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Assimil Experiment Group Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5880 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 185 of 344 05 January 2013 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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El Catalán sin esfuerzo - Lessons 43 to 49
Seventh review lesson. At this point, I'm happy to understand longer and more normally spoken texts. Although not yet natural texts, we're close to that and the mere fact that it took me less than 25 hours to do this is somewhat amazing and I won't continue to complain about grammatical explanations here. I'm very curious about the active phase, hoping that it is as well designed, and we are going to produce texts in our target languages without pain. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shiningstars Diglot Newbie United States lang-8.com/351461 Joined 4668 days ago 8 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese | Message 186 of 344 06 January 2013 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Le vietnamien sans peine update
I finished all of the 63 lessons in this book, and honestly, I think it is the best language course I've ever used. Obviously, I did not update periodically here... But, I did so HERE on my blog. I think that everybody reacts to different methods in different ways. Fortunately, Assimil just happened to work extremely well for me. No, I don't remember every single vocab word that showed up in the book, but I remember most of them. I happened to meet a very nice Vietnamese friend online, and I have been talking to her throughout my studies. I can understand most of everything that she says. I tweet in Vietnamese too, and it is so easy for me to do because of this course. I did one lesson everyday, and I only missed 2 days out of my whole time doing this experiment. Sometimes it could be somewhat frustrating, but most of the time every lesson was a joy. The only bad thing is, I wish there were more lessons! The book explains things so, so well. And even if I didn't understand a certain grammar point when it was first introduced, everything was continuously reviewed until I understood and it was second nature. The audio is superb. I think Assimil spoiled me, because now when I listen to audio from other courses, it is either of bad quality or gummed up with annoying English. I didn't know anything about Vietnamese or the culture before I started this, so I am really grateful that I chose to participate in this experiment; I have grown to love Vietnamese! 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| RedBeard Senior Member United States atariage.com Joined 6100 days ago 126 posts - 182 votes Speaks: Ancient Greek* Studies: French, German | Message 187 of 344 07 January 2013 at 1:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Hey, all!
I am late getting to this, but I restarted Assimil for the new year before I found this discussion. I hope it's not too late to join in. Obviously, I am still in the first week of the passive wave. I am really tempted to use more than one source, just as others here have experienced. But I will limit my study to Assimil (German Without Toil c1982) and see what happens. I must say that I am not a beginner. A couple summers ago I used Defense Language Institute materials and about lessons 1-21 of GWT. So I don't expect any trouble for the first month or two. As for absolute BEGINNERS, I wouldn't recommend Assimil. Especially for those languages (like Japanese) with new alphabets or word-order. It seems to me that if one could get 20 Pimsleur lessons or a Traveler's Phrases tape one would be in a much better position for starting Assimil. OK, time to go do my lesson... :wq! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5445 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 188 of 344 07 January 2013 at 2:18am | IP Logged | ||
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L'Egyptien
It's been a while since I updated, and I confess to missing one week and then backtracking to catch up. I just finished lesson 28, so 4 weeks done - not a very good pace. The hardest part I've found in this course is trusting it to keep me going. With L'Alsacien sans peine, I had enough standard German behind me that a lot of what was going on was recognizable. I'm finding, with Egyptian, that my choices are to really only get a handle on the sound part but not the symbols, or to take way too long. In this, I'm running up against an issue I had with Teach Yourself Babylonian - learning the language is an interesting endeavor, but it just lacks the zip if you can't read them the way they were first written, especially since you can't really hope to find someone to talk to (the reason I'm not so bothered about not being able to write Mandarin). Based on my experience so far, I would still say this is the best resource for learning Egyptian as more than just something to decode, but I think to fit what I've been doing anyway, I'm going to do each lesson over the course of two days, one to work through it and let it sink in and one to inscribe it in my notebook and see what has stuck. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 189 of 344 08 January 2013 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Le Grec ancien - Lessons 36-42
This set took me weeks to finish. I don't think it was harder than the others, so much as there has been such a massive accumulation of details that I couldn't keep it all straight. I had to go "off-method" a few times. I've read that Homeric Greek has 80 verb forms, but that the average student only has to memorize around 50. Yeah ... only fifty. There are an equally insane amount of noun forms. And then there is the aorist tense, and middle voice, and other things we don't even have in the West. And so while I still like Assimil, I don't know that the "assimilation" part was fully working for me. I needed outside help, and did a few chapters in some standard grammar books. I also did un-Assimil like things like trying to memorize declensions and grammar, and spending hours on the revision lessons rather than 30" I'm also having trouble with the French translations more and more. I don't know if this is Assimil's fault, or if it's me not knowing enough French. Greek grammar does not line up nice and neatly with Romance grammar at all, and so the literal translations use completely tortured syntax. A native French speaker might not have this problem. My outside resources: 1. Pharr's Homeric Greek (1959, public domain, free download at Textkit). Teaches Greek by walking students through the Iliad. 2. Teach Yourself Greek (1952) - I found it at a used bookstore. Assimil will remain my main method moving forward, but I foresee needing more breaks where I act like a school boy and do drills and written exercises from a classical text book. The best part of le Grec ancien has been the recordings. Assimil uses pitch accents (which a lot of courses don't teach), so the spoken Greek is almost like singing. I can't sing, mind you, but it sounds great and I'm glad I'm learning this style of pronunciation. No one, ever, at any time, has said that ancient Greek was easy! Edit: Here's an example from Lesson 43: gumnazdoménous - s'entraînant (training), moyens-passif (middle voice) oux - negation hugíeian - santé (health) heksein - future infinitive of avoir, The phrase gumnazdoménous oux hugíeian heksein shouldn't be too hard, but Assimil's translation is l'entraînement est malsain, while the literal translation below this is s'entraînant ne-pas santé être-sur-le-point-d'avoir. Do those of you who are more fluent in French find single words like être-sur-le- point-d'avoir awkward? 'Cause I get all tangled up in it, and I'd love to know if it's Assimil, or if it's me (and my mixed command of French). It took me thirty minutes just to untangle the tenses in the six lines of Lesson 43, and I haven't even started listening to the recordings. Edited by kanewai on 09 January 2013 at 4:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 190 of 344 09 January 2013 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
Shot in the dark here, but if he's from the old school of teaching and drilling forms and vocabulary first, and not speaking and reading until you've already magically learned all of that, he may be assuming that anything in the book that you're working on should be well within the previously attained level of actively drilled production that you've done, which would, of course, be way off base. In case it helps, I'm at active wave lesson 74, IIRC, and I'm now finally starting to realize that I can, slowly and with a lot of backtracking, express all sorts of relatively simple ideas in French if I try. When I was just starting the active phase, however, I couldn't say ANYTHING. So no promises, but hang in there and don't panic! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5246 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch | Message 191 of 344 10 January 2013 at 1:33am | IP Logged | ||
Congratulations on your success! In your personal prediction before starting the course, you wrote that you hoped to reach an A2 or possibly B1 level by the end of the course. What level do you believe you actually reached? What is the average amount of time you spent on each passive wave lesson? When you got to the active wave, how much time did that add to your study sessions? Were you able to translate all of the lessons from French to Vietnamese "with ease"? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6536 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 192 of 344 10 January 2013 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Does anyone know how to get around the Norton antivirus software when downloading anki?
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