get fansubbed. There's lots of other communities for finding different types of films for different genres and interests, though I don't think discussion of these sites is condoned on this forum.

There's also lots of websites like Open Subtitles that have tons of subtitle files for lots of films in different languages, so if you can find a video file for a film somewhere, you can find various subtitle files for it as well. Though in some cases you may need to re-time the subtitles if they come from a different source from the film.
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kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4882 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 23 of 99
25 January 2014 at 9:15am | IP Logged 
I'll have to check out some of your French movies!I like the ones we've seen in common.
I keep finding that I love American and French (and Italian, German, and Japanese) movies
from the 1940's and 1950's, but there's this 'dead period' to me from about 1965 to the
mid 80's. You listed a couple new ones to me that might fill that gap!

Edited by kanewai on 25 January 2014 at 9:18am

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renaissancemedi
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Greece
Joined 4351 days ago

941 posts - 1309 votes 
Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2
Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew

 
 Message 24 of 99
25 January 2014 at 9:33am | IP Logged 
Try this film, if you haven't seen it.

(La grande illusion) (1937)

It's a classic.


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