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Older Learner tries Assimil for Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 137 of 175 29 June 2012 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||
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Assimil appears to require you to repeat aloud "turns", what they call "paragraphs" in some instructions. These turns are numbered.
Some of these numbered turns, are long collections of sentences others break long sentences up. Assimil claims that "repeating aloud" is an important step. Which is easier to remember and repeat aloud in one chunk? This? "Buenos días doctor, no puedo más, tengo ganas de llorar, no sé que hacer, necesito su ayuda, ¡ah...! ya empiezo a llorar... pero... ¡por el amor del ciel, digame algo!" Or this? "El imperativo es utilzado en España tanto" My short term memory doesn't hold the first one in English either. Why does Assimil divide them up by number if they don't intend for you to repeat them as numbered turns. I agree completely that it is trivial to repeat Buenos días doctor or no puedo más or tengo ganas de llorar All I'm saying is that Assimil should split up some of these long passages that don't fit very well into short term memory. If you follow their instructions, the way I understand them, you will have to repeat 30 word passages that include many sentences to get through some of the lessons. If the numbers don't mean anything, and you're supposed to just repeat the passage a sentence at a time, why do they put the numbers in... If they split them up some more, the lessons would be easier. I wonder if anybody has a copy of the French version of SwE. I know Assimil is famous for vague and varied instructions. Do the instructions mean something else in French? I also suspect some of my frustrations with the grammatical instructions in SwE are that the grammatical instructions were written for someone who speaks a closely related language, not for someone who speaks English and who has only learned Non IndoEuropean languages to this point. I readily admit that I hope nobody thinks I hate SwE or anything. It's not perfect, but I love it, just like an old friend... steve Edited by sfuqua on 29 June 2012 at 12:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5297 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 138 of 175 29 June 2012 at 1:39am | IP Logged | |||||
I understand your problem, but really, there is something totally wrong with this. You are trying to follow a fixed procedure, as I said above, instead of concentrating on the content. It is so common a mistake here that this may even seem natural, but in fact it is against all reason. You agree with me that the sentences are easy, so life is good and you can be happy. No problem at all. Whoever wrote these instructions could never expect that people would follow them like the word of god, these things are meant as a little help for beginners, not as anything definitive. I can only repeat: If you understand these simple sentences, can say them on your own one by one, then everything is fine. Shadow them, write them, mix them up, check your pronunciation, I mean do whatever you want, it is just some language material, offered to you by the creator of the course, and what he cares about is that you understand it, that you absorb it, that you can say these things on your own, in the long run, that's the goal. The content should be everything, the procedure means nothing (well, not so much). Edited by lingoleng on 29 June 2012 at 1:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 139 of 175 29 June 2012 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Good point. When I started this log, I attempted to ask the question, "Can a 58 year old learner learn
Spanish using Assimil?". Often in this forum, people seem to dismiss a book or a method, shadowing, LR, or Assimil without actually trying it the way its creators intended; they do their own variation, and then say that the method doesn't work. I attempted to do the course following the instructions Assimil gives. Halfway through Spanish with Ease, following the instructions the best I could understand them, I was dissatisfied with my progress. I think I can say, with some justification, that Assimil, using their instructions, does not deliver what it promises for a learner like me. If I hadn't followed their instructions, I couldn't say that. Next I tried shadowing through the book. I made rapid progress at first, but I still doubt if b2 is a reasonable possibility. About a month ago, after reading about the usual amounts of time it takes to reach some of the higher levels in languages, I decided that I simply needed to do more work. I decided to do the overly difficult lessons exactly the way Assimil says. I want to get every drop of knowledge out of this book I can. If at the end of the day, I say that Assimil does not take a learner like me to b2, I don't want anybody to say that I did not complete the book according to instructions. I want to be able to say that I completed the book as instructed,and I did more. Assimil is excellent language material. I could see that it might bring a learner to b2, a learner living in Spain, living with a Spanish girl/boy friend, using Spanish everyday, reading newspapers... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 140 of 175 29 June 2012 at 4:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sorry I got long winded.
My goals with this blog were: 1) learn Spanish 2) test assimil I have to do assimil as designed to test assimil. I have concluded that assimil will not work if you simply follow the instructions and you are a learner like me. I have supplemented it, but I think I still need to complete assimil as designed as well as supplement it to test it. If I haven't "learned Spanish" by the end of assimil, I'll do something else. Peace :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4687 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 141 of 175 29 June 2012 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It took about a week or two for me to decide that I would not follow this part of the Assimil instructions for French, and I started just repeating whatever seemed like a reasonable size chunk. Then I eventually ditched that in favor of blind shadowing. Then I decided that was a bit too hard when the lessons got faster and more complicated, and started shadowing while reading the text, and only after that blind shadowing, which is what I'm still doing at passive lesson 70-something.
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| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5297 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 142 of 175 29 June 2012 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
You must do what you must do, it's up to you. But for the benefit of others I'd like to emphasize that Assimil, that's some short texts with translation and audio, slowly introducing words and grammar. That's the "method", the design, the heart. Some casual lines of instructions for people who've never learned a language: That's surface, not substance. It's a gross misunderstanding, a very common one, that's why I thought it would make sense to say so. If one wants to complete Assimil as it was designed, then one has to assimilate, absorb the content, in the widest sense. Following some rigid formalism is never ever what Cherel had in mind. We can be sure that his entire work is much more a reaction against the rigid formalism people of his time knew from school than the try to introduce another form of it. I feel quite bad for bringing something like a sound of disharmony into your log, so let me say that this is not anything personal at all. But some things have a tendency of perpetuating themselves, and this being concerned about formalisms instead of putting the focus on the actual content is such a tendency. People will ask "Is reading it twice enough of should I read it a third time?" and you know at once that things go all wrong. So I could have written something like this at many other places, it's probably just the title that keeps attracting me while I am approching the fifties myself, I don't know. Peace and keep up the good work! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 143 of 175 29 June 2012 at 11:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I really want to thank you for keeping this log. You're making really intensive use of
Assimil and documenting the results. This is a huge help for other students out there. For example, when my copy of Assimil : L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique arrives, I plan on borrowing some ideas from you and adapting them. :-)
I more-or-less followed the vague instructions for New French With Ease, and made it to about A2. But I certainly didn't wring every last drop from the course the way you've been doing. I can easily believe that a diligent student could make it to a solid B1 using Assimil. That said, I just sat a DELF B2 exam, and it was genuinely hard. I still don't know whether or not I passed it. Among other things, I had to give a 10-minute oral presentation on whether Paris should adopt the London congestion charges, and then defend my opinions. I had to read the equivalent of WSJ and NYT articles and answer surprisingly tricky reading comprehension questions. And one of the listening comprehension passages was just awful—harder than most of what I hear on French radio. I just don't see how anybody could get there using New French with Ease. Among other things, Assimil only has about 2,500 unique words. I've probably got at least twice that (based on semi-random sampling of a frequency dictionary) and I was definitely feeling the limits of my vocabulary. I think you could pass the DELF B2 Pro, a specialized exam for business professionals, using Assimil Business French. But that's because the DELF B2 Pro is weird, and it deals with a only a single subject. Nobody's going to ask you about teen drug use, single-sex schools, educational reform, deforestation, or bush meat in Africa. You know it's going to be sales, marketing, human resources and maybe some labor disputes. This focus is a lifesaver, because a big danger near B2 is suddenly hitting a specialized subject and discovering that you lack 20 essential vocabulary words. I think you mentioned this, right, when discussing FSI assessments? The ever- present danger of having to discuss outrigger canoes or something crazy like that?
Exactly. For the regular DELF B2 exams, you really need to spend several months reading the newspaper, carrying on conversations, writing short essays and letters, and generally building up your vocabulary. Assimil gives you an excellent starting point, but you need more breadth and real-world practice to reach B2. In objective terms, you probably need at least 10 times the material in Assimil. But that shouldn't be a cause for discouragement, because you'll be able to voraciously consume native materials. Now, I really don't want to beat up Assimil over one of their obscure marketing claims. I love their courses, and they definitely take you far enough to start learning from native materials and speakers. It's great stuff. I'm keeping an eye on your log, watching for the day when you dive into real Spanish books. There's something totally intoxicating about finding an awesome, untranslated book.[1] [1] Not that I really believe in the possibility of translation anymore. Tocqueville's prose is elegant and clear in French, but his best translators leave him feeling musty and overblown in English. MC Solaar writes beautiful lyrics that lose a vast amount in translation. And going in the other direction, Terry Pratchett and Buffy the Vampire Slayer lose something, despite the brilliant dubbing work in Buffy. So much literature relies heavily on charming, brilliant use of words. Have you ever been tempted to read Borges in Spanish? And if you ever do, can you tell me what I'm missing? :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4764 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 144 of 175 08 July 2012 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Life has been messing with my Spanish study lately. I haven't actually missed a day studying, but I'm back to studying an hour or so a day. I'm taking a math course all day, which seems to burn some of the language learning drive out of me. The course is done a week from now, and I should get back to my schedule by then.
I've been doing a couple of lessons each day using the book instructions for the passive wave, that is repeating each section aloud without looking at the text. I'll add the active wave when I get to it, and I'll keep up this pace as long as I can. Once I finish the math course I'm doing, I'll be able to have several sessions a day and may move faster. I want Spanish with Ease done before the school vacation is finished. I also plan to start reading a novel of some sort pretty soon now. We had a broken pipe in our apartment (what a disaster!) that destroyed many of my books, so my choice is less than it would have been . I'm debating between Harry Potter, and La Reina del Sur. Harry Potter looks like it might be easier, but Teresa Mendoza's story has more swearing, sex, and violence (good things for adult language learners, I think). I suppose I could try La Reina, and drop back to Harry if La Reina's too hard. Teresa Mendoza, "La Reina del Sur," will always have a soft spot in my heart. I read the English translation back at the start of my Spanish adventure last December. I watched every episode of the telenovela with my wife, a confirmed soap opera addict. At the beginning, I couldn't understand anything, by the last episode, I could get most of it without the subtitles. It's always funny to see what they chose to leave out of the subtitles, or how sometimes the translation is inaccurate. It would be sort of appropriate to use LRdS as my first Spanish novel. I have an audiolibro version, but I don't think the book is very good for LR; the sentences are long and the differences between Spanish and English word order mean that your eyes have to jump around a lot to follow the meaning. The unfamiliar vocabulary in LRdS does not seem to be too dense. I've about talked myself into LRdS as I wrote this paragraph. Young Potter will be there if I need him. I wonder how many people have ever actually finished Spanish with Ease according to the instructions, that is completing a passive wave "repeating aloud without looking at the print" for the passive wave, and translating orally and written for the active wave. I'm sure many people have, but I bet that they did not finish the book on the schedule suggested by Assimil, a half hour a day for each lesson in the passive wave and 10 minutes more for the active wave. I bet most mortals, who do not already have a strong background with another closely related language, either spent more time per day to keep up the 1 new lesson a day pace, or they spent more than one day on several of the lessons. For me, I would bet that a much better approach would be to keep up the 30 minutes during passive wave, 40 minutes during active+passive wave, and spent more than one day per lesson when needed. During this whole process, I would shadow assimil for about a half hour a day to increase fluency, making the whole process about an hour a day. I bet this would mean somewhere around 250-300 hours to complete Assimil, and I think this would leave one with a solid A2/B1 level of production and probably B1 reading, if they did nothing but Assimil. I think Using Spanish might get one solidly into the B's on production, which to me seems to be the point where it is time to leave courses behind and concentrate on native speaker materials. Ah, to be a B1... Someday soon I hope. Actually, I'm really betting, B1 in about a month. I hope. We'll see. steve Edited by sfuqua on 08 July 2012 at 7:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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