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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5165 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 73 of 94 17 October 2012 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Care to share your thoughts about Indonesian books? =D
I'm taking 4 languages each day. I feel highly demotivated about Chinese; I'm about to remove French from my fixed schedule and focus only on native resources with no daily obligations, replacing it by Russian in the Assimil challenge. I dislike the current book because it's slow but there are only 7 lessons left. Georgian takes most of the time, with long readings from textbook. One day I'll run out of textbooks and read only authentic materials, therefore outside of a fixed schedule. I'm doing Assimil Norwegian as you have noticed and it accounts for the most burnout, I'm getting loads of words that I couldn't understand in French, having basically to look them up twice. I do hope it gets better, most important words get repeated and the overall result be that I'll be able to actively use them while vaguely recognizing the most specific ones. I've had a look at Norwegian novels and it seems I can understand much less than I'd do for Georgian ones, in terms of vocabulary. So, if I were to follow you, I'd drop Chinese and French, focus on a more extensive learning in Norwegian and maybe add a 3rd language I really want and need to improve - be it Russian, German, Spanish, Italian or a few others standing on my "queue". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 74 of 94 17 October 2012 at 9:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I was wondering how you would manage six new languages in the Active phase! Even three
still seems like an incredible feat. It's a pity about Latin, though. If it had been one of the 'fun' Assimil courses I think I would have picked it up also. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4635 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 75 of 94 18 October 2012 at 4:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hey, sorry to hear about cutting off some languages. Gotta do what you gotta do, though.
My bad if I missed something previously, but did you find you mixed up languages at all? Or did you feel at any point as if one language was blocking out another? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 76 of 94 23 October 2012 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Thanks for your kind words. Indeed, I would really recommend that you buy that book if you're interested in Swahili. I've seen other books to learn the language, and it seems to me that it was the most friendly and that it covered the same amount of grammar as the others.
I'll definitely do, I need to find the references again and examine them more closely.. wouldn't want to go in the wall a second time, nor push you into it!
Well, I can't really recommend anyone to drop French nor Chinese! But if you have priorities, well, it's up to you. I can't really say I've understood what was the best way to tackle multiple languages, but generally speaking I like to have one more intensive language and the rest as "slow" progress: it satisfies both my desire to go far (the intensive one) and large (all the others).
I have to agree that the active wave gets a little violent and 6 languages can be quite a feat to pursue in the active wave. The trick to this I believe would be to have Anki decks with cloze deletion for each language, because it seems (for now) to work very well to help me assimilate the content of the lessons. However, I think I mostly dropped one half because I didn't find the books to be very good (Indonesian / ~Latin) or the language to be very interesting (Egyptian) for the time spent. Replace them by German (a great Assimil language) and other good Assimil languages and I'm sure 6 languages would be something I'd be motivated enough to continue. As for Latin, surely it's a pity. The beginning was very entertaining, but the unreasonable amount of daily vocabulary makes me wonder what their goal is... I have the newer version, I'll check if it's any better.
Don't be sorry, I'm more than happy to have explored the 3 languages that I've dropped, and I'm now happy to have my 3 favourite to pursue. I'm not regretting the others in the least. I didn't find I was mixing up anything however, except for a very few words (suka meaning "to like" in Indonesian vs "to braid" in Swahili). I had chosen the languages to avoid interference, and I think in this respect it was quite successful! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 77 of 94 23 October 2012 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Another "week" has passed. I've been wondering if I should post a report every 7 days or every 7 lessons, but as I used to post only every time I had reached the revision lesson and didn't count the missed days, I'll continue thisway now: as predicted, with less languages to deal with, I have more time for each of them, and I can often afford to study two lessons of one (or all) of them in the same day, and as a consequence my "weeks" are now shorter and I'll report more often.
The clock shows that my time spent per language on average for 7 lessons has raised to around 4h30 (not counting Anki review time but counting time spent adding cards) where it was only around 3h before: I'm spending less time in total but much more on each language, which is doubleplusgood. I'm getting closer to the end of the passive wave with just 3 "weeks" left, which I hope would take me under 2 calendar weeks to complete. I've also spent a bit of time on Anki, and my card additions are slowly catching up with the active wave, and it's doing me a lot of good. Assimil Adventure - Week 11 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : no lesson : 0m On hold for now. -Latin : no lesson : 0m On hold for now. -Norwegian lessons 71 to 77 : 4h50 Not much going on there. I've reached the stable phase where there's not much grammar but loads of idioms. It is perfectly fine, and my only concern is that I cannot remember them all, not even passively. As I said in the intro, I'm adding every lesson into Anki using cloze deletions: this helps a lot to remember idioms and usage, (along as automating knowledge of grammar) and I have added until lesson 21 for now, which is slightly behind where I am in the active wave. I expect to speed it up a bit so as to have my Anki deck ahead of the active wave, which should make it much easier (by cheating?) to produce the content of the lessons. As I said a few times before, I expect to start a 3rd wave once I finish the passive wave, and I expect that the help of Anki will be most obvious by that time, as for now I find the active wave in Norwegian quite challenging, and as the lessons are quite meaty, I often feel quite tired when I finish the passive wave and lack the energy to complete entirely the active wave. -Polish : lessons 71 to 77 : 4h50 Polish is quite similar to Norwegian in that there is not much more going on in terms of grammar (at least not that I could perceive), even though the lessons are much shorter and don't contains loads of idioms, but perhaps a certain amount of vocabulary. At least, the lessons are generally quite pleasant to follow, the dialogs are funny and that alone is enough to keep me motivated to study every day. As opposed to Norwegian, I've managed to add many more lessons (they're shorter...) to Anki, up to lesson 36, meaning that I'm now ahead of the active wave, and in a few days when I get to review them enough, I expect to start to see the active wave "clicking" or at least becoming much easier: for now, I just notice that I miss a great part of the vocabulary, but I also notice that I start to get a better intuition for grammar, which is very positive. I think this is mainly due to the way I add my cards to Anki, paying close attention to what cases are used in the sentence, looking up the base form, the gender etc, so that endings become more familiar to me, and so does syntax. These days I've even found that I could understand quite a lot of words, sometimes even sentences, simply by ear and before reading the text. This is a huge improvement over the past weeks where I was basically feeling that Polish was entering one ear(/eye?) to go out of the other. So this is my feeling for now, but I think next week's report should confirm the general improvement brought by Anki. -Swahili : lessons 71 to 77 : 3h45 Quite a mixed feeling for Swahili: overall, I've felt that the grammar was quite light and simple, but when reading the revision lesson, I realised that there was a LOT of it. Or perhaps not a lot in terms of grammar points, but something not easy to digest, probably requiring either a lot of time or practice to assimilate and use naturally. On that note, Assimil seems to agree with me, suggesting that for some time the learner would only concatenate simple clauses (saying that many native speakers do the same) and that relative clauses would take more time to integrate: considering the complexity of relative clauses in Swahili, it only makes sense. As I've fully caught up with Anki (not having to add sentences myself helped a lot..), my work load for Swahili has reduced greatly and this is quite pleasant. To take advantage of that extra available time, I've tried a new exercise: noticing that I wouldn't get a lot out of listening to the dialogs, I've decided I would work on that. I've tried only twice yet because it's quite tiring, but here's what I've done: Without looking at the book, I listen to the new lesson, and try to transcribe it all on paper. It takes me around 10mn to transcribe the 1'-1'15" dialog, and that really requires a lot of concentration. The first time, I've checked directly my transcription against the book, only to notice that I had a lot of mistakes (oh, surprise!): the main problems were word segmentations, as it's difficult to segment a continuous flow, especially with new words, as well as misinterpretation of sounds. My most comment hearing mistakes were confusing /e/ with /i/ as well as missing the /w/ and /j/. In terms of spelling, I've mixed a lot of 'u' for 'w' but as far as I know (i.e. not very far) there is no way to distinguish a 'u' from a 'w' in spelling (i.e. they're spoken the same way, "to my ear"). I'll have to find if there are rules for that, or if it's arbitrary, which I doubt. For my second attempt at this exercise, I've been slightly more clever and after transcribing completely the text, I've actually read what I had written and tried to make sense of it: this helped a lot in correcting segmentation mistakes, and by the end I could understand completely the story, being able to infer the meaning of a few of the unknown words, the ones missing not impeding comprehension. I've found the process extremely rewarding, and I would like to do it more often, the only problem being that it takes time and makes me quite tired, but the benefits seem to be worth the cost. -Indonesian : no lesson : 0m Apparently, the new book will be released only early next year, so that puts the possibility of tackling it out of the scope of this experiment. As I said before, I may consider using other textbooks, but then it will happen later. A final note: A very good week. I'm very happy with last week's choice of dropping two more languages, as it really helped me go faster with the languages I'm most interested in. I expect it to only be the beginning and that next week will be even better. Stay tuned! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Roman Diglot Groupie Spain Joined 5451 days ago 42 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Italian, French | Message 78 of 94 23 October 2012 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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What a cool adventure!
I'm more or less on the same Assimil boat, doing German and Italian and thinking about tackling French... Some questions: Do you put all Assimil's sentences on Anki? Is the question in French and the answer in the TL? Can you explain how will be your 3rd wave (probably you already did and I missed)? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5165 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 79 of 94 23 October 2012 at 6:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I'll be waiting! Thx
Theoretically I have two "fast" progress ones, French and Norwegian, and two "slow" ones, Chinese and Georgian. But Chinese has been slow on vocabulary since I decided to freeze it at the beginner's stage, doing beginner's books over and over again, while Norwegian is heavy on vocabulary thanks to Assimil. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4677 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 80 of 94 06 November 2012 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I add all the sentences I find interesting: that's most of them (for vocabulary, structure or grammar), but I don't force myself to add everything. I use cloze deletion, which means the question is in the TL with holes to fill (and a hint in French) and the answer is entirely in the TL. If needed, I have an extra field to add some note, but close 100% of the deck is in the TL. The third wave will simply be like the second wave, but by that time I should have a better command over the material, thanks to Anki (and probably that means I'll have remembered the dialogues, but well...). Now the report. ____________________________________________________ Week 12, getting closer to the end of the passive wave, but things didn't quite go the way I had expected: instead of doing 2 weeks of work in a week, I've done a week of work in 2 weeks. Receiving the visit of both my girlfriend and sister for a full week didn't really help, so I probably have a good excuse for doing nothing for a few days. Anyway, I'm still here and that's good enough that I'm now 2 weeks (of work!) away from the end of the passive wave. I have dropped nothing this time, and am mostly going through the routine, as it really "feels" that the end of the book is close: not much going on any more, I'm patiently "waiting". This will be a short report, considering the previous paragraph. Assimil Adventure - Week 12 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : no lesson : 0m On hold for now. -Latin : no lesson : 0m On hold for now. -Norwegian lessons 78 to 84 : 5h As usual, loads of idioms and new vocabulary, but it seems manageable. I've just managed to catch up with Anki and I'm now adding the lesson that I'm going to do tomorrow in the active wave, which should help a lot with all that vocabulary I've forgotten in the meantime. Norwegian is of course the language of the three I feel the most comfortable in, and I feel I could survive without problem using it only in Norway. Note I said "survive"... for Swahili and Polish, I think I'd have a hard time putting my head around speaking with the right classes/declensions. As I've stated elsewhere, I've started writing a little program that gathers Norwegian news articles from RSS feeds and picks out the easiest ones (considering my Anki vocabulary as well as intrinsic difficulty) for me to read: it's been quite useful already as I've had the chance to read a few articles easy enough for me to understand completely, and obviously it's been quite rewarding to do so. Once I finish the book, I plan to use that software to provide a (vocabulary) evaluation of the book, perhaps with graphs showing the evolution of ease of reading articles as one goes along studying Assimil. I plan to do more than this with this software, but that is going quite slowly as I'm quite busy already. -Polish : lessons 78 to 84 : 6h40 Probably the same comment as last week. I'm mostly writing "as usual" in my personal logbook, so I believe there is nothing special to say this week. I'm continuing to add sentences to Anki and to study every day. It seems that I am slowly improving, but I also feel that I'll need some more formal grammar to get more confident. On the "after Assimil" side, I've found from what I've gathered at the language bookshop that reading children's book could be in reach within quite a short time, and if I get the time, I'll try to add support for Polish to the software mentioned above. -Swahili : lessons 78 to 84 : 3h Not as glorious a week as last week. Due to a quite steep increase in the time spent on the two previous languages, I've had to keep my Swahili effort to the minimum. So no transcription exercise this week, though several times I've considered spending the extra half hour to do it. Lessons still contain new grammar items, though more in accumulating fashion than completely new things. I now find it quite hard to assimilate: not that it's particularly complicated, but I don't really know how to tackle vocabulary acquisition: -for an isolating language, it's pretty simple: you learn the words. -for a fusional language, you learn the words, and rules (and exceptions). -but for an language that makes very extensive use of affixes, do you learn the roots or rather learn the affixed forms as well? Some verbs in Swahili can be very tricky: "to laugh" + causative => "to make laugh", but "to defecate" + causative => "to rain". Perhaps the answer is simply to learn the special cases, but if anyone has some advice on the matter, I'd like to hear it. I think Esperantists may have something to say here. -Indonesian : no lesson : 0m Stopped. A final note: My sister is now gone, I should be able to study at a more steady rhythm, and hopefully finish the passive wave in less than two weeks... hopefully. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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