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Assimil Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7184 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes  7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 17 of 29 12 April 2006 at 8:07am | IP Logged | |||||
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My goal with studying right now is to understand what I'm listening to/reading. If I understand what a sentence means, I move on. I don't look it up in the grammar book and I don't puzzle over why it is said that way. After all languages weren't designed by mathematicians so usually there just isn't a good reason why things are said in a certain way.
If I understand what a sentence means I know that sooner or later with enough exposure to the pattern I will learn it. This is why I like bilingual texts. If you don't understand the sentence you are reading you just glance at the opposite page and get the explanation immediately. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| reltuk Groupie United States Joined 6817 days ago 75 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 18 of 29 12 April 2006 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think it's completely reasonable to say you could do two lessons a day. It's supposedly better if you don't do everything at once, but split it up throughout the day. Optimal "burst-learning" times are between 15 and 30 minutes. You will also hopefully be listening to the dialogs throughout the day, as a review, on an mp3 player or something.
Unfortunately, I can't comment on FSI, as I've had no exposure to it. I've been generally amazed at how fast Assimil introduces you to Spanish, but I think they can get away with it because everything is presented in context and they don't ask you to apply any of the points until you've been seeing them for months. As an example, in the first 35 lessons of Assimil, the reader is exposed to the following verb forms: present indicative, imperfect indicative, preterite, future, and perfect indicative; they have had passing exposure to the present subjunctive and the pluperfect indicative, as well as maybe others that I'm not thinking of right now. That's all within the first 5 weeks of listening for 30 minutes a day. In your case, you'll "know" all of that by week 3 (at least passive recognition of it). Most beginner Spanish courses that I've seen would not come close to exposing you to all of those forms in the first 18 hours of study, but like I've said, I've never seen the FSI Spanish course. Hope this helps, --reltuk 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6913 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 19 of 29 12 April 2006 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I on the contrary do not like bilingual texts and have found them not as useful as I once thought. Often the translation is very different from the text in target language and can give very vague idea of what is being said in target language. Obly such bilingual text where translation is kept as litteral as possible would be more helpful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| InsanePenguin Senior Member Wales Joined 6872 days ago 248 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 20 of 29 12 April 2006 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know what you mean but for Spanish I think they are good because generally the translations are as literal as possible, I guess it depends on the language
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| maxb Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 7184 days ago 536 posts - 589 votes 7 sounds Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 21 of 29 13 April 2006 at 12:17am | IP Logged | |||||
Well in ny view, even if the translation is not literal, they can still give you and idea of the meaning of the sentence. I bascially use them instead of using a grammar book to figure out tricky sentences. However I might not dare to only rely on them to learn the words in the target language. I still look up unknown words in the target language to get the exact meaning. But I still think these text help figure out how things are said in the language. For instance I have been looking at "Teach yourself cantonese" lately which has no translations. I think that if I didn't already have a grounding in mandarin I would find it a bit tricky to use. Because I would constantly have to refer to the grammar notes to figure out what sentences mean. As it is know I can rely on my knowledge of mandarin to help since the two languages are rather similar (although by no means identical) grammaticaly. In my view the Assimil format is much better, where you just glance at the opposite page and immediately get the meaning of the sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6913 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 22 of 29 13 April 2006 at 1:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I wonder why there is so little or no courses which would contain litteral rather than idiomatic translation along target language texts. Maybe authors of textbooks feel uneasy to write translation of texts in "broken" English, it maybe seems to them as a mockery of English, as something inapropriate.
Is the translation in Assimil courses litteral or idiomatic French(or English)? From what you say I suppose it shall be idiomatic, but earlier I presumed that it should be litteral, since the second phase of Assimil method presupposes that the student should cover the text in target language, and try to reconstitute the text of target language from the French(English) translation. Yet if this translation is idiomatic, this task would be almost impossible since the structure of English/French can be completely different from that of target language. Eg. a very simple example. Let's say we have a Russian phrase V parlamente proizoshlo sobranie if we would translate litterally into English we would have: In parlament happened meeting. Clearly that the student can easily recreate the Russian phrase from litteral English translation. If we translate not litterally into English we would have: There was a meeting held in the parliament. If the student will try to "recreate" this sentence into Russian he will get a nonsense like: *tam bylo sobranie soderzhano v parlamente. Of course with some toil and thinking the student maybe would be able to achieve the correct phrase in Russian, but would it very different from the notorious grammatical-translational method? And in my eyes, a method which requires thinking cannot be called "without toil" or "sans peine". So I would like you to explain me what kind of translation is used in Assimil? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cheemaster Newbie Canada Joined 7046 days ago 35 posts - 35 votes | Message 23 of 29 13 April 2006 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Currently, I am using "Assimil - le chinois sans peine". As this is the only Assimil course I have studied, I can not be sure if all of their courses follow the same format. Nevertheless, to answer your question based on my limited experience, "le chionis sans peine" has both idiomatic translation, and literal translation. This, in my opinion, is the ideal format for such a method; the idiomatic translation allows the student to comprehend the implied meaning of each phrase, while the accompanying literal translation breaks down the sentence into its constituents. This helps with the grammatical understanding of a given construction, as well as vocabulary aquisition. Furthermore, having literal translation, in addition to idiomatic translation, helps to prevent nonsensical translations of idiomatic language as you have described. I hope I have answered your question to some extent. Is the method of dual-translation common to most Assimil courses? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linas Octoglot Senior Member Lithuania Joined 6913 days ago 253 posts - 279 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Lithuanian*, Russian, Latvian, French, English, German, Spanish, Polish Studies: Slovenian, Greek, Hungarian, Arabic (Written), Portuguese | Message 24 of 29 13 April 2006 at 1:59am | IP Logged | |||||
Spanish is structurally sufficiently close to English, so that make translation as litteral as possible which would not look as "broken English" is in the most cases possible. However there are more problems when we deal with a language like Korean. In this case a litteral translation alone would be also not very helpful, since it can be unintelligible. Therefore one would need two translations - one litteral, very litteral(probably one would have to use some metasymbols for Korean affixes and function words with no equivalent in English) and another more idiomatic. The former would explain structure, the latter would give a more immediate grasp of sense. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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