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Emme’s Small Steps - Team Sleipnir TAC’15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 105 of 360 28 January 2013 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I totally understand you, Emme. All I can say to encourage you is that it got worse
before it got better. I'm currently at my final week, lesson 64, and the worse ones were between lessons 43 and 55, I think. Now I'm getting used to the length of the lessons, and the vocabulary starts to repeat itself again (museum and art stuff). I'm far from having any clue on the verbal system, but vocabulary starts to stick more consistently. I believe it would be nice for you to finish the book, the feeling of accomplishment, not hard feelings or sorrows left behind, even if you don't stick strictly to Assimil Challenge's rules. I personally do everything as an active wave and I just write down the Russian sentences because I have no idea what to say, but in the last days it started paying off. Do you have any other resources in mind for doing next? It may sound like masochism, but I'll be doing the old 60's Assimil right after this one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 106 of 360 28 January 2013 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been struggling with Assimil Russian as well. I do fine until lesson 30, then I struggle from 30 to 50, and then I give up, and start again after some months, at which point I have forgotten almost everything and it feels like I am starting from zero.
I am hoping to tackle more of it in this 6wc. If I start at 30 and go through it from 30 to 50 in repetition mode I hope to have built up momentum, to be able to charge up the hill of lesson 50 and onwards. We are in this together, so don't lose hope :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 107 of 360 28 January 2013 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Expugnator for the encouragement!
I hope you’re right, that the worse ones were between lessons 43 and 55, which is exactly where I am. I have plenty of resources to choose from: from the Princeton Russian Course to the Learn Russian website and the S azov textbook, just to mention the first that come to mind (on the first page of the MIR thread you can find the links to these and more). I’m not sure which one I would pick next, I haven’t thought about it yet, but right now anything looks more appealing than Assimil to me. When I compiled the list for Team MIR’s resource bank I barely took a look at those courses, but all I can remember is how reasonably doable those first lessons looked with their short dialogues and those pretty exercises (I know, I must be crazy to long for “pretty exercises”, but that’s how I feel). The funny thing is that I realize that it’s thanks to the hours spent on Assimil (which now seem wasted on that, but I’m sure they weren’t) that I am now in the position to start any of those courses and work through the first lessons with a certain ease. So I’m not condemning Assimil or bashing its method, it’s just that I can’t keep up with its insane pace and even though I tried my best to slow it down and take my time on it, I’m really fed up with it at the moment. I’m really about to burn out, and I probably need a break from Assimil just not to lose motivation completely. Sorry for venting, but tonight I’m really demoralized. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 108 of 360 28 January 2013 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Cristina, too, for the encouragement! (We cross-posted: tonight the forum seems especially slow)
I’m half thinking of joining you on the 6wc in order not to lose the momentum in Russian which I’ve built up in the past three months, but as you know I’m really hopeless with technology and social media in general, and Twitter kind of scares me! It’s true, anyway, that there always comes a point in Assimil courses where the lessons get suddenly more difficult. I think there are generally three or four tiers of Assimil lessons: the first couple of weeks, where you can do the lessons in the fabled daily half-hour; then lessons 20-50 where things start getting interesting and you start spending more and more time just to go through the entire lesson in a reasonable way; then after lesson 50 when in most courses you’re supposed to start the active wave which allegedly adds just five minutes of work to your daily effort, but in my experience always take more than half an hour; finally lessons from 70-80 onward where the workload gets so big that even many determined people get stuck and end up quitting. I’m not sure whether it’s a great idea Assimil trying to persuade people that with their method you just need to dedicate half an hour of your time every day to study a lesson and in about 5 or 6 months you’ve assimilated your target language without too much effort. Apart from marketing reasons (of which I am well aware), I think a more realistic assessment of the kind of commitment (in time and mental energy) that Assimil requires would lead to more reasonable expectations and consequently fewer burn outs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 109 of 360 29 January 2013 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Emme, it's not just Assimil's courses. The problem with most language courses is the
(false, afaik) premise that, the more you advance within a course, the more words you can retain. So, you start with 10-15 words at the first lessons at short dialogues and end up with 3-pages dialogues with 30 new words or more, and it it's all cumulative. That's in my point of view a big flaw. You haven't increased your memory and attention span just because you've learned a few grammar rules. Vocabulary is vocabulary, and if you want to keep it really sans peine, you have to alternate lessons with new grammar and others with just the remaining vocabulary for that level, without new grammar. 'Coz we all know there's way more vocabulary to learn than grammar. Instead, what we see is that people come with a lesson on the present tense and 15 new words. Then they come up with a lesson on the future and 30 new words, which is totally wrong. It's not because one person knows the present and the future tenses that now they'd become able to tackle twice as many words a day as before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 110 of 360 29 January 2013 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | ||
Having made wordlists for every single Assimil lesson in Le Breton sans peine, I can refute this. Fairly few Assimil lessons (in this edition at least) teach you more than 20 new words. On average I would say it's 15 or 17. I include wordlisting a few idiomatic expressions in this. The number is quite stable. But yes, that assumes that the old words are known (and tbh knowing the forms of to be seems to me like it would be a fairly good plan anyway). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 111 of 360 30 January 2013 at 1:14am | IP Logged | ||
But actually I think that premise is (mostly) true. If I’m given a daily list of 20 words to learn, they’d better be in English rather than in Russian. In fact, I don’t find it too hard to learn new vocabulary in English, because I’ve reached a certain level of proficiency where I have plenty of experience with English morphology, phonology, orthography etc. and I can find all kinds of useful mental hooks and links between words to make memorization easy. Where I agree with you is that that kind of proficiency can’t be achieved over a single course, no matter how comprehensive or well organized it is. It takes years of continuous contact with your target language not a few months! I’m not as diligent as tarvos, so I haven’t compiled wordlists for Assimil Russian and therefore I have no idea how many words are introduced in each lesson. Judging from other Assimil courses I know, though, his estimate of about 15-17 new words per lesson seems reasonable. Apparently that’s too much for me. I don’t know if this metaphor makes sense, but I envision language learning as reaching an elevated lookout from which one can dominate the landscape (i.e. the target language world) all around. Sure, you can run up the 400-meter Empire State Building in less than ten minutes (they actually do: see Empire State Building Run-Up) and I’m sure the view from there is fantastic, but that’s not for me. I’d rather climb a 400-meter hill, choosing a gentle path that gets to the top in a roundabout way. The route will be longer and no doubt it will also take much longer, but I’m confident that I’ll be able reach the top and above all I will enjoy not only the journey but also the different views along the way. And I won’t need to worry about giving myself a heart attack! ;-) The Assimil Experiment is like the Empire State Building Run-Up and I’m really out of breath right now! --- P.S. After I wrote this post I checked the glossary of Il nuovo russo senza sforzo: they list just over 1300 words. Considering that there are 70 lessons in the book, that means that on average they introduce 18,8 new words each lesson. If you don’t count the 10 review lessons, which have very few new words, the average rises to almost 22 words per lesson. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 112 of 360 31 January 2013 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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After a few days of reflection I’ve decided to drop the Assimil-only rule from the Assimil Experiment.
At this point I don’t feel I benefit much from doing Assimil the way it was intended (or almost the way it was intended). I’m well aware that finding out the efficiency of this method used as its authors recommend was the original purpose of the experiment but I must face reality and accept the fact that after three rather pofitable months I’ve reached the end of the line for me and Il nuovo russo senza sforzo unless I tweak the way I use it some more. Indeed, adding a second passive wave (my so-called 1 ½ wave) has been a worthwhile change but clearly not enough. I feel that a little latitude in my approach to Russian may be helpful. And so from tomorrow I will be free to use whatever textbook or resource I want. However, I still intend to finish Assimil, only it will probably take me longer now. There is one thing, though, that I’ll miss about this experiment as I’ve run it until now: i.e. knowing exactly what I had to do every single day. This, in my opinion, is one of the best characteristics of Assimil. The idea of one lesson every day is a brilliant one (it’s just the unrealistic workload of that lesson that’s killing me), and prevents you from jumping around from one textbook to another continuously second-guessing your method and learning plan. I’m afraid that without the structure (bordering on the straitjacket) of Assimil I may lose focus and direction in my Russian studying and end up giving up on the entire enterprise. That’s why I’ve also decided to try the 6wc. I hope that the sheer amount of studying that the 6wc should promote may ease the passage from the structured learning with Assimil to a new learning regime where I use one or more resources with a modicum of consistency. The 6wc should also offer a great opportunity to sample various learning methods and materials, so that I find out which one is best for me at this stage. Now I’m off to try and enroll in the 6wc. As I said in a previous post, I’m no Twitter fan and a bit of a tech nitwit, so let’s hope everything works out fine. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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