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Criticised Assimil programs

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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
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fabriciocarraro
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Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French
Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese

 
 Message 17 of 67
11 March 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:
There are around 3000 native Esperanto speakers. There's also a relatively 'neutral' Esperanto accent - pronouncing all of the sounds correctly, without a listener being able to guess your native language. Some native speakers I've met don't have a particularly neutral accent (they tend to have that of the native language of whichever parent spoke Esperanto to them), but some do.


By "native", I meant in a specific area or withing a specific group. Those native speakers usually learned their Esperanto from their parents, who most likely had an accent from anywhere they were from, like you said.
I highly doubt that someone from France and someone from, say, Japan, will speak Esperanto with the same accent (unless they learned it using the exact same resources, but in that case they'll probavbly end up with the accent of the person who created the resources, who also has his/her own accent).

Anyway, I was just kidding with "alang" =P I do know that there are people who speak with a more or less strong accent. But if there's such thing as a "native accent" in Esperanto, it should probably be that of Russian, since it was Zamenhof's mother tongue.
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Volte
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 Message 18 of 67
11 March 2014 at 9:49pm | IP Logged 
It's closer to Serbian. Russian has vowel reduction, and very heavy Russian accents are nearly incomprehensible in Esperanto.

There are a lot of events for Esperanto-speaking kids to socialize with each other, and that tends to lead towards some standardization in their accents. This also happens, to a lesser extent, with adults - some people who routinely go to Esperanto events end up with a quite neutral accent, while some don't, kind of like the variance in the accents of adults who move to an English-speaking country and learn English.

Edit: it just bothers me a bit when people 'lol' or invent things about various Esperanto-related things, when they wouldn't do the same for Spanish or Ladino with an equivalent amount of relevant knowledge. It's a living language with perhaps a couple million speakers and a couple thousand natives and well over a century of history...

Second edit: a further problem with the Assimil Esperanto course is that it doesn't provide a particularly full view of the grammar. The later lessons aren't bursting with participles and causatives, to put it mildly. It feels like it starts at the beginning, and kind of stays there, adding vocabulary but not addressing a large enough subset of the language itself.

Edited by Volte on 11 March 2014 at 9:59pm

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kanewai
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 Message 19 of 67
11 March 2014 at 9:56pm | IP Logged 
Name: L'arabe
Base: French
Generation: 2006
Criticism: Speakers on the CD sound like cats being tortured.

Good parts: Nothing that makes up for the horror of listening to those recordings.


Name: Le grec ancien
Base: French
Generation: newest
Criticism:
(1) Ancient Greek has 9236 different ways to conjugate or decline any word (give or take 1500); this might be too much to "assimilate" naturally, much less without pain. Or lots of pain.
(2) The dialogues follow a spunky school boy through his day. Greek, the language of gods and heroes, is reduced to telling wacky tales from the gymnasium.

Good parts: I like the way the Greek sounds, though others have said the accent is "too
French"


Name: Le turc
Base: French
Generation: newest
Criticism: The French seems more of an interpretation than a translation of the Turkish
dialogues. Assimil might not be a great fit for an agglutinative language. It's hard to
match up the Turkish dialogues with the idiomatic French, and you spend a lot of your
time with the dictionary to figure out which words mean what.

Good parts: Recordings are nice, and you get a sense of how the complete language
works. This might be a good course for those who are already approaching a B-1 level in Turkish.


Edited by kanewai on 11 March 2014 at 11:05pm

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alang
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 Message 20 of 67
11 March 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged 
fabriciocarraro wrote:

By "native", I meant in a specific area or withing a specific group.


That is how I understood your post. I think Volte thought you meant there are
absolutely no Esperanto native speakers anywhere.

fabriciocarraro wrote:
Anyway, I was just kidding with "alang" =P I do know that there
are people who speak with a more or less strong accent.


That is why I loled.



Edited by alang on 15 March 2014 at 12:51am

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ericblair
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 Message 21 of 67
11 March 2014 at 11:58pm | IP Logged 
Name: Italian With Ease
Base: English
Generation: newest
Criticism: More typos than it seems like there should be. Even having no prior
experience with Italian, I was able to notice most. Not a deal-breaker and still a fun
enough course!
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sillygoose1
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 Message 22 of 67
12 March 2014 at 12:47am | IP Logged 
ericblair wrote:
Name: Italian With Ease
Base: English
Generation: newest
Criticism: More typos than it seems like there should be. Even having no prior
experience with Italian, I was able to notice most. Not a deal-breaker and still a fun
enough course!


I couldn't believe how the mistranslations between "colazione" and "pranzo" made it through to a final product...
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ericblair
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Studies: French

 
 Message 23 of 67
12 March 2014 at 1:51am | IP Logged 
sillygoose1 wrote:
ericblair wrote:
Name: Italian With Ease
Base: English
Generation: newest
Criticism: More typos than it seems like there should be. Even having no prior
experience with Italian, I was able to notice most. Not a deal-breaker and still a fun
enough course!


I couldn't believe how the mistranslations between "colazione" and "pranzo" made it
through to a final product...


I just imagine a factory full of French monolinguals doing their best to slap together
the product to get it out, haha.
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alang
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 Message 24 of 67
12 March 2014 at 3:49am | IP Logged 
@Kanewai,

What were the specifics for the Arabic course, that made the audio difficult to listen
to?
Speed, native speakers, topics.

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

When I took Latin I fought for my right to pronounce Latin with a Spanish accent which
in my view was more
likely to be close to the original than the Norwegian accent.


I thought Italian is the daughter who stayed home in Italy, while the siblings moved
out to what is now known as France, Spain, Romania, Catalonia, Occitania etc.. While
keeping up certain features and dropping others. Italian probably did something
similar, but probably sounds closer to the mother tongue.

I can see why Assimil does not have native speakers for Esperanto, Latin, Ancient
Greek, Sanskrit and Ancient Egyptian.

The first three were criticised for noticeable French accents. It is odd why a native
Modern Greek speaker not chosen to do the audio for Ancient Greek?

Esperanto if a non specific region like the Polish accent was not chosen, it would
have been nice to hear multiple accents, as it is suppose to be international. It is
easier said, than done, due to restraints on time, budget and resources.

Does anyone know if the Sanskrit audio was spoken by a scholar of Sanskrit who is a
native speaker of a modern day language descended from Sanskrit?

As for Ancient Egyptian, my only guess to make it close, is to have a Coptic speaker
do the audio for the reconstruction. This is only a guess.

Edited by alang on 15 March 2014 at 12:53am



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