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Assimil Experiment Group Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5240 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch | Message 201 of 344 17 January 2013 at 4:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Dutch With Ease
Passive Wave: Lesson 71 Active Wave: Lessons 22-28 Houston, we have a problem. Fortunately, the problem is not with the active wave, although I'm no longer able to translate from English to Dutch without making any mistakes. I've spent at least thirty minutes per day on these lessons, memorizing words I had forgotten, listening to and shadowing the audio, doing the drills, reading the grammar notes, and doing the oral and written translations. I feel that I have a good grounding in the material I've covered so far in the active wave. The passive wave is a different story! The remaining passive wave lessons (#71-84) are much longer and more complex than previous ones. According to the book: These lessons may seem a bit longer than previous ones, but actually they contain the same amount of new material. The slightly longer texts, however, allow us to repeat more often the vocabulary and grammar of former lessons. Apparently, we've already covered a lot of the grammar and vocabulary that was in lesson 71. Uh oh. Feeling completely lost at this stage of the game means that I have not "assimilated" a good deal of the grammar and vocabulary that was presented earlier in the course. It took over an hour just to get through the lesson 71, and I don't think I have retained much of anything from that lesson. I tried to do lesson 72, but I felt so burned out that I just couldn't force myself to slog through the ding dang thing. So now what? After weighing all of the options I could come up with, I've decided to set aside the remaining lessons of the passive wave for now. I'll continue doing one active wave lesson a day until I get up to lesson 71. Hopefully, by then I really will have retained the material well enough to make sense out of the final fourteen lessons. Failure is not an option. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5339 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 202 of 344 18 January 2013 at 1:58am | IP Logged | ||
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This post is in great part copied from my log.
Il nuovo russo senza sforzo, Italian edition of Le Nouveau Russe sans peine Passive Wave: Lesson 45 Active Wave: Lesson 9 My opinion of Assimil is still forming and I’m still of two minds about it. I think it has lots of virtues and yet at the same time I have the nagging doubt of whether it really is a suitable course to start a completely new language with little transparency like Russian is for me. What I fear is that even though I’ve been exposed to quite a big amount of language over just a few weeks, very little of it is actually sticking and the active lessons prove just that. I find that as a method Assimil is perhaps the one that increases the gap between one’s passive knowledge of the language and one’s active skills the most. Usually with other methods one spends maybe a week or two on beginner’s stuff like greetings and introductions: you get to learn a few words and expressions and the first basics of grammar (maybe the pronouns and the present of “to be” or of some other important verbs), but above all, you are supposed to be able to use the same few items actively from the beginning. Which means that the core of every lesson must be learnt and internalized to some extent (it doesn’t matter if you forget a word here or there) before you move on to another lesson and the process begins again with slightly more complex words and grammar patterns. With Assimil everything is different. You are supposed to naturally assimilate how the language works through exposure. So they make you listen and read a lot, but how you’re meant to internalize and systematize all of that is a mystery, given the lack of proper exercises and the rather flimsy grammar explanations. Just an example: today I did lesson 45 (I’m pacing myself and I’ve planned reviews way beyond what Assimil asks of you) and only this week (I think it was in lesson 43) did I encounter the grammar note that says that Russian verbs are classified in types (really? Who knew? That’s the first I’ve heard of types of verbs and I’ve been studying for weeks, now! ;-)) and the first type is made up by verbs that end in -ешь / -ёшь in the second person singular. Then they list the forms of the verb дремать, which happened to be in the lesson, with the advice to “read them carefully”. Of course, I’ve studied languages long enough to be able to work out what suffixes I need to know to conjugate the present tense of the first type of verbs, but the textbook itself doesn’t bother to tell (and if you are new to language learning that may be a problem), and the chances that I will remember them is pretty low, to be honest. On the other hand, I like the self-sustaining momentum that the structure of an Assimil course gives you. I don’t believe I would have been able to study for 78 consecutive days and counting if I had been using another textbook. The emphasis on learning a little every day is crucial, I believe, even though their proposed amount of daily study (20 minutes to half an hour) is rather delusional. Most days I need about an hour, but sometimes I need up to 90 minutes (and I never even do the active lesson after the passive one on the same day!), which is way more than what they tell you. Edited by Emme on 18 January 2013 at 2:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Gerardparks Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4381 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: Cantonese, English* Studies: Mandarin, French | Message 203 of 344 19 January 2013 at 5:18am | IP Logged | ||
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New French With Ease
I am sorry to say that I will be leaving this experiment. I cannot find the time to read my Assimil book everyday. 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 204 of 344 22 January 2013 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Le Grec ancien: Lessons 43-49
This past week went much more smoothly than the previous two weeks. I think the break I took to do some chapters in a regular grammar book really helped. I've started the active wave, but it's too early to tell how that's going - the first couple chapters are just simple word lists and pronunciation practice. My thoughts on the experiment so far, based on this and other Assimils: 1. The Standard L/R Assimil technique works for more familiar languages (Spanish and French), but not at all for the more exotic languages (Arabic and Greek). The grammar is too different for you to just follow along in the L1 while you listen to the L2. You need to adapt the technique. I end up studying the text, then listening to it, then studying it some more. 2. Ancient Greek with Assimil is hard ... but I think Ancient Greek with anyone would be hard. I know students who absolutely hated Greek in school. I can empathize: I would have snapped already if I had been required to memorize all these declensions. 3. Assimil is great to excellent for getting a holistic overview of a hard language. When I flip ahead through harder texts I'm surprised at how many advanced concepts I recognize, even if I don't fully understand them yet. 4. You need to supplement Assimil with a basic grammar course. I would have already failed if I hadn't done this. 5. The Ancient Greek recordings are the nicest I've heard to date. 6. The passive wave takes much longer than the thirty minutes they suggest. It takes me thirty minutes just to do the conversations. And with Ancient Greek they introduce vocabulary and grammar points in the exercises that haven't been covered yet. At this point I just skip them, and hope that the exercises will make more sense in the active wave. 7. I might not do an active wave per se. I'm thinking more of a medium- active, where I'll do a fifteen minute review, and copy out the dialogues, but not worry so much about translating French>Greek. And I might do the same thing with my Spanish - I totally stalled doing the active wave there. Overall I'm feeling good about the course. It's taking more time and energy than I was expecting, and so I've had less time for my main two languages. Going forward, I don't think I'll add a new Assimil unless I either have the time to commit, or are already familiar with the language family. I was secretly hoping that Assimil would be a great way to study a new language "on the side." So, no Russian or Japanese in the near future, but Italian and Turkish are still options! Edited by kanewai on 23 January 2013 at 5:47pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4680 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 205 of 344 22 January 2013 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
For languages closely related to the base language, I think 20-30 minutes is realistic, but for Russian, I'm sure you're right. Assimil does seem to take a one-size-fits-all-languages approach, at least as far as their packaging of the courses is concerned. Ironically, part of what appeals to me about Assimil is the focus on a specific active wave. With courses like Colloquial and TY, I never really got past using the language in a passive fashion, but Assimil specifically sets you up for a whole process devoted only to activating skills you've already gained. Perhaps a more motivated and better informed student can do better in this regard with TY, etc., but before I discovered Assimil the whole idea of training active skills differently than training passive skills was unknown to me. 2 persons have 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 206 of 344 23 January 2013 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil Experiment: El Catalán sin esfuerzo - Active 1-8, Passive 57-63
From my log: Lesson 63 isn't a review lesson, but a normal one and quite big (8 minutes recording). No new grammar and that's how it's going to be till the end of the course. It means that I already know (or should know) all essential grammatical features of Catalan. I'm sure that the differences between Catalan and Spanish or Portuguese shouldn't be huge, but it's hard to believe that those differences are that small either. Anyway, six more passive lessons, after that I'm going to "the real world", let's see how good are my receptive skills at this point. About my productive skills, I'm sure that they are still at a very low level, at this point at most A2, and that is possible only due to the fact that there are so many common words among Romance languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ayrrom Senior Member United States Joined 4555 days ago 9 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 207 of 344 27 January 2013 at 12:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil experiment: Japanese, Volume I
Still here. Haven't updated in a while. I started over on lesson one several weeks ago after really struggling there for a while. I purchased some other sources of Japanese language learning. I read through some basic grammar, began listening to Pimsleur Japanese I, and reading the text of Japanese DeMystified, 2nd edition. Read the first few chapters of DeMystified, and of the first 2 chapters of the [Baron's] Grammar book. And I am now on lesson 5 of Pimsleur audio. The Assimil lessons make a lot more sense now. I had absolutely no background in Japanese prior to starting Assimil, so my conclusion at this point is that it is not a good idea to do Assimil as a complete beginner. My experience with Assimil Spanish was far different - I was able to go straight through, but I had read [some]other sources some prior to starting it. I am going to continue with Assimil Japanese going forward, but I have slowed to 3 lessons per week, with review of the previous 3 units prior to tackling a new one. I am also using ANKI during the day to review during spare moments. I will try to be more diligent about updating my progress here as long as there are still other posters left standing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5240 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch | Message 208 of 344 27 January 2013 at 1:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Dutch With Ease
Active Wave: Lessons 29-35 The gulf between my passive and active abilities in Dutch is widening as I go deeper into the active wave. I can read the Dutch dialogues without peeking at the English translations since I'm familiar with the material and can easily guess any forgotten vocabulary by the context. On the other hand, my results in translating the past week's lessons from English to Dutch are less than impressive. Assimil's claim that the active wave lessons will only add about five minutes a day seems like a complete joke by now. I'm spending thirty minutes a day on the active wave lessons, but in spite of the time and effort I put into Assimil, I make mistake after mistake in translating the English dialogues to Dutch. Why isn't the active wave working better for me? Did I do something wrong during the passive wave? Am I just not smart enough? I'm wondering in particular about this claim on the back cover of Dutch With Ease: In just a few months, you will be able to speak Dutch easily, fluently and naturally! How many people achieve that goal by studying Assimil and only Assimil just 20 to 30 minutes a day? I guess we'll see by the end of this experiment! Today I watched the YouTube video that Professor Arguelles made about Assimil. He said in that video, "They claim that if you just study for thirty relaxed minutes every day, within six months you'll get a good grounding in the language. That's not hyperbole. You could work through one of these methods in about six months' time and go to the country and be somewhat functional. But in order to really internalize all the material and master it most profitably, you could spend an hour a day studying for a year to really digest all of this material." That makes sense to me. Although I have my doubts that a few months from now I'll be speaking "easily, fluently and naturally," I do believe that I will be, as Professor Arguelles put it, "somewhat functional." In fact, I think I'm already somewhat functional! So despite all of my difficulties in navigating my way through tricky sentence structures, mountains of vocabulary, and way too many idiomatic expressions to absorb in just two waves, I'm determined to get to the Assimil finish line and am not going to let my many mistakes get me down. By hook or by crook I will finish this book! 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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