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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 321 of 344 20 May 2013 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese With Ease Final Update
I started on Christmas day and did my final active translation this morning. So just short of 5 months to do 105 lessons. I did it all pretty intensely. Every day when I finished working my way through the passive material I'd also re-listen to 10 prior lessons. When I encountered new words I'd load them in my flash card app. So I'm working pretty hard. An hour and a half was pretty typical each day. Results are pretty much what I expected. This was time very well spent. I'm much improved from where I was 5 months ago, but fluency is a long way off. This weekend I went to a Chinese language meetup group. It's the second time I went. The first time there were about 7 people and mostly English was spoken. So I didn't get much of an opportunity to push myself. This time though I arrived and nobody else was there. Just me and the lady that organizes it. She is Chinese. So I just sat and started talking, exclusively Chinese. I understood a lot from her, and when I didn't understand she generally wouldn't break from the Chinese. She'd make me use the Chinese-English dictionary on my phone, and we would struggle through. We did this, with some English breaks, for over two hours until someone else showed up and we had to dial it back because this person wasn't at this level. It was incredible. I really felt like I was getting there, and true fluency was attainable. The teacher was extremely complimentary and I think really enjoyed the discussion. This is what she always wanted this meetup group to be. Fight your way through and use Chinese exclusively. But it's not possible for the other people that come because they are more just dabbling in it, not really throwing themselves into it in an serious way, as I am. She complemented me and told me I'm smart, but I don't really think that's true. I think I am fortunate to discover better teaching methods, and the others in the group could do the same. If I can make this much progress over the next 5 months then I really think I'll achieve my goal, which is B2/B1 level. I've made huge strides. This has been very worthwhile for me. But I don't think it will be easy going forward. I really like the way Assimil paced me, breaking up a typical hour and a half with some listening, some writing, some reviewing, and some new material. What would be perfect is if there were another 105 Assimil lessons of Chinese. Anyway, in summary I think Assimil has been very worthwhile. I would highly recommend it. It is time well spent. But when you're done with Chinese with Ease you'll still have a lot of work to do. 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4717 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 322 of 344 21 May 2013 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
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O Novo Francês Sem Esforço - Leçons 71-77:
This passive block was very funny. A strong focus was put on the imparfait, and it's very easy! My listening comprehension didn't vary so much, being close to 75% in all of the lessons. No problem at all with the active phase. The review lesson was again strongly focused on the imparfait and also explained the future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jasoninchina Senior Member China Joined 5233 days ago 221 posts - 306 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 323 of 344 21 May 2013 at 4:47am | IP Logged | ||
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@JSBR_C That's a really interesting review of your time spent doing Assimil. I once had the opportunity to listen to the Chinese Assimil and was not impressed by the audio. I found that they did not speak naturally and it was in fact quite stilted. But I'm really glad it worked for you. Keep up the good work, Mandarin is an awesome language.
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 324 of 344 21 May 2013 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Il nuovo russo senza sforzo - Russian without toil
As I mentioned here a couple of months earlier, I decided to take another edition of Assimil Russian instead of doing a second wave. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of vocabulary, literary excerpts and long, useless notes at Il nuovo russo senza sforzo, and when I started Russian Without Toil I thought I could take advantage of what I had previously learned at Il nuovo russo senza sforzo, in order to make the learning process less painful. Unfortunately, that was not what happened. After its firs half, RWT started presenting the same problems as Il nuovo russo senza sforzo. I got loads of new vocabulary before the previous vocabulary had been taken care of well enough. I got endless notes on several forms of words. I know that Russian morphology is so rich, but I find it totally useless to come up with all adjectives, perfective and imperfective verbs and participles derived from a noun everytime you come across one. For example, if the word for breakfast showed up in a dialogue, then on a note I would get the derived verbs, participles, adjectives and all that. Plus, i'd normally get similar lexical items such as dinner, lunch, teatime. I find it totally useless and totally deviating from what an Assimil is supposed to be. So, these two Assimil Russians are totally NOT what an Assimil is supposed to be. I think the authors feared so much that Russian has too much vocabulary and morphology, that they wanted to make everything fit into 100 (or 70 lessons). As a result, you have so much stuff scattered through the book that you end up not knowing anything enough. Assimil RWT and INRSS are the opposite of Assimil Chinese Two Tomes. The Chinese one might seem dry, but, after the second wave, I would come back to them and notice that what was important got retained. Now I look at it as a beginner's book I managed to go through. The Russian ones, on the contrary, are Frankensteins where you get informal dialogues then more formal dialogues then literary excerpts and you end up not knowing anything for any of the situations involved. i'm really disappointed with my experiment for Russian. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4717 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 325 of 344 22 May 2013 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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O Novo Francês Sem Esforço - Leçons 78-84:
That was fast, right? Ahaha not really, it's just that I wrote the last post while I was already in the middle of this block. A bit like the block before the last one, my comprehension varied a lot, going from 50% to 100%, considering only the listening comprehension before looking at the book. There were a looot of expressions, and well, there was even a lesson called "l'argot" (slang). I think it's great to learn such things. Now they've focused on the future, which is also easy enough (except the irregulars). Just one note, I think that the lesson 83 is a little late to first present an important word such as gasoline (essence), I'd have done it a earlier. But anyway, unless you're planning on travelling through France by car, you're good without it. The active phase was harder for me though. It wasn't really a problem, but I constantly forgot about using "celui-là", "celle-ci", etc. Otherwise it was ok. The review lesson was focused on the relative pronouns such as "laquelle", but adding prepositions, so "auquel", "duquel", "de laquelle", etc. It also explained one important grammar point, which is the use of the indicative future after words like "quand", "lorsque". I pointed that out because in Portuguese we use the subjunctive future, and it can confuse us at first, but giving it a longer look it's even easier in French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JSBR_C Newbie United States Joined 4317 days ago 19 posts - 38 votes Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 326 of 344 22 May 2013 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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@jasoninchina I think I know what you mean when you say the audio is stilted. Maybe I'm not as good at distinguishing it since I'm relatively new, but I've seen some things like commercials that air in China or bits from shows and yeah, they do seem to flow a bit more. It's kind of like the words run together, whereas with Assimil the words are distinctive. Though that is probably helpful when you are new to the language.
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 327 of 344 24 May 2013 at 12:52pm | IP Logged | ||
Hi Jason, I'm sorry for being so tardy in replying to your questions. I haven't had time before now to check in after posting my final update, as I've been busy catching up on everything I set aside in order to do the experiment! Woody Allen once said that eighty percent of success is showing up, and that's what I did during this experiment. I just showed up every morning and read, listened to and repeated the dialogues, studied the grammar notes, did the sentence structure drills, took dictation from the audio, and during the active wave translated the dialogues from English to Dutch. I can't say that it would be beneficial for everyone, but I personally like to start out with a Michel Thomas foundation course, simply because after blasting through it in a couple of days, I have a basic understanding of how that particular language works and can make up my own sentences. That feeling of "getting it" makes me feel confident and enthusiastic to take the next step in learning a new language. I don't feel it's necessary to master anything before beginning an Assimil course. You can jump right into Assimil without doing anything else first, or you can do something like Michel Thomas, Teach Yourself, or Pimsleur first and then follow up with Assimil. I struggled with some of the Assimil lessons, but I am definitely reaping the benefits now, as I continue learning Dutch. Assimil truly gave me a great foundation to build on. I just completed the Pimsleur level 1 Dutch course, and it was falling-off-a-log easy. Next up: Linguaphone Dutch! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 328 of 344 28 May 2013 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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For those who studied Chinese; how does Assimil deal with the tones? If there will be an
Assimil purchase in the near future, my guess it will be Le Chinois (or maybe Finnisch ohne Mühe). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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