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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5394 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 41 of 94 05 September 2012 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Once the active phase starts, are you planning to continue at the pace of one passive plus one active lesson per day for each language? I have found the same frustration with vocabulary that you are having with Swahili and Indonesian with my Turkish course. I know some of my problem is that I'm studying from my L3, which is not as strong as I'd like, but I don't really have any problem understanding the French. Obviously that's not a problem for you, but I wonder how much of it is that for me, compared to the fact that the language is structured so differently from the Indo-European languages. As different as the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages are, they all share a lot of grammatical structures, base words and cognates. I think the idea of using Anki (or any other resources) defeats the idea behind the method behind Assimil, but I don't really believe it's that "simple" to learn a language that has such foreign grammar and vocabulary. Didn't Sprachprofi do the Swahili Assimil course with no other resources to see how far the course would actually take you? Are you planning to continue all these languages once you've finished the Assimil adventure? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 42 of 94 06 September 2012 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Kerrie: so, the plan for now is to continue at the rhythm of 1 lesson per day in the passive wave, and add the active wave at the top of that. I may adapt if I see that the active wave takes too much time, but if it's in the 5-10mn range, then it will definitely be fine. There is one good reason for this: It already takes 5 months of quite heavy daily commitment, and if I decided to do 1 day passive 1 day active, it would add another 50 days. There's also the fact at this rhythm, I should finish all of these languages between the 23rd and 28th of December, and that's quite symbolic: I want to be done before next year (in fact, I may try to do 2 lessons a day a few times in order to get everything done before Christmas).
Then if I feel I could still benefit from it, and if I have enough courage, I'll still be able to do a second active wave at 2-3 lessons per day. (but I may also be quite fed up by then.) Then I'm not sure if I understood well your problem with Turkish. Do you mean you had problems with both grammar and vocabulary? How did you tackle these problems, and what were the results? I see that Turkish is not in your study list, so I suppose you dropped it? Why? I think Sprachprofi has indeed studied Swahili through Assimil, but that's probably an old log that I didn't follow. Of course, using Anki is deviating from the original Assimil method, but well, I'm not doing an Assimil advertisement campaign (who would've thought?!) and if I see Assimil alone is not going to be enough, then I'll be willing to add something else to supplement. Perhaps we could at least agree that using Anki on the side is not like using another method, but merely using a tool, which is quite different. Anyway, for now I haven't thought properly yet of how to do for Swahili, and it seems that being more focused and reading aloud (something I had stopped doing for some time due to an inappropriate environment) help a lot. Perhaps I can continue Swahili without extra help and see what happens, while comparing with Anki-helped Indonesian. Finally, I don't know if I'll continue all of these languages. I would like to say "yes", because I always want to keep studying all of the languages I've started, but if I did, it may be sporadically, in bursts and certainly not regularly, as I would like to have more time to focus on German, Old English, Classical Chinese and perhaps preparing for next session of Korean's TOPIK. Among the languages I definitely want to keep, Latin and Norwegian (the two easiest) are at the top, and probably Swahili and Indonesian at the bottom. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5394 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 43 of 94 06 September 2012 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | ||
No, just that it's really hard to remember the vocabulary, because it is so vastly different from the Indo-European languages. I wonder how much of my vocabulary retention (or lack of it) is because I'm learning from my L3, and how much of it is because the language is so different. It sounds like you're having somewhat similar issues with Swahili and Indonesian, with the vocab being harder to remember. So I think it has more to do with the fact that the language is so different from English, and less to do with my French. =) I'm not really studying Turkish right now, but I want to start the Assimil course in the next few weeks. I watch a lot of Turkish drama, so I have picked up a few phrases from that, but I haven't studied it much yet. The vocabulary from the few Assimil lessons I have worked on don't seem to stick though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 44 of 94 07 September 2012 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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You are awesome!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 45 of 94 09 September 2012 at 11:09am | IP Logged | ||
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Advice request: I'm less and less satisfied with Swahili. Perhaps it's because I'm very busy with other things these days, tired and don't necessarily have the patience for it, but I feel like I'm not really progressing.
My feeling is that we're covering classes one by one/two (there are 15 of them), and that has very little value in terms of intellectual challenges, as they're merely different prefixes in front of nouns. The verb grammar is more interesting, and they're teaching subjunctive this week, which is relatively similar to French to make enough sense. But the vocabulary is such a pain, and the dialogs are SO boring. Here's yesterday's dialog:
Where is the humour touch that makes my other Assimil (at least Latin, Norwegian, Polish) a real pleasure to study? It's dry as hell. How about the new vocabulary? Is it such a common situation in Kenya or Zanzibar to walk on "urchins", "limp" or have "stings" broken in the foot? It's not the end of the book, it's only lesson 40, i.e. after one month and a third of learning... It's not fun nor cultural (some are about the local culture at least). This constantly new vocabulary makes studying each lesson like trying to see through the fog, you need to look up almost every word, only to discover the text behind was not quite worth the effort. Do you have times like these? How do you cope with them? What should I do? I don't want to give up, but if it continues on this track, with frustration day after day, I don't know how I will be able to reason myself to spend half an hour on it every day for the next four months.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 46 of 94 09 September 2012 at 11:49am | IP Logged | ||
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You know how you didn't give up learning to cycle after you dropped off your bike once?
You shouldn't give up Swahili for the same reason. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5165 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 47 of 94 09 September 2012 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I know how you feel, vermillon. There are always those times when we feel we're wasting our time with such
vocabulary. What I usually do is just browse through it with no specific effort to retain anything. I'm pretty certain that when the time comes and I need it again, I'll know where to look up. Assimils for less commonly taught languages do have such idiosyncrasies one lesson or Another, but I think that doesn't hinder the magnificence of the method. Just remember that the core of the language will stick into your mind without you realizing it. You've gone so far on your challenge, don't let an urchin stop you! I thought it would be worse with Indonesian, because this one is reported more often as being an awkward one with senseless vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 48 of 94 11 September 2012 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here it is, my first weekly report that comes on time. I've just finished the 6th week for Indonesian this morning, and this means that Egyptian is already dangerously close to the day the active wave will start.
Assimil Adventure - Week 6 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : lessons 36 to 42 : 3h15 This week has been just fine. I don't know if this is the calm before the storm, but it has been pretty smooth content-wise, and the revision lesson is the first of the book to be an actual revision lesson and not a lesson that has twice the grammar content of the full week. In that respect, this has been very positive and I wish the future revision lessons will stick to this format. The vocabulary sticks just well I believe, but I didn't try to write out the dialogs, so it's very likely that I just recognize it at sight and wouldn't be able to reproduce it. I've been too busy with other things, and writing out the full text of the lesson would easily take an extra ten minutes that I didn't have. I've installed Anki 2, finally, to start using emk's deck. I haven't actually started the one that contains sentences, as I clearly didn't have the time, and perhaps it will fit better in the active wave. I have tried the "signes de base" however, but just tried (lack of time again). It has proved a bit frustrating, as out of the fifteen or so that I've tried, I don't think I had seen more than 3-4, so if those are supposed to be the most common, then Assimil failed to show them to me unfortunately. Anyway, as I said, lack of time prevented me from going further on this, and as soon as my life gets a bit calmer I will definitely try it more. -Latin : lessons 36 to 42 : 2h30 As usual, Latin goes very smoothly. The only thing that keeps me from understanding the dialogs beforehand is the new vocabulary (which they sometimes push to a ridiculous amount, as was the case during two lessons this week, but at least they admitted it, so it suggests it was deliberate, even if I cannot get why). The grammar is very progressive and usually it is quite easy to understand from context. I cannot always make sense of why they use the passive voice however (for active meanings and for verbs that I don't believe to be deponent, but I didn't check), but I just imagine them in the active voice. The active wave will surely be beneficial here as a quick re-read of the notes should shed some light on the few points that remained obscure during the passive wave. -Norwegian lessons 36 to 42 : 2h45 Continuing on last week, everything seems to go quite well. My listening skills are now ok for the level of the dialogs, and usually I understand well the words that I have already seen (was not the case before) and can guess ones I have never heard. Here I can draw from English, German and even the bits of Icelandic I have learnt earlier this year, this is extremely rewarding. This is something I really expected, and somehow in this experiment I really wanted to pick up a Germanic language to see the puzzle getting a bit clearer. In the end I hope to get a larger understanding of Germanic languages, and I believe Norwegian is a step in the right direction, in addition to sounding very nice and probably figuring on the list of my future holidays destinations. The only thing I can say about my learning itself is that I've set myself the rule to read aloud every dialogue and exercice to mark a lesson as studied, and this reading aloud has been a tremendous help for vocabulary retention, grammar patterns and listening skills. I've then decided to apply it to the rest of my languages (all but the two previous, for which mood and time availability mostly kept the lessons silent) -Polish : lessons 36 to 42 : 2h15 Quite smooth here as well. We've just started the past, but fortunately that's an easy chapter in Polish apparently, so perhaps next week will not mention the past anymore. Here too I've found that reading aloud helps vocabulary retention as well as forces oneself to pay attention to the grammar. The bit that hurts is that pronunciation is SO hard, I can spend about half the time (or double the time I should say) trying to read aloud the text properly. There are just too many rz and cz, sz and they're so close in time that some sentences are really tongue twisters for me. Perhaps there's some assimilation going on, I didn't pay attention to it, but if there was then it would surely help me utter all these sentences without having the need to learn the dialog by heart. At the same time, it's very useful, because then I focus so much on the dialog that I'm pretty sure I'll get a better retention of the vocabulary as well as syntax. This is a bit early to say, but I'll keep an eye on it. -Swahili : lessons 36 to 42 : 3h As usual, I've found the vocabulary a real pain, and this resulted in the post from a few days ago. Fortunately, it turned out I was quite tired and perhaps it was a particularly bad lesson. I've read your comments, and perhaps I was indeed like the kid falling off his bike (though reading my log, the vocabulary & boring dialog issue has been there for several weeks now, so it's more the kid covered in blood here). I tried to think of Expugnator's comment as well, as a way to see Assimil in an optimistic way: vocabulary acquisition can come later and Assimil is probably more about learning how the language works. Anyway, I still decided to tackle the problem, and this will be a fight to death: I've started an Anki deck two days ago, and I'll try to add all the vocabulary I encounter. Adding two lessons a day should be enough to quickly get me back on track: I add the vocabulary from the day's lesson, as well as that from lesson 1,2,3... The first day I've done it took me 1h to complete the lesson instead of 25-60 usually, but it's fine because I felt so satisfied doing it: first, it made me discover a Swahili dictionary (had not looked for one), and in this dictionary they return a lot of words based on the root you've entered, which made me realize how much affixation Swahili could use. That really boosted up my mood, as Assimil had not really touched the topic, and the perspective of growing vocabulary by combination is something that I really enjoy (in Esperanto). The second day I could already feel that some verbs that had never stuck before suddenly had stuck after I had added them to Anki. I'll follow up on that, but I think I've found a solution to my vocabulary problem here! -Indonesian : lessons 36 to 42 : 3h Not a very pleasant week in terms of Assimil. The dialogs have always been rather dull, but now the mix dull dialog + extreme fatigue makes it difficult to be satisfied by the texts. I hope to catch up on sleep and return to slightly less busy days very soon, as I don't think I'll be able to hold both my Assimil load and my other duties. The good thing this week is that I've continued with Anki, and this is of course a great way to make all this vocabulary stick. I won't say that Assimil isn't good, but I don't think it's really their focus to make you remember all this vocabulary: as long as they've shown you a word, they can add it to their count and later claim they've taught you 2000+ words, even if you probably don't remember more than half (actually have no idea about this, could be much more or much less). Anki doesn't take as much time for Indonesian as it does for Swahili, as I don't need to look for the base word, its plural or class, I just need to copy it straight from the book. It has helped me remember a lot of words already, so I'm going to continue until the end of the book. One last complaint about Assimil Indonesian, the revision lesson: no recap as they usually do, but simply an exercice (like last week), translating sentences from French to Indonesian, the goal being to use correctly the affixes they've taught during the week. The problem is that they don't re-explain these affixes, and they just give the answers, so that for affixes which are very close and easily confused (and there are quite a bit I believe...), I keep on failing without knowing why, which is not a very good teaching method, I'm not supposed to learn through osmosis but rather through assimilation, which can be greatly helped by understanding. Anyway, we'll see how it fares. A final note: The active wave is approaching. I think I've solved, or am in the process of solving all of the problems I had in the previous weeks with vocabulary. The only thing I can wish now is that I'll be less busy (or in fact I could wish the opposite, but that would mean the end of this challenge) soon enough to start the active wave serenely. Fingers crossed! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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