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TAC 2012 – Jinx – Freutsch & Catalan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 25 of 36 29 June 2012 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@ReQuest: dank je wel! :)
@Kerrie: I would wholeheartedly recommend both Assimil Chinese and Japanese, if you like Assimil's style. Of course, you have to take my recommendation with a grain of salt, since I haven't gotten very far through either book yet. But I've really come to appreciate the Assimil learning style as well, and so far I'm very impressed with their books for Asian languages. I hate memorizing and don't do it as a rule, so using Assimil instead of a more character-oriented course works fantastically for me: I study the characters and the romanizations side by side, and am doing a self-invented sort of "one-and-a-half wave" before starting the official second wave. This consists of writing out (only in the actual characters, of course – no romanization!) the lesson about ten lessons back from where I currently am. This helps me remember the characters, and so far when I re-read my handwritten lessons I can understand everything with no problem. It's very rewarding! The lesson content is also more interesting than I had expected it to be, considering the level of language they have to restrict themselves to. The more complicated grammatical concepts such as particles (了， 得 etc.) are introduced in a very natural and non-threatening way. I think the downside, if you can even call it that, of the Assimils for more distant languages is that they won't take you as far in the same amount of time. I don't consider that a problem, though; it makes perfect sense. I know the Chinese Assimil, for example, has two volumes and a third book dedicated specifically to the writing system, and I get the impression one might be a B1 at best by the end of the course, whereas the Dutch Assimil for German-speakers easily takes you up to B2, I'd say. But again, no complaints here – it's natural that languages that are "further away" will take longer to learn. I've heard very high praise of "Catalan sin esfuerzo" and I kind of wish I'd learned Spanish first, just so I would be able to use that course! If I recall correctly, Professor Arguelles said he thought it was one of the highest quality Assimils. How are you finding the advanced Assimils? I'm really looking forward to starting the French one (if I ever complete the basic level, that is, haha). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5387 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 26 of 36 29 June 2012 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, I really like Assimil. It's embarrassing how many of their books I own. (I really wish they weren't so diligent about keeping their programs off the internet. They are not particularly well-known outside of Europe, but if I had not found them "on accident" online years ago, I would never have bought all the ones I have now! LOL) I would not expect the Asian courses to take you as far as the European languages. I don't think it's a downside, it's just the realistic truth. :D I've gone through the Spanish and French With Ease, and I'm working on the German and Italian with Ease right now. I have a hard time sitting down and memorizing things, but the Assimil method works wonders for me, and if they have a course in my target language, I will choose them before any other method that I've found. I also have the Catalan and Dutch ones. I promised myself I could start the Catalan after I'm done with the advanced Spanish and French, and I will probably start Dutch after I've finished the German, although I don't know if I will actually wait that long. =)
I really like the Advanced courses. I'm working through the French and Spanish ones at the moment, and they are both very thorough. I would definitely recommend them. I actually just ordered the Italian book (plus the English-based Russian course, and Hungarian with Ease) earlier this week. (Okay, I only ordered the Hungarian because it was $16 and gave me free shipping. Otherwise it would have cost $8 to ship the other two books, so I basically got it for $8.) :D I am going to try to finish (at least the first wave) of the Italian with Ease by the end of August, and then would like to start the Perfectionnement in the fall. German is harder for me, and although I will probably be done with the first book by the end of the summer, I will probably spend a good deal of time reviewing and shadowing it before I decide to move on to the Perfectionnement. I have been thinking about what languages I really *want* to know, in the long run, and both Chinese and Japanese are on that list, so I have been thinking about checking out the Assimil courses for them. I'm glad to hear they are worthwhile. =) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 27 of 36 29 August 2012 at 1:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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Long-delayed answer to Kerrie: I see we're both big fans of Assimil. The more I use these programs, the more I like them. I'm excited to try the advanced-level courses, especially after hearing your thoughts on them!
- - - General update: I just wrote the following Freutsch summary on our team thread:
What I'm actually doing with the Breton stories is copying them out by hand while reading them aloud (slowly, focusing on pronunciation – still my bête noire in French), and then later going through them again to underline, look up, and note down all unknown vocab words. Most of my work on German has been in the framework of helping my mom with her studies, which is such fun. In addition to Freutsch, I've spent quite a lot of time in the last month working on Dutch and Mandarin, particularly the latter. One language I haven't done much with, though, is Catalan. But I'm planning to return to that more intensively in September, in preparation for the commencement of the fall semester in October. For Dutch, I've returned to my Colloquial Dutch book, which I hadn't looked at in a long time. I have the audio files too, so it's a pretty useful resource. In all matters Mandarin, I've been having lots and lots of fun with characters. I don't memorize – it's never worked for me, feels unnatural and no fun, so I just don't bother with it! Instead, I write a lot, which I highly enjoy. I quickly learned the correct way to write hanzi and now write every single new word I learn. I've returned to the beginning of Assimil and am writing out every lesson, and also working through TY Chinese and transliterating every dialogue into characters (since they don't use characters in the book). It's quite fun, and as long as I do a little bit every day I don't have much trouble remembering words. However, in the past few days I haven't gotten much study done. Instead, I've been working on my creative writing, practicing and recording some of my songs, and preparing for my flight tomorrow back to Germany. It's very satisfying – I don't mind taking a study break if it's for stuff like this. That said, I'm gung-ho to return to hardcore studying once I've settled back in Leipzig and gotten over my jetlag. I still have over a month before the new semester starts, and I plan to make the best of it. My classmates for Catalan will be doing an intensive Catalan course during September that I wasn't able to attend for financial reasons, so I intend to make up for that by doing some heavy-duty studying on my own during the next month to prepare for the new semester. I'll close this entry with a realization that I had today: for the most part, I'm going to stop categorizing German and French as languages that I'm "studying". In both of them, I've reached the point where I don't have the patience for anything but native materials, and I noticed that listing them as my primary focus languages for the TAC this year (as I did for the past years) gave me a "free pass" to be lazy in my studies. I would still like to work through the FSI French course to improve my speaking, if I have the patience for it, but besides that I'm going to only use native materials from now on, and focus all my official study time on other languages. Edited by Jinx on 29 August 2012 at 1:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5387 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 36 29 August 2012 at 2:00am | IP Logged | |||||
I highly recommend them, but don't be under the impression that it's a simple 30 minutes a day per lesson. LOL. They are well worth going through. The Advanced Spanish is easier (for me) than the French, but my Spanish is far better than my French (and has been from the beginning), so I'm not sure how much that has to do with it. I had a bit of a French breakdown over the last week or two, but I don't know how much of that was from the French book being too much and how much was from my kids driving me bonkers. Thank goodness they go back to school next week, though. :-) I think it's cool that you've got your mom excited about learning German. No one in my family understands or cares why I like to learn languages. They'd all rather sit down and watch TV instead! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReQuest Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5024 days ago 200 posts - 228 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Spanish | Message 29 of 36 29 August 2012 at 2:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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Good to read this all! Very inspiring.
En mocht je nog vragen over Nederland(s) hebben, stel ze gerust! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5001 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 30 of 36 29 August 2012 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Jinx, it' great to hear from you again!
You are really courageous to take on Mandarin and your writing, no memorisation approach is quite interesting. How many characters have you learnt so far, approximately? Can you already write a letter? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5685 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 31 of 36 11 November 2012 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A good three months since I last posted here. Heavens! No worries, though; these three months have involved the most intense and regular language-study of my life. I am extremely satisfied with my progress, and will describe it all in excruciating detail in just a minute. First, though, a response to the three most recent comments from so long ago (sorry, folks).
Kerrie: I finally started "Le français en pratique", partially inspired by your description of it, and I'm liking it so far. I'm only about a week in, but I can already tell that it's exactly what I need at my current level. ReQuest: Dank je wel! Ik denk dat mijn Nederlands nog niet goed genoeg is om veel vragen te hebben. Van het ogenblik schrijf ik maar "Duits met nederlandse woorden", hoewel ik weet dat dit niet werkelijk een goede idee is. Ik moet nog veel in het Nederlands lezen om de echte nederlandse zinsbouw te kunnen assimileren. Maar het is leuk de mogelijkheid te hebben met jou het schrijven een beetje te oefenen! :) …Toch, ik heb een vraag: kan je mij televisieserieën in het Nederlands aanbevelen? Het schijnt dat de meeste televisie in Nederlands engelstalige is. Cavesa: I'm not sure how many characters I've learnt at this point… if you give me an English word, I can probably say and write the Mandarin word for something between 200 and 300 of them, I'm guessing. I might be able to write a very very basic letter – I'm talking really Dick-and-Jane-ish! The extent of my Chinese-writing abilities are pretty much talking with friends on Facebook about how much I like Chinese. :) --- Now, the update: let's do this language by language. CATALAN On November 2 I finally finished "Colloquial Catalan" – the first Colloquial book I've ever worked through in its entirety. I liked it quite a lot. True to its name, it focused on the way people actually speak. While this subject area is by definition limited (I tend to prefer more literary and historical texts than yet another conversation about "Shall we go to the movies?"), it's an important linguistic area that needs to be covered, and it makes sense to get it out of the way near the beginning of one's journey with a language. The book covers an introduction to this type of language quite well. At this point, I find that turns of phrase such as "Oi que no?", "És que…" and "Com es diu…" come automatically to mind in the correct situations. Of course, that's not much help to me yet, because my vocabulary is still too limited to make conversation a realistic possibility. However, reading is much easier, and I recently found myself reading about the US elections in Catalan without any trouble. I've now started working through the 1970s edition of "Teach Yourself Catalan", which I'm hoping will live up to the old-school TY reputation and be a little more challenging than Colloquial was. I've only done the first three units so far, but it already looks promising. CROATIAN Croatian is the only language that's really been languishing this year. I've done effectively no work on it since the spring, and I really miss it in my life. But I've realized I simply can't push my quotidian study above six languages. I'm close to finishing active study of Dutch and Catalan, and once I've put four of my languages (those two, plus German and French) solidly on the "maintenance" shelf, I plan to return to Croatian with much more seriousness than I've been able to devote it up until now. However, I did see a rather off-beat – to say the least – Croatian film a few weeks ago, called "Šuma summarum". Watch at your peril. DUTCH On September 18, I finished the passive wave of Assimil's "Niederländisch ohne Mühe". Since then, I've been working regularly through the remaining active-wave lessons. I'm currently up to lesson 55. If I continue at my current rate, I'll have completed the entire Assimil course by the middle of December. Not much to say about Dutch except that I'm still enjoying it; quite pleased with my progress; severely lacking in listening/speaking ability (I did almost the entire Assimil without using the audio, although I do theoretically know Dutch pronunciation); and, as I wrote to ReQuest above, still find myself getting lazy and writing "Duitsch" – "German with Dutch words" – more often than I ought to. I assume this is a common problem for German-speakers who learn Dutch, and my plan is to start reading a lot once I finish the Assimil, so I can expose my brain to real Dutch grammar and structure. I also tried to find Dutch-language TV series to watch, but that was quite a challenge… apparently the Dutch vastly prefer to watch English-language television (guess I should have seen that coming). FRENCH On September 11, I finished the passive wave of Assimil's "French Without Toil". Finally! It only took me about two years to get through that course. I did enjoy it very much – it's the old 1940 edition, very charmingly dated in its subject material and audio – but for some reason it was an absolute colossus to get through. I'm managing to be pretty regular in working through the remaining active-wave lessons, though: currently up to lesson 103, with 36 lessons to go. Again, should be finished around the middle of December. At this point I'm starting to (again: finally!) feel more confident about my pronunciation. As I wrote to Kerrie above, I've also started Assimil's "Le français en pratique", although I'm studying it in rather a desultory fashion. (Too many languages on my plate right now to be able to put so much enthusiasm into one of my advanced ones.) I prefer to use my French for reading and writing at the moment: I've been journaling more often in French (need to remember to post some of those entries on Lang-8 for corrections), and reading a lot. I recently read a lovely little book called "Oscar et la dame rose" by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt (highly recommended, and short: I finished it in less than two hours), am continuing "Les Misérables", and have started several more: "Le cimetière de Prague" by Umberto Eco, "Aleph" by Paulo Coelho, "Dans les bois éternels" by Fred Vargas, and "L'inspecteur Cadavre" by Georges Simenon (this will be the third Simenon I've read in French – I love him). GERMAN German rolls on with its own momentum, as always. I continue to study full-time in this language, as well as working at my two regular translation jobs. Over the past two days, I attempted to translate a large chunk of a legal contract from English into German. Not too pleased with my results – legal language is hard, even in English! – but it was definitely a good brain work-out, and I posted it on Lang-8 for corrections (even though I'm not optimistic about getting much help on such a big and difficult text). Despite how hard it is to construct a text in legal German, I do enjoy this Fachsprache quite a lot. This semester I'm taking courses in marketing translation (my favorite – the psychology of marketing language makes it very interesting to me), microelectronics (least favorite – don't understand a word of it, even in English, then I've got to translate that crap into German!), audio-visual translation (currently subtitling a short film from the 1940s on remote control, quite fun), and bilateral interpretation (incredibly difficult; interpretation is NOT my thing, but it's a required module so I'm suffering through it). I don't have so much time for pleasure reading in German anymore, but I have read a couple of short books recently – "Der kleine König Dezember" by Axel Hacke (highly recommended, charming and poignant) and the play "Jedermann" by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (a classic) – as well as dipping into a few Krimis and Fachbücher ("Übersetzung und Literaturwissenschaft" by Norbert Greiner, "Audiovisuelles Übersetzen" by Heike E. Jüngst, "Handbuch Translation" by Schmitt et al.). In the realm of film, I continue to work my way through the Tatort München episodes, and a couple of friends recently sat me down and made me watch the first two Sissi movies. All of this is without subtitles, obviously. And as for music, I've been going through a particularly intense opera phase lately, memorizing several Mozart arias ("Durch Zärtlichkeit und Schmeicheln" from "Die Entführung aus dem Serail" and "O zitt're nicht, mein lieber Sohn" from "Die Zauberflöte"). MANDARIN I am so fond of this language. The more I learn, the more I love it. On September 11, I finished the passive wave of the first volume of Assimil's "Chinesisch ohne Mühe" and started the second wave. It's great to have a daily writing session; it really helps me remember the characters, while still avoiding any rote memorization, which I can't stand. I'm currently up to lesson 79 of the passive wave and 29 of the active wave. The other day I also read the first 10 chapters of the LingQ story "Who is she?" (她是谁？) and had no trouble with it. A couple of days ago I started going through Pimsleur as well. When I first tried it about a year ago, I had trouble hearing the tones accurately, but now it's no problem and I'm enjoying the aural practice (something that's been rather lacking with my Assimil studies, which I again did mostly without audio). NORWEGIAN For the "Assimil Experiment" that's currently taking place, I chose Norwegian as my language. Yes, another language on top of everything else: I know, I'm crazy. But I was missing having a low-level language, and I'm finding it lots of fun. Quite simple, although the pronunciation took a bit of getting used to (no worries, I'm doing this Assimil course with audio!). The melodic nature of the language makes it particularly fun. You can read my more detailed entries about it every week in the collective Assimil Experiment Group Log. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 6160 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 32 of 36 11 November 2012 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Jinx I am so impressed with volume of work that you have accomplished. I doubt there
would be many others who are able to begin a colloquial book and actually complete it. Managing to get through a passive wave of assimil is quite an achievement but to do it for three separate languages is simply incredible. Kudos to you for that. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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