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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 1 of 94 19 August 2012 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi everyone,
Seeing my collection of Assimil books sleeping on the shelf, and finding myself a bit bored after cramming some Korean and German for the first half of the year, I've found kanewai's idea perfect to get myself busy until the end of the year. I start it now because I like symbolic deadlines and starting in early August means finishing at the end of 2012. Goals: So here it goes, the aim of this log is to keep trace of my Assimil experiment. The goals of this experiment are manifold: First, there is this list of languages I am interested in, but don't think I would be able to study full-time, so purposedly studying them as part of a multilingual experiment seemed pretty good, assuming that changing all the time between languages would help me keep motivation. This is also the opportunity to broaden my horizon with languages from families I have never studied before. Whether I continue studying them after this experiment is another question, even though I obviously wish to do so. Second, and related, I want to see how possible it is to study several new languages at a time, what kind of interference there can be between them. To limit the risk, I've chosen languages that have normally nothing in common, all belonging to rather different language families: Egyptian (is that a family?), Romance, Scandinavian/Germanic, Slavic, Bantu, Austronesian. Arguably a bit heavy on European languages, but using Assimil, that's a natural bias. I assume here that there should be almost no interference as the languages have completely different phonologies and grammars, and I would like to prove to myself that there is no real limit to the number of new languages you can study at a time, provided that they're different enough. Third, this is both an evaluation of the Assimil method across languages, to see how far can one get with that method alone and no extra work (I'll come back on that later), and of course of the difficulty of languages. Despite the shiny "B2" label on the cover of the books, I don't expect to reach quite the same level in languages close to French or English than to those unrelated. I think it would be interesting to compare that in light of the usual class 1 through 4 system. Fourth, this is the perfect occasion to get myself a bit more disciplined. Studying 6 assimils every single day, in addition to some other languages I started studying before, should require quite a lot of life hacking. Languages: So here is the list of languages I plan to study over the next five months using Assimil: -Egyptian Hieroglyphs using "L'égyptien hiéroglyphique". Here the book only, as I don't have the audio. I have no previous experience in the language and simply got attracted by the various logs (emk's mainly?) and topics I've read about it. -Latin using "Le latin sans peine". I also own the newer Latin course from Assimil, but skimming through both, it seems much more fun to use the older version and therefore I'll use this one. I've done a little bit of Latin earlier this year, so I have "some" knowledge, but somehow the boring exercices ("The sailor goes to the temple of the Goddess") made me stop. I hope Assimil will give me a good foundation and enough strength to pursue learning Latin, without boredom. -Norwegian using "Le norvégien". I have no previous experience with Norwegian. I took it because I used to listen to quite a lot of Norwegian metal in my teens, as well as part of a desire to learn the whole Germanic family. I expect my little knowledge of German as well as my command of English to be of great help here, and I expect a lot of fun from Norwegian. -Polish using "Le polonais". My only experience of Polish is using Michel Thomas's foundation course last year, as part of an evaluation of MT's method. I've liked it and bought the Assimil book months ago but didn't open it. I hope this experiment will be the opportunity to get a bit further with Polish. -Swahili using "Le swahili". I have no experience with Swahili, and mostly got interested in it reading logs of people from the team Ne Nur, as well as Sprachprofi's introduction to Swahili in Esperanto. I don't really know what to expect there, but I hope it will broaden my understanding of languages. I also wish I could do something useful of it, but I don't know what yet. -Indonesian using "L'indonésien sans peine". I have no previous experience with Indonesian apart from a very quick look at the Teach Yourself book, which (as about any TY) I didn't like at all. I have lived with Indonesian people in the past but was too busy learning Mandarin at the time, so perhaps it's time to repair that mistake. I also chose it because it is supposed to be one of the relatively easy languages, at least as far as non-European languages can go. To these I may add another language, Breton or Armenian, once I see how well it fares with the current six, and how much free time I have left daily... Method: One extra aim of this experiment is to make myself a better learner, to understand how learning works and force myself to spot, language-wise, which areas need more attention. However, this may come after the first phase of this experiment. As of now, my plan is to use Assimil roughly as recommended by the book, but I'm more than open to suggestions and comment on past experience of other people. I start by listening to the lesson without reading, a couple of time, trying to get as much as I can. In the first few lessons, it is much more a matter of appreciating the phonology as well as the prosody of the language, but after a few weeks I expect to understand more and more of the dialogs as they will re-use things already studied in previous lessons. Then I listen again to the dialog, reading it in the book, to help fixing what my ear may have misheard and perceive better word boundaries. Then I study the dialog, reading it aloud, looking at the translation, trying to make sense of what word is what, reading the notes carefully. Once this is done, I re-read the dialog a once or twice, trying to be sure I'm understanding what I'm saying, as if I was producing it myself. Then I re-listen to the dialog without the book, trying to understand everything that is said as if it was the first time I heard it. If I fail here, I will do several rounds of listening while reading and listening without reading. Finally, I try to shadow the text a few times.. I find this phase very difficult because usually the speech is too fast for me, and I find that I either can't cope with that speed or I have to sacrifice the quality of my pronunciation. Any advice on this would be welcome. Apart from that, I have no plan to do more, but it is possible that later I try using either Inversen's list or the golden list, if I feel that the book doesn't reinforce vocabulary well enough. I have used Inversen's list with success for Korean and German, but here I feel the golden list could be worth a try as I don't want to spend much time on it and expect to be guided well by Assimil. This log: I plan to post regularly: my initial plan is to post the log of what I've done up to now (finished week 3), and then post daily. As I have started these languages one day after the other, every day of the week (but one) should have a revision lesson in one of the languages, and I'll try to post my thoughts about that language on that day. As posting daily may be either too demanding, or annoying for people to see that log coming up all the time (and I would understand), I may go for a lower rhythm later. Any comment welcome! edit: For quick reference, I'm posting a list of the weekly reports, and I'll keep these updated as I go. I do this for me to quickly get an overview without looking too much through the page. Week 1 (lessons 1 to 7) Week 2 (lessons 8 to 14) Week 3 (lessons 15 to 21) Week 4 (lessons 22 to 28) Week 5 (lessons 29 to 35) Week 6 (lessons 36 to 42) Week 7 (lessons 43 to 49) Week 8 (lessons 50 to 56 & active 1 to 7) Week 9 (lessons 57 to 63 & active 8 to 14) => dropping Indonesian for now Week 10 (lessons 64 to 70 & active 15 to 21) => dropping Egyptian and Latin for now Week 11 (lessons 71 to 77 & active 22 to 28) => not dropping anything! Week 12 (lessons 78 to 84 & active 29 to 35) Week 12 (lessons 85 to 91 & active 36 to 42) Edited by vermillon on 15 November 2012 at 1:44pm 15 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4866 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 2 of 94 19 August 2012 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Good to see you back with another log! Your new experiment sounds positively crazy and a lot of fun, so I'm looking forward to reading about your 8-language-journey.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 94 19 August 2012 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
This sounds like a fascinating—and rather crazy—experiment! The best of luck to you. Egyptian is an Afro-Asiatic language, which means it's distantly related to the Semitic languages and to Berber. It uses 2- to 4-consonant roots, and has two genders, with the feminine ending in -t. But Afro-Asiatic is a large, loose family. To give you an idea, Proto-Indo-European is usually dated to 3,700 BC (plus or minus a millenium), and the older hieroglyphic writing dates to around 3,400 BC, at which point the family had already diverged significantly. So Proto-Afro-Asiatic is old. If you want an Anki deck of 204 common hieroglyphs, or a review deck for the Assimil course, you're welcome to send me a PM. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4664 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 4 of 94 19 August 2012 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you're going to learn an Austronesian language, why not be different and try Malagasy? Assimil "le Malgache" is practically the only learning resource available, and few people here are learning it. Just a suggestion.
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 5 of 94 19 August 2012 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@druckfehler: thanks, hopefully you'll have something to read regularly (unlike the other log?) :)
@emk: indeed, such an early divergence is what makes me hesitate to put it in a family... perhaps the same way I wouldn't really consider Sanskrit and Breton are the same family, even though they're Indo-European :) But I know no other Afro-Asiatic language, so I can't see what similarity there might be ("les adjectifs nisbés"?). I may send you a PM soon indeed! @viedums: perhaps I didn't formulate it well. I didn't pick languages from a pre-selected set of families, but rather wanted them to be different, so there could have been Armenian, Breton, Hungarian, Basque... I simply chose languages I felt interested in, and Indonesian being Austronesian wasn't what made me choose it, I merely mentioned it. Idonesian is "different" enough to me, perhaps I'm too mainstream! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 94 19 August 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Enjoy. I did a 6-language at a time experiment (most with Assimil) a few years back, and kept it up for 2 months. It'll be interesting to see where you've gotten by then, and where you get by the end of the year.
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 7 of 94 19 August 2012 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not very auspicious! As you're sharing this, do you have any thoughts on what made you give up? What were the special challenges? Do you think you would be able to last longer if you were to do something like this again?
Here, the thing that makes me believe in success is that Assimil naturally limits the amount of time I need to spend each day. With the assumption that each lesson requires half an hour a day, as they claim, that's only 3h of work per day, something I've easily done for eight months now. (and 3h/day is a high estimate, I'll include time reports in my future log entries and they'll show that it's lower than this). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 94 19 August 2012 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes - hitting the active wave in (almost) all the languages at the same time. Staggering that by even a few days would have probably made it a lot easier, in retrospect. I was also using a French base for one language; I felt I got almost nothing out of that one, despite being able to read novels in French.
I was strictly doing 20 minutes per language per day, for a total of 2 hours, so that sounds plausible. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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