Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 209 of 344 31 January 2013 at 9:46pm | IP Logged |
All these people working on Assimil and 5 days without a post!?!
Come on, the fans are waiting! ;)
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7203 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 210 of 344 31 January 2013 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
Arekkusu wrote:
All these people working on Assimil and 5 days without a post!?!
Come on, the fans are waiting! ;) |
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I agree. The posts are very interesting. They are definitely helpful when the wanderlust bug strikes (for resisting it).
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Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5345 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French
| Message 211 of 344 31 January 2013 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
Il nuovo russo senza sforzo, Italian edition of Le Nouveau Russe sans peine
If you have read my previous posts here in this thread or if you’ve been following my log, you know that in the past couple of weeks I’ve been really struggling with keeping up with Assimil Russian.
I’ve come to the point where I must admit defeat and throw in the towel.
I’m not dropping Assimil, nor am I quitting the Experiment completely, but I need to let go of the self-imposed rule about using no other method apart from Assimil for the duration.
I’ve been studying with Il nuovo russo senza sforzo for three months and I’ve logged more than 70 hours (not counting listening to the audio at every occasion). Had I done all the lessons as intended (i.e. one each day, and once the active wave was reached, a passive and an active lesson one after the other), in a fortnight from today I would have finished the book anyway (it only has 70 lessons).
Instead I took my time and tried to slow down the process by adding a second passive wave. It was a worthwhile attempt, but still it wasn’t enough to make Assimil doable for me in just one go. From tomorrow I will add other resources. It seems that most participants to this experiment sooner or later had to tweak the way they work through Assimil. Using other textbooks and materials will be mine.
I still intend to finish Il nuovo russo senza sforzo: if it takes longer now, so be it!
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oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4417 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin
| Message 212 of 344 01 February 2013 at 12:57am | IP Logged |
I am around lesson 45 of my Chinese challenge. I am not following the Assimil method. No
active wave opposed to passive wave. Everything I do is listening and understanding. I
don't much attention to the characters either since I am studying them in parallel to
this course with other books.
I am not speaking since I don't have 800 hours of exposure to the language yet. No speak
from day one.
I edit the mp3 files removing the silent gaps and I speed them up so the files are more
similar to what I am likely to encounter in the real life.
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 213 of 344 01 February 2013 at 1:28am | IP Logged |
oruixo13 wrote:
I am not speaking since I don't have 800 hours of exposure to the language yet. No speak
from day one. |
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*choke*
Come again?!?
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oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4417 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin
| Message 214 of 344 01 February 2013 at 1:00pm | IP Logged |
Arekkusu wrote:
oruixo13 wrote:
I am not speaking since I don't have 800 hours of exposure to the language yet. No
speak
from day one. |
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*choke*
Come again?!? |
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I am doing an experiment. It consists of lots of input and little pressure to begin
speaking.
By the way, now that I am the only one studying Chinese in this challenge, I have to
say that this method is not intended to teach you the characters. One has to focus on
listening, speaking and writing pinyin.
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Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6468 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese
| Message 215 of 344 01 February 2013 at 1:42pm | IP Logged |
oruixo13 wrote:
I am around lesson 45 of my Chinese challenge. I am not following the
Assimil method. No active wave opposed to passive wave. Everything I do is listening
and understanding. I don't much attention to the characters either since I am studying
them in parallel to this course with other books.
I am not speaking since I don't have 800 hours of exposure to the language yet. No
speak from day one.
I edit the mp3 files removing the silent gaps and I speed them up so the files are more
similar to what I am likely to encounter in the real life. |
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I'm the first to advocate a lot of input when it comes to non-European languages, to
get a better feel for how they're different and not impose European structures on them
too much, BUT: input-only for 800 hours is crazy. There's a guy who completed 2000
hours of Chinese input (
http://natural-language-acquisition.blogspot.de/search/label /TV%20method),
then tried to have a conversation with a native speaker, and frankly there were some
people in my 2nd semester Chinese class who spoke better Chinese than that. And had
better comprehension.
You need to try to use the language yourself, try to express yourself - only then will
you notice all the differences and all the things you're missing, and this will in turn
allow you to listen with more purpose, to watch out for how native speakers would
phrase the same thing. Active learning stimulates passive learning and vice versa. If
you're missing one or the other, particularly in a language like Chinese, you'll soon
be stuck in a blind alley. Please rethink your approach.
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oruixo13 Triglot Newbie Australia Joined 4417 days ago 33 posts - 35 votes Speaks: FrenchB2, Spanish*, EnglishC1 Studies: Mandarin
| Message 216 of 344 01 February 2013 at 2:11pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the response. The thing is that I am listening and understanding, not only
listening, which I think differs from what the guy does.
Moreover, I didn't choose this method randomly. I chose it because Stephen Krasen and
other linguists advocate it.
And believe me, I notice a lot of things. I am not listening blindly to the files, I
read
the pinyin, I recognize some characters. I have some experience speaking and I prefer
the natural approach, i.e, listening and understanding a lot before start speaking. I
won't force myself to speak, it'll just spring spontaneously.
Edited by oruixo13 on 02 February 2013 at 12:58am
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