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Assimil Challenge: Pre Planning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6149 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 113 of 129 07 September 2012 at 10:02am | IP Logged | |||||
While I've breached the 100 hours criterion, I'm still only a low to mid A2 in Russian in terms of my speaking capability. I'll also finish the Assimil French course around the same time.
I find the active wave frustrating at times because of the quality of some of the translations, and also slightly redundant. I tend to learn the lessons off by heart. I find it much more valuable to do the active wave as you are doing the current lesson. Instead of translation during the active wave, I'll review the footnotes from the old lesson. These often contain nuggets of information, and vocabulary, that are forgotten, as they're not relevant to the audio. Edited by DaraghM on 07 September 2012 at 10:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4871 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 114 of 129 07 September 2012 at 11:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd really like to join, but I'm not sure if I can, because I am already studying
Japanese by myself and uni is starting soon as well. I'm also considering picking up German again too, because I'm at an A2/B1 level in that language. I also have to figure out what language to try. Perhaps Russian or Spanish, because the former has an interesting alphabet whereas the latter is very commonly spoken throughout the world... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 115 of 129 02 October 2012 at 5:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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I like your initiative. Very much looking forward to seeing the results. How will you
know you have reached B1? Personally, I don't like Assimil that much, but I will still give this some thought. 6 months is a long time when you have other projects and languages on the go, but perhaps a simpler language like Catalan, Portuguese or Dutch could be fit for this. As you might know, Sprachprofi and I attempted a 30-day challenge with Finnish, from scratch, back in February and we used mostly Assimil. A Helsinki Finnish professor tested us and evaluated us at A2 after less than 35 hours, so I can't imagine how 6 months would not take us a step up. However, I found Assimil Finnish to be quite annoying, so I'm not about to give it another 6 months. I think Sprachprofi also tried to follow Assimil's suggested method with Swahili. Perhaps she can retell her experience here. It's not a secret that not all Assimil courses are created equal. I suspect some people will have more success with some languages while others will struggle with other languages. 6 months is a long time when you are working with crappy material... In my view, it's not impossible that a single book would take you to B1, but Assimil is not it. It's not nearly detailed enough to be your only source of information. Not that you couldn't ride it out and make it to B1, it's just that it would be so frustrating, you'd give up or look elsewhere. I'm sure some people would disagree, and maybe some people have done it, but it doesn't work for me and I'm guessing many, if not most, of the people here will give up if they try to use Assimil only. Then again, maybe the community will encourage them to persevere. When we were doing Finnish, it was clear to me that if Assimil had been the only source of information, I would have given up. There were too many holes and gaps, senseless dialogues, etc. And yet, I was most certainly motivated. Although I should say I didn't do the passive and active waves as suggested; I simply couldn't imagine myself reading 50 lessons without questioning anything. I think we are all critical, we want to ask questions, we want to know, and to ask adults to just sit back and take it all in for 50 lessons is just too much. It might work if passive and active periods were much shorter, maybe over 10 lessons at a time. Edited by Arekkusu on 02 October 2012 at 5:57am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| langluv Newbie United States twitter.com/ladyling Joined 5882 days ago 24 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Modern Hebrew, French | Message 116 of 129 02 October 2012 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I studied the Assmil French with Ease course from Aug 2011 to Feb 2012 (I'm a native English speaker with, at that time, a very limited amount of French studies, but was about a passive low B1 at Spanish).
I completed the entire course, doing both the passive waves and active waves. I pretty much did the method that Assimil suggested in their Dutch with Ease course (see josht's post). But I studied 40 minutes to 1 hour per day (instead of the 20 or so minutes they suggest). I'd say it got me to about a high A2/low B1 for passive skills (listening/reading) and high A1/low A2 for active skills (writing/speaking), after letting the language sink in. I also feel like I could have completed the course in 3 months instead of 6, but I wanted to follow the Assimil method as much as possible. I studied Living Language Beginner's French while doing Assimil for the first 2 weeks or so. Then I only did the Assimil with Ease. 5 1/2 months into Assimil, I started "Living Language Ultimate French Beginner to Intermediate" and was able to breeze though the course because I had learned so much with Assimil. Also, I had an easy time with Michel Thomas beginner's French course. But still those courses may have helped with my active and passive skills. So, I guess I can say I already completed this experiment and those are my results! Please note: My memory is horrible, so maybe others will fare better - especially with active skills! Edited by langluv on 02 October 2012 at 2:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 117 of 129 02 October 2012 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Will everyone be able to use the very same single log for the challenge? I wouldn't like to open a new log for a language I'm not sure I'm going to hold for long.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 118 of 129 02 October 2012 at 8:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think the idea of an passive then active wave is brilliant, but in my limited experience the active wave has never worked the way Assimil intended. i.e.: I've never assimilated enough that I can just go back and translate L1>L2. It'll be interesting to see the different approaches people take to the active wave.
I think that will be better - I'll open a collective log on November 1. And I updated the Registration page to read Estimated finish time: four to six months. We'll all move at a different pace, especially once we hit the 'active' phase.
Assimil insists its lessons are designed to last 30 minutes. I have my doubts! I don't have a lot of free time either, so I'll be forcing myself to hold to 30" sessions (maybe longer on weekends). We'll find out if it works. Edited by kanewai on 02 October 2012 at 9:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 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 119 of 129 02 October 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I will post in the central log thread, but these will be copies of my posts in my own
(multilingual) log. I hope to be able to write the entries in Breton by the end. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4713 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 120 of 129 02 October 2012 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Now I'm almost certain I'll do French!
1 person has voted this message useful |
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