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Assimil Experiment Group Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ayrrom Senior Member United States Joined 4555 days ago 9 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 161 of 344 19 December 2012 at 1:59am | IP Logged |
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Japanese with Ease, Vol 1
Lessons 22-28 Still working at it. Still a struggle because I have been going too fast to learn any of it well enough. The last couple lessons I finally stopped trying to learn the Kanji. I know many people feel passionate that it is somehow blasphemy not learning Japanese without simultaneously learning Kanji, but they just slow me down too much at this stage - and I am learning that going slow saps my motivation to continue. I am learning some of the Kanji separately with ANKI. Luckily, Assimil Japanese, vol 1 was already entered into the Anki shared pool by some blessed-saint. I can't help but wonder if Assimil really did not intend for you to actually learn the Kanji. They have a whole separate vol for the written that they recommend you do after you finish volumes 1 & 2. Also, I had the chance to speak with an [USA] Belitz language instructor and asked how they taught Japanese, and especially how they handled learning Kanji. He said they recommend learning to speak Japanese first, then learn the writing by already understanding the spoken word - otherwise they find students get frustrated with the reading and writing portion and quit[have no idea if they know what they are talking about or not, as I have never taken one of their courses]. This does however fit with my earlier thought [from my Spanish experience] about doing audio-only to start a language, then switching to Assimil after learning the basics. My other option is to keep on plugging through the current Vol 1 to the finish, then restart on page one, and go back through it again. The second time through I would then learn the Kanji. Obviously this means I will not be immediately moving on to Vol 2, or the active phase. 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 162 of 344 19 December 2012 at 4:10pm | IP Logged |
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As you may or may not have noticed in the flood of posts, I have given up on the Assimil
experiment. A lot of life came into it. So, while I love Assimil as a resource (really, there is no better collection of fun short beginner pieces with audio), I cannot learn a little bit every day. So, I am back to my own schedule: 1.learn as much as you can while you can 2.let your brain digest it while you don't have time for learning more. It works for me, so it is not much of a trouble. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Flarioca Heptaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5874 days ago 635 posts - 816 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Catalan, Mandarin | Message 163 of 344 20 December 2012 at 1:09am | IP Logged |
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El Catalán sin esfuerzo - Lessons 29 to 35
From my log: Fifth review. They say that you should do all previous lessons again. What? Well, I'll keep doing dictation and that's all folks, lesson 36 tomorrow. Anyway, half the passive journey and I'm enjoying and learning it without much effort. Yes, this is an easy language for a Romance speaker, ok. However, some points are hard and this fifth review is about personal pronouns, which is VERY hard in Catalan, harder than in any other language that I know. I'll use my grammar book, "Catalan: A Comprehensive Grammar", by Wheeler, Yates and Dols, to study this subject. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4881 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 164 of 344 20 December 2012 at 2:33am | IP Logged |
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Assimil Greek had another reminder at the end of Lesson 30: Resist the temptation to
run. You learn a language through the small and steady accumulation of knowledge. I'm passing this on to others who are frustrated. Greek definitely still looks overwhelming to me, and I feel like I'm starting from scratch with each new lesson. However, I'm trusting that in another month or two, when I hit the active phase, I'll have a general framework in place, and it will be easier to start memorizing some of the tenses, moods, cases, declinations, and obfuscations. Remember that Assimil is designed to be a three to six month course! I find it hard to judge my progress at this point. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5240 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch | Message 165 of 344 20 December 2012 at 7:50pm | IP Logged |
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Dutch With Ease Update
Lessons 43-49 For the past seven weeks, I have seen the Assimil active wave shimmering in the distance like an oasis in the desert. At last, I have arrived! Tomorrow I begin the active wave of Dutch With Ease. This seems like a good time to take stock of my progress to date. I have picked all the low-hanging fruit from lessons 1-49. I know the ordinal and cardinal numbers, and can tell you what time it is in Dutch. Taking dictation from the audio has given me a lot of practice spelling Dutch words, although I still make a few mistakes. I've picked up quite a bit of vocabulary and have no trouble forming my own sentences in Dutch, as long as I keep it simple. Still, Assimil has a way of making me feel like the "slow student" in a Michel Thomas course. The nature of the passive wave makes it difficult to judge exactly what I know and what I don't know. And so much vocabulary and grammar is being thrown at me right now that I feel overwhelmed. My way of dealing with this is to just surrender to the process and not worry about the final results. If I fail at this, I'm blaming it all on Assimil. Hee. This past week a new instruction was given concerning irregular verbs: Pay attention to the irregular verbs. Go over the lists given in each lesson as often as you can and mark them with a special sign in the list of verbs at the end of the book. This will help you find them quickly. Frequent repetition of these verbs is extremely important. So far, in addition to completing the daily lessons, this course has asked me to do the sentence structure drills, review previous lessons, copy the sentences, go over the expressions in previous review lessons, and study lists of neuter nouns and irregular verbs. There's nothing difficult about those activities, but to get everything done requires more time than 20-30 minutes a day. That reminds me of something else, now that I'm beginning the active wave. This claim about the active wave is made in French With Ease: Tomorrow the active phase begins: it will add about five minutes to your daily study. There is no mention in Dutch With Ease of how much time to allow for the active wave, but it does say this: Your general knowledge of Dutch will now allow you to master the earlier lessons with ease! I've never in my life gone from general knowledge of any subject to complete mastery in only five minutes, so I don't think that's going to happen with Dutch With Ease, either. Based on my experience with French With Ease and Spanish With Ease, the first few weeks of the active wave will be very easy, but after that, it will definitely take more than five minutes a day to master each lesson. In fact, it will probably take more than two waves! Edited by Marishka on 20 December 2012 at 7:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 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 166 of 344 20 December 2012 at 11:35pm | IP Logged |
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Le Breton sans peine (until lesson 49)
Exam is over, I am tired, and tomorrow we start on the second wave of Assimil Le Breton sans peine. A second wave can never be a bad thing, because I notice I miss a word here and there that I have picked up - and it can only be good that you review things. I also learned apparently that you are supposed to do the translation wave back aloud; I never do them aloud. I always translate them in writing instead (which according to Assimil is facultative, but I write a lot more often than I speak in general). We'll have to find a solution for that but I am going to write down the translations in any case. I prefer writing things down. It is how I work. Another annoying thing this book does is introduce new words in the revision lessons. There's a reason it says Révision at the top of the lesson, bozos. No need to introduce words you DON'T know in the translation exercises, because no, they are not always obvious from the context, and no, there is no bilingual text to translate, the point of the revision dialogue is to translate it yourself (also, the revision dialogues for some reason are three times as long as the regular dialogues. 19 lines for this one. That is a lot, even for Breton which forms quite compact sentences). I had to look them up and rack my brain to figure out where I had seen that word. Turns out I hadn't, they were new, and were to be introduced later. That's annoying and this is not the first time that has happened to me. Fix it. Breton Grammar Notes So. Breton has two features that I have not yet got the hang of (well, that is to say, three; but speaking Breton is somewhat enigmatic anyway) One of those is mutations; and it seems to be like the Rubik's Cube of Breton. Instead of merrily changing the ending of words (which happens...for...verbs...and...plurals, which are 99% regular), they change the beginning. This has two important consequences: 1) I always have to check which mutation it is (there are four plus an exception), what words cause what mutation (and also whether they cause adjectives to mutate along), and although the mutations follow a fairly logical sound pattern of voiced/voiceless most of the time, it's kind of hard to hear that initially when you don't know the words. When you know that 80% of words mutate (sigh), that kind of makes translating from the audio quite hard (and I have had to revert to listening and keeping the text alongside to make sure I do not miss a word in the translation, and even then I miss a bit). But overall the rules for mutations are fairly logical, although they are kind of random regarding what triggers which mutation. The most common one is the softening mutation, which happens after articles, some prepositions (da, war among others), the verbal particle a, and also to adjectives modifying feminine nouns (you know it's feminine because it mutates after the article, as I have explained before here). It also occurs after the possessive da (ton/ta/tes) and a shitload of other places. But I don't know them yet. The mixed mutation is easy; it only occurs after the verbal particles e and o, and the word ma (if). It thus only ever inflects a verb. O marks the progressive form and is always recognisable; e is used in some instances when the word leading the sentence is not a subject, a verb, an object, or an "objet anticipé". Basically if you are emphasing something through a dative construction, place/time, etc, you use "e". The "mutation renforçante" hardens up consonants. This one occurs after ho (votre), and a few other cases which we have not seen yet (but I checked it in the grammar index of Assimil and it looks like this one is not very interesting either to learn; a few simple rules). The spirant mutation also looks like it will be a nightmare to deal with. We'll see. Thing number two that is annoying: Declined prepositions! I have never seen this in my entire life, this is actually (just like mutations are) a totally alien concept to me. Only one thing saves this; it is very similar to verb conjugation, and thus most forms sound logical after a while (they tend to use the endings from the être verb, bezañ). There are two types based on two different prepositions. Knowing the ones for a, da, evit and gant is pretty useful since those prepositions are pretty much everywhere. But I know the one for "da" pretty well now. Din Dit Dezhañ Dezhi Dimp deoc'h dezho You cannot just thunk a personal pronoun after a preposition, you have to conjugate it according to person. I have not learned so much about anything else except that -ez makes a word feminine and also that the real hang of it is gotten by just getting the prepositions and mutations right. We still have to learn some verb forms (future, past, conditional) but they are pretty much all super-regular and "no big deal". The question is how to use them, of course 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5201 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 167 of 344 22 December 2012 at 7:39pm | IP Logged |
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A quick note to say I'll re-start my fledgeling Italian efforts after the holidays; and to post this snippet (also on my
log) for you. I've been reading Le Petit Nicolas, by René Goscinny, and was delighted to come across an Assimil reference: Assimil Experiment participants may particularly enjoy the story on page 60, in which Agnan, who fancies himself as having some English skills, tries to speak to George MacIntosh, a new (Anglophone) student. Upon hearing him, George laughs heartily at Agnan's efforts, tapping his forehead to indicate that he thinks Agnan is crazy. It turns out that Agnan is telling him, among other things, that his tailor is rich! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| jeronz Diglot Newbie New Zealand Joined 4850 days ago 37 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Yiddish, Latin, German, Italian | Message 168 of 344 23 December 2012 at 5:06am | IP Logged |
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El Nuevo Francés sin Esfuerzo
Passive Wave: 57-63 Active Wave: 8-14 What a disaster 17 days since my last update and I've only managed another 7 lessons in each of the active and passive waves. I have just finished a 12 day straight at work, three of those days I worked till past 10pm. I averaged 80 hours a week. I think I need to choose a medical specialty with a better work-life balance... I even have to work christmas, boxing day and throughout new years... (night shifts during new years nonetheless which always screws up my study momentum) Anyway progress continues. There were a couple very painful lessons (60 and 61) because they had no relation to modern society with heaps of vocabulary related to how telephones used to work such as phone box, telephone operator etc. I noticed that they removed them in the English version. I must admit. Since starting the active wave it has been more difficult getting momentum going, knowing that I have to do two lessons instead of one. Anyway enough complaining! I might have a french couple stay at my house at the end of next week (couchsurfing) so I'll let that represent a short-term goal to improve. Edited by jeronz on 23 December 2012 at 5:11am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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