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An Assimil Experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7106 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 9 of 51 18 October 2010 at 10:23am | IP Logged |
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La Guingette did a series on Accents de France. In 2009, they covered Alsace, the articles plus audio are in the archive:
Accents de France: L'Alsace Also the following site has some more information: http://accentsdefrance.free.fr/ (as a long-time Assimil fan, I'm following your experiment with interest) Edited by Andy E on 18 October 2010 at 10:25am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 10 of 51 24 October 2010 at 4:01am | IP Logged |
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Third update: 23 October 2010
Lesson 18 completed Friday I was on a plane, so I skimmed the earlier lessons. One interesting facet of Assimil: The points that were the hardest on the first go-through were the ones that came back the most quickly. The process of making sure to understand the text as part of the daily routine means that the harder something is to understand, the more time spent on it and there you go. Most interesting item encountered so far: the idea of combining 3rd person pronouns with 2nd person verbs to make an utterance more formal. The more I work with this, the more that similar German vocabulary and structures come back. But what brings it back, in many cases, is the ways in which Alsatian differs. It's something to see what happens with a language when it is allowed to roam free, absent the careful reinforcement that a state supported language receives. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| DesEsseintes Triglot Newbie Ireland Joined 5185 days ago 33 posts - 68 votes Speaks: English, French*, Spanish Studies: Croatian | Message 11 of 51 26 October 2010 at 1:55pm | IP Logged |
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This thread is very interesting, thanks a lot.
I'm really looking forward to discovering whether you'll improve or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 12 of 51 30 October 2010 at 9:21pm | IP Logged |
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Fourth Update: 30 October 2010
Lesson 25 completed Moving from week three into week four, I've started having Alsatian phrases pop up in my thinking. It's mostly mindless - "It's cold out" or "What should I wear today?" but at least some of the phrases are different in Alsatian from standard German, which tells me that those turns of phrase that pop up often or feel right are starting to sink in. The most striking thing to me is how some phrases where the preposition from a separable verb goes to the end aren't totally baffling me. I never got the hang of this in German, so this is something new. Thanks to Andy E and DesEsseintes for the comments. One thing I would note: Earlier I talked about being encouraged to study when I didn't feel like it since in twenty minutes I'd be done. I'd add that there's a value in not studying more than 30 minutes or so - the amount of material you can learn - consciously process - and the amount you can assimilate - just get flowing around in your brain - are different. In the past, when I've rushed the Assimil process, I've noticed that while the language comes in easily enough - I can understand what I've worked through later - it doesn't come out so easily - I get hung up on remembering word orders, endings, etc. Doing the one lesson a day thing, I've found that the bits that stick with me really stick with me because I'm taking it slowly enough that I don't have to make a conscious effort to understand. In the future, if I rushed an Assimil program, I would be careful to space out the lessons enough that the last one had at least a few hours to gel before I did another one. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 13 of 51 06 November 2010 at 5:37pm | IP Logged |
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Fifth update: 6 November 2010
Lesson 30 completed It was a busy week at work and I missed two lessons. From the standpoint of learning Alsatian, a setback, of course. From the standpoint of the experiment, a useful data point and a good chance to approach a couple questions that go with a daily method like Assimil. First thought: Missing a day does hurt. It is surprising how much more in your brain a language is if you just used it yesterday. As a result, I spent a full half-hour making sure I learned the lesson well, this because it required a little extra reading aloud to make the new sentences come out smoothly and such that I could feel the meaning as I said them. Second thought: That first thought points, again, to why doubling up to catch up is a bad idea. Doing a lesson after a missed day, the last thing I needed was to double what I needed to work through. To the contrary, I think that if you want to do two lessons to make up for missing a day, you should revise the previous lesson to re-orient your brain to where you're picking up from. It may not speed your progress, but it might at least solidify the foundation you're gradually building. (Something to remember the next time this happens!) I work in a language school, and I do occasionally venture a word or two with the German teachers. This week, both "esch" for "ist" and "hete" for "heute" slipped out. So my Alsatian is starting to interfere with my German, and not just my German with my Alsatian. A new sign that the Assimil Method really does let the language seep into your brain, because going to the Alsatian forms was certainly not a deliberate choice. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 14 of 51 14 November 2010 at 8:07am | IP Logged |
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Sixth update: 13 November 2010
Lesson 37 completed A lesson a day this week, just according to plan. I'm nearing the point where the Assimil Method gets tested: Two weeks from now the active phase begins. I'm finding that comprehension remains not too difficult, but that the fill-in-the-blank exercises are getting harder. The big challenge is keeping track of the numerous words for place and direction, as these are sort of like German but not exactly, and they can be enough of a hassle in German. An example: Wu géhn-mer ane? My memory tells me this is "Wohin gehen wir?" ("Wo gehen wir hin?"). Looking at the Alsatian, you can line up the elements with German easily enough, but as the words multiply that are similar to German but not the same, the opportunities for comprehension to far outpace production grow. It will be curious to see if in seven weeks I can produce that "ane" as readily as I today saw that it was "hin." 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 15 of 51 20 November 2010 at 10:36pm | IP Logged |
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Seventh Update: 20 November 2010
Lesson 43 completed At this time next week, I'll have started the Active Phase. Out of curiosity, I flipped back to the first week of lessons to remind myself what I would need to know actively. It's amazing how elementary it is, which gives real hope that the lesson I just finished will seem just as elementary in another 6 weeks. I'm getting to a point where there are things I know or at least recognize in Alsatian that I have either forgotten or never knew in German. Among other things, I'm starting to get a sense of how the articles work in different cases, which always eluded me in proper German. On a side note, if you're learning standard German and the articles give you trouble in the different cases, the post below - a series of "Michel Thomas" style explanations of how to remember them - is worth a look: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=23779&PN=1 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5450 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 16 of 51 27 November 2010 at 9:23pm | IP Logged |
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Eighth Update, 27 November 2010
Lesson 50 Completed, Lesson 1 revised Today starts the active phase. Because the first lesson was pretty elementary, even the first time out, revising it posed no particular challenges. On the other hand, pronouncing it in Alsatian, rather than German or French, came easily in a way it didn't the first time through. What I will be curious to see is the relative ease or difficulty in the active phase as I start getting into article usage and past participle formation, two things where recognition is easy but production is harder. On the plus side, the review lessons have a pretty good summation of the articles and perhaps I will be able to make sense of it along the lines of the HTLAL thread I mentioned in my last date. I'm less sure of the past participles, which differ not only from German but also according to whether it's the Upper Rhine or Lower Rhine dialect in question - in Strassbourg, it's closer to German, but for the dialect in the Assimil book, where the ge- prefix has reduced universally to g-, the prefix goes away in a number of places, most commonly because it's too hard to say with the following consonant and no vowel in between. Time will tell. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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