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Assimil Experiment Group Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| JSBR_C Newbie United States Joined 4317 days ago 19 posts - 38 votes Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 265 of 344 19 February 2013 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Chinese With Ease
Passive: 64-70 Active: 15-21 Another week of fairly easy active translations, which is nice. It's a lot of words I'd seen with Pimsleur so I don't think it's all that surprising. My poorest performance was yesterday's lesson 19 where I had 6 tonal errors and one forgotten word. Not too bad. And I do it cold. I don't read the dialogue first as some have suggested. If my errors get more numerous I will start doing that. One thing I'm doing that I think is helpful is every day I take one lesson that is 10 lessons back from my current passive lesson and I listen to the audio and try to write it out. This exercise, which forces me to focus on the distinctions between the words rather then just hearing them all in a bit of a blur when a phrase is spoken, I think goes a long way for me. It probably does more good than some of the other things I'm doing. I may start doing that for two lessons per day, the 10th back and the 9th. This way I'll write out each lesson twice. Is anybody else thinking about what they plan to do when the passive wave is done? I spend most of my time with the passive material. I'll be done in 5 weeks and when the passive work is done I'll have extra time on my hands. My library has Teach Yourself Chinese, so I'm going to grab that and look it over. I'm sure there's more to be learned there, new vocabulary as well as words already covered in Assimil. I also saw someone at Amazon that reviewed Assimil recommend Schaum's Chinese Grammar. The reviews are generally positive. What's also nice about that one is it has pinyin throughout, which is what I need. I'm not learning characters at this point. My goal is a basic competency with the spoken only. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rahdonit Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie Ukraine Joined 6616 days ago 50 posts - 87 votes  Speaks: Russian*, Ukrainian*, English, German | Message 266 of 344 21 February 2013 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Le Grec ancien sans peine
Lessons 1-38 After some hesitation I decided to stop (or hopefully postpone) learning Ancient Greek. Despite the fact that I grew to like the language very much and certainly would like to continue studying it, I feel that Assimil alone is not enough for this task and I would have benefited a lot by supplementing my studies with a more grammar-oriented course, which would require in its turn additional time for studies. Also starting two new languages at the same time (Ancient Greek and Turkish) did not prove to work (for me 1,5h daily is essential for a language and I could not find this time for each of them). I definitely can recommend Assimil Ancient Greek but only together with a solid “classical” textbook. For myself, I would supplement Assimil with Учебник древнегреческого языка http://www.greeklatin.narod.ru/grk1/index.htm - in addition to very thorough grammar explanation it has very nice texts. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| rahdonit Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie Ukraine Joined 6616 days ago 50 posts - 87 votes Speaks: Russian*, Ukrainian*, English, German | Message 267 of 344 21 February 2013 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Türkisch ohne Mühe
Passive wave – Lessons 1-46 Active wave – Lessons 1-11 In short, I am very content with Assimil Turkish. The dialogues are interesting, new words recur periodically. Grammatical concepts are also very well introduced, probably almost mathematical Turkish grammar helps. The active wave is still rather easy, but lessons become more difficult starting from around lesson 25 and I wonder how it goes after that. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| agantik Triglot Senior Member France Joined 4637 days ago 217 posts - 335 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: German, Norwegian | Message 268 of 344 21 February 2013 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Le norvégien sans peine - lesson 30
Unfortunately, I confess I dropped out of the experiment at lesson 30, due to lack of time and motivation to be honest. I can't stick to one method only and I missed dictionaries, grammar books. I was just dying to have a look at the other self tuition books I own (teach yourself , colloquial Norwegian, le norvégien en 20 leçons...) Next time I want to tackle Norwegian, I won't be using only Assimil. Moreover I chose a language which was not my number one priority (it is Italian this year, and I am at a stage where Assimil is not enough) hence perhaps the lack of motivation! :) Edited by agantik on 21 February 2013 at 3:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 269 of 344 21 February 2013 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not in the "experiment" per se, but I just made it through the first 50 units of Le norvégien sans peine for the
team Viking TAC challenge. As others have pointed out, Assimil seems to do a much better job with languages closer to one's native language. I am finding the method working well so far for Norwegian. (It wasn't so good for Chinese and Arabic!) I will point out that my Norwegian reading skills at this point are much better than my comprehension which is far, far better than my speaking skills! Maybe that will improve with the Active Phase. My mission with Assimil is to use it to get a core vocabulary "base" and then move on to a more comprehensive grammar text and speak with more Norwegian speakers. Yes, Assimil Norwegian is pretty good so far, but one needs supplementary methods to make it to B1! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5168 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 270 of 344 21 February 2013 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been through Norwegian Assimil and I think I got too much unnecessary vocabulary for a "faux-débutant" stage. There were so many household words which I can't even say in my native language! I'm sure a native English speaker will be able to detect the similarity of these words which are often Germanic-root cognates, but for me I kind of spend a long time leanring what I still don't need while I needed to know so much stuff that was taught "en passant".
liddytime, I'm sure you'll enjoy it much more when you come to try reading novels or even using the intermediate textbooks. In the case of Norwegian, there seem to be only monolingual intermediate textbooks, but they look quite nice! Now, for the experiment: like I said here, I decided to take Russian without Toil instead of doing a canonical active wave for Il nuovo russo senza sforzo; so far it seems to be working out; I'm at lesson 16 and I'm not having much trouble translating English-Russian, so I assume it would also be easy if I tried to do this with Assimil Il nuovo russo senza sforzo (well maybe not that easy because this edition is insane when it comes to vocabulary as it only has 70 lessons, but still...you see the point I'm trying to make). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 271 of 344 21 February 2013 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
...and how! Important stuff is taught in passing and then later, you're foreover wanting to find these little bits but can't remember where it was... Anyway, here's where I'm at with Romanian: Passive: lesson 83 Active: lesson 30 As a reference, lessons 82 (quick re-read of 81) and 29 took me almost an hour last night -- lesson 29 was one heck of a heavy lesson with every line having new (AND mostly useless) nouns and verb forms. At best, I might be A2... at best. Finishing the passive wave won't do much to improve that, but by the time I'm done the active wave, who knows. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5250 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch | Message 272 of 344 21 February 2013 at 11:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Dutch With Ease
Passive Wave: Lessons 71-77 Active Wave: Lessons 50-56
Thanks, Flarioca! I took your advice and I'm so glad I did. As it turned out, I had something on hand to read that was perfect for my current level of Dutch. When I first started learning French, I bought the audio book A Moi Paris from the French Today website. You can listen to and read this book for free on the website, but I bought the entire package, which included MP3s and pdfs of the book, bilingual workbook, and Q&A exercise book, and pdfs of the book translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Russian, Romanian, Hindi and Dutch. The Dutch translation of this book was just what I needed right now. As Flarioca pointed out, reading something outside of Assimil was a great way to find out how much I've actually learned from my Assimil studies. Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm just spinning my wheels and not really learning that much, but reading A Moi Paris in Dutch was almost as easy as reading English, so I've obviously learned something! Reading an easy book in Dutch was fun and pulled me out of the Assimil doldrums. After I got the snap back in my garter, I plunged back into the passive wave where I left off at lesson 71. It took almost two weeks to complete lessons 71-77 of the passive wave and lessons 50-56 of the active wave, but I finally got through it. One more week and I'll be finished with the passive wave. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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