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Assimil Chinese - any good? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6378 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 13 08 June 2012 at 4:39am | IP Logged |
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Like dbag said I describe it in my log. I would link to it but it's a pain doing it from an iPad. Check my profile
if interested. Here is a description I posted about it. Since I'm close to the last lesson of Chinese With Ease, I thought I'd comment on the quality of the course. I'm not going to actually speak of the quality of the lessons and the recordings, which are both good. The dialogs are sometimes funny as expected, the actors are good, and usually the vocabulary is helpful, everyday language. The problem I have found is that the second volume is riddled with errors. It was somewhat surprising because I don't remember the first volume being so bad. Specifically: 1) Tons of tone errors. I mean literally dozens and dozens. Also, can someone confirm or refute the following claim in Assimil that first appeared in lesson 102 (!). "Before a fourth tone syllable and before the classifier ge, qi1 (seven) and ba1 (eight) take a second tone." I've never heard of this before. If it's true, I have no idea why they waited so long to mention it. 2) Audio not matching the text. Sometimes, it was simply prices not matching (one kuai vs. two kuai). In one or two cases, there were whole sentences in the audio that didn't appear in the text. The biggest one though was an entire lesson not matching at all (lesson 79). I bought the audio from someone who bought the French version of the program so maybe that's the source of the differences. But I've never heard of the same generation Assimil audio differing across L1s. 3) Some translations where pretty bad or missing. Battery was translated as accumulator. I guess that's from French. There were some words that were never included in the dialogs or in the glossary in the back of the book that showed up in the exercises. Also, there was at least one dialog where part of the literal translation wasn't included at all. 4) The voices weren't consistent in the dialogs. For example, in lesson 44 the actors switched characters midway through the dialog. 5) Continuity problems/formatting problems. Some lessons that seemed to have several dialogs were not labelled/formatted as such. It wasn't always clear if the problem was the lack of formatting or a poorly written lesson that was actually supposed to be one dialog. All in all, still a very good course but obvously there was some shoddy work that I hadn't expected. It wouldn't have made me skip the course if I had known, but it did make the learning experience more fustrating at times than it had to be. Edited by newyorkeric on 08 June 2012 at 7:45am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7145 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 10 of 13 08 June 2012 at 7:37am | IP Logged |
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Accumulator is an English word for battery - not used much these days. In fact, I think I have mainly seen it in print in documents around 100 years old. No, I did come across accumulator when I went through my electronics course.
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| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5830 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 11 of 13 08 June 2012 at 4:44pm | IP Logged |
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So could it be said that whereas Assimil for European languages will typically take the learner to a level between B1 - B2, Assimil Chinese is more likely to take the learner to around the A2 level?
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| newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6378 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 13 11 June 2012 at 4:53am | IP Logged |
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I don't really know how far someone would get with Assimil Chinese. It depends on how you use it and what other materials you are using. When I finished it, I couldn't even easily string a sentence together (note: I didn't do the active wave). Chinese has such a steep learning curve I don't think any single program can get you very far. Edited by newyorkeric on 11 June 2012 at 4:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| maximus242 Newbie Canada Joined 4807 days ago 9 posts - 11 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 13 16 June 2012 at 9:37am | IP Logged |
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I recommend chinese pod, its very extensive and easy to use
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