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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 94 20 August 2012 at 10:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I wish I had the time and energy to spend towards an experiment with this, although I'm already doing 4-6 Assimil courses most days as it is, so I can't overload myself. I'm interested to see how your project goes, though!
Depending on the language and where you are at in getting your mouth around new sounds, it can also help to slow the audio down to 50-75%, then speed it up again. Sometimes I will run it faster, too, to get my ear used to more rapid speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 18 of 94 20 August 2012 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Err, if you're already doing 4-6 Assimil, how is it different from what I do? How can you say you're lacking time? :)
Oh, I don't think that's the problem. I don't think Norwegian has any sound that I haven't had to learn in a previous language, but that "English r" (I prefer the flap of the other speakers on the cd) makes every word sound like a mumble... And there's a lot of assimilation of sounds. Perhaps it's simply that with that heavy schedule I don't want to take the time to repeat 15 times the dialog to get everything right. I've noticed it and I hope I'll manage to find the perfect organization in the next few weeks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5393 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 94 20 August 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, for one, I started them all at different times, and I'm at different places with each of the languages. For Spanish, I'm doing the Advanced Using Spanish, and having a rather easy run through it. Spanish is by far my best TL, but there are many holes in it, and I am using Assimil as a means to fill in some holes, plus to make daily exposure a habit. For French, I am also doing Using French. The lessons are a lot harder for me (than the Spanish). I'm not sure if it's simply because my Spanish is at a higher level, or because the course is harder. Twenty to thirty minutes a day is a joke. It takes me 60-90 minutes to work through one of the lessons, and even then I don't feel like I've mastered the material. I keep plugging away at it. I trust the system, I think the constant exposure to new language is important for me at this stage, and I plan to go back and listen to the audio repeatedly when I am finished, so we'll see. For Italian with Ease, it is a breeze. The first 15-20 lessons were a lot more work, but I think once my brain started to understand the differences from Spanish and French, it got a lot easier. I'm around lesson 60 right now, and I'm just starting the active wave with it. I also go back and review the previous 2-3 lessons every day, and write the dialog out. It helps me pull apart the grammar and understand the structures better. For German with Ease, I'm about lesson 55, I think. I've mostly put it aside for the moment, since my 6WC language is Italian, and I'm working on Super Challenge stuff for Spanish and French as well. German is a lot harder for me to internalize for some reason, and my progress has been slower. I'm a single (work-at-home) mom, and it's hard enough to find time for work and languages during the school year, but with the kids home for summer break (and often having more than just my own two), I can't find enough time for work and more than 3 languages. Some days, I can't even get that done. I am also (periodically) working on Croatian and Dutch, but at this point they are just a treat when I need something fresh. I'll be adding Portuguese in September (when my back-ordered book FINALLY gets here), and I'm hoping to have time to add Portuguese, Russian, and German into the daily mix. The girls go back to school in two weeks (Hallelujah!), so I will be able to get back to a somewhat regular routine. I should be close to finishing Using French and Using Spanish by then, but I will be continuing work on both languages(albeit with different materials). Edited by Kerrie on 20 August 2012 at 11:12pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 20 of 94 21 August 2012 at 7:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I can understand that, it's already quite unbelievable to do all this when you have children... I don't have any, and I already find time is missing. Good luck with pursueing that goal! Perhaps you can force your kids into speaking foreign languages, that way your practicing time with them would increase your total practice time. :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 21 of 94 23 August 2012 at 1:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Alright, I'm in the middle of my fourth week (Indonesian 22 - Egyptian 27), so it's perhaps about time that I start back-logging my first three weeks. Week 1 for today.
Assimil Adventure - Week 1 I would like to use this space to report my progress with Assimil, but also express my feelings towards the books, indicate the time it takes me every day, the possible changes in my method over time.. who knows, it may be useful to some people willing to start with any of these languages, or for people willing to try to do multiple Assimils. -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : intro + lesson 1 to 7 : 5h10 I didn't know what to expect there and my impression on the first week is not good nor bad. The phonology indicates that several consonants are identical to Arabic ones, and I quite like producing them, so that's a plus. The book introduces to the way the hieroglyphic script works: some characters are used for their semantic value, some other for their phonetic one, (that's explained much better elsewhere), but the funny part is the redundancy: a character can have the phonetic value "in" and still have "i" and "n" spellt out, after (in i n), before (i n in) or around (i in n). That's magic and looks like a great mess. What I really wonder is, if these guys thought it was so important to introduce redundancy for consonants, how come they didn't write vowels. Not much more to say, the first week only introduced single words, which gave me the opportunity to get familiar with a few different hieroglyphs, and to start assimilating some of the ones that are used to spell out phonetically. At first I was quite annoyed by 6 days of words only, especially as it meant no repetition of words during that week (which I've forgotten in subsequent weeks), but probably the main point was to retain the "letter" hieroglyphs which are then used all the time. I've still waited eagerly for the week to finish. -Latin : intro + lesson 1 to 7 : 2h10 Not much to say here. The first week was absolutely fantastic: the stories are so vivid it's difficult not to do several lessons in a row. The book doesn't treat Latin as a dead language, and the stories are certainly more interesting in Latin than any of the other languages I have. It's not the usual Roman story, here stories take place in France, or could be anywhere, but are not placed within the boring context of the Roman empire. There are even songs and quite a few jokes! The recording is also quite lively, the speakers use an energetic tone, making it stick better to my memory. The only complaint I would have here is that the pronunciation is really too French: French r, French "ae", and it makes some words impossible to recognize for me. Apart from that, absolutely perfect. -Norwegian intro + lesson 1 to 7 : 3h25 I had never listened to Norwegian before. Among the Assimil, that's my second favourite language after Latin for the first week. Here again, the dialogs often contain a sort of punchline that makes full sentences stick in mind, and the actors speak in a way that doesn't make you sleep. The language seems overall easy, as I can easily draw parallels with English and German. I hope this feeling will carry on like this until the end of the book! I'm really enthusiastic about Norwegian now. If it is true that Norwegian is (one of) the easiest language(s) to learn for a native English speaker, then there's good chance I'll manage to learn it before I die. :) -Polish : intro + lesson 1 to 7 : 2h Polish is, with Latin, the only language I've had experience with in the past. Let's say that in 2h I don't feel I've learnt much, as I have already done the 8 hours of Michel Thomas. My feeling with Polish is that the lessons are extremely short and don't have much content. The book is thinner than the other ones I have (except Swahili), and I'll try to publish a comparison of the amount of audio contained in the cds per language... Polish ranks pretty low on this list. Also, compared to Latin and Norwegian, the dialogs are pretty boring. Of course, it is rather difficult to make jokes with so little language knowledge, but if the other languages manage it, I assume it should be possible for Polish as well... As I've heard from different people that it was a good method and that some people had achieved a good level, I'm willing to accept this first week as a revision of things I had already learnt and wait for the next week. -Swahili : intro + lesson 1 to 7 : 2h45 Very good surprise. Swahili seems to be an agglutinative language, or at least to have some agglutinative characteristics: the verbs include the subject, the tense and the object. Another particularity (for me) of Swahili is classes: classes are somehow like genders, except there are more of them, and everything has to agree with the class of the noun. That makes demonstrative pronouns, subject markers, object markers, genitive markers etc to exist in 15 different versions. That seems to require a bit of mental gymnastic, however I'm pretty confident as Assimil seems to bring the matter progressively and with repetition it seems almost natural. Good thing, the phonology of Swahili is pretty easy, there's no sound that should pose any problem to anyone I suppose. As for Polish, the dialogs are not very fun, but well.. -Indonesian : intro + lesson 1 to 7 : 2h35 I had tried Teach Yourself Indonesian, so I had an idea of how the language sounded. Here again, the phonology should pose no problem to anyone. I also knew that the grammar was easy in the beginning, and that's indeed the case. This impression is rather reinforced by Assimil having a word by word translation under every sentence, in addition to the natural translation. This word by word translation is very useful, because Indonesian omits a lot of words (for location verbs, the preposition "at, to, from" is enough and the verb can be dropped!) and because the word order is different. Many times I had to refer to this to understand what's going on. Overall I'm quite happy with Indonesian for this week, even if the dialogs were frankly boring and several times I had no idea why people in the scene were even talking to each other as they seemed to talk of different things. One interesting point of this book is that it has many more cultural notes than the other methods. It's always nice to end one's session (studying Indonesian last of my list) with some cultural information. The drawback is that some lessons seem to be there only to justify a cultural note. A final note: this first week has been quite easy of course, but I already have a few remarks to make. First, lessons don't take the same amount of time per language, as can be seen above, and that's perhaps something to take into account: had I chosen 6 languages requiring as much time as Egyptian, not sure I would be confident about finishing the books. On the contrary, with 6 languages like Polish, I would feel really bored as it seems that I'm finishing the lesson as soon as I've started it. My second point is that languages greatly differ in the funniness of their dialogs: I think that if I were to use other Assimil methods "at random" in the future, my choice of language would be guided by how the dialogs make me laugh (yes, even laugh!). I've been to the book shop again and opened a few, and unfortunately many of them have pretty dull dialogs with absolutely nothing more than touristy topics (we go to the restaurant, the village is beautiful). Pay attention to that, because you're going to spend the next 5 months with your Assimil! That's all for week one, it's perhaps a bit long as it's the first week, but hopefully the log of weeks 2-3 will be shorter and more interesting. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 94 23 August 2012 at 4:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||
For my active wave French, I generally listened to the lesson one or twice in French before trying to translate it from English to French. There were several especially difficult lessons that I actually listened to in chunks. That was the only way I could make it through parts of the active wave. Fortunately, I didn't suffer any grave consequences, and I finished the book. In hindsight, this suggests that Assimil is quite robust—you should get a lot out of it even if you do strange things with it.
My experience has been slightly different, for three reasons: 1) I learned ~200 basic signs before starting the course. This means that I generally know all but 2 or 3 signs per lesson. 2) I have the CDs, and I actually do most of my work with the audio. So I'm learning a fair portion of my Egyptian by ear, and relying on my reading skills to connect it to the text. 3) I'm entering a large fraction of the course into Assimil. So I know 90% of the vocab from week one, for example, and if I replay the audio for those lessons, I hear mostly familiar words. My total study time per lesson is close to 60 minutes, including card making and Anki reviews. If you leave out the card making, it's closer to 40 minutes. Why am I making this effort? It's something of an experiment. I won't be able to keep up this pace for a full 150 days, and I'm not ready to make a long-term commitment to regularly reading native materials in Egyptian. :-) So by running everything through Anki, I hope to "freeze" my knowledge and avoid backsliding. This should allow me to pick it up and put it down at will. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 23 of 94 23 August 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That would suggest that Assimil's claim that it's possible to do the active wave simply after the passive wave is wrong. Of course, it's much more likely that their claim is wrong, because indeed I don't see how you would remember idioms you've seen once only after 50 days...
Indeed, quite a big difference! I think I will try to find the time to learn those 200 signs as well, I will definitely take your offer about that Anki deck. Fortunately, it's gotten better and I'll mention it in my week 2-3-4 log, but I would definitely save a LOT of time if I didn't look up all the hieroglyphs that appear in the lessons (and are not referenced in the lesson..). The time spent on Anki would definitely be compensated within a few days. As for the cds, that's something I'm missing indeed, I can see the difference with the other courses where I spend a few minutes listening to the dialog without reading it, to try to get my ear used to it. Well, perhaps my reading aloud compensates a bit for that. Perhaps I should do my own recordings! :) Finally, the other Anki deck, I might be interested in that one as well if your offer is still up. I think your argument is perfectly sensible, there needs to be some better repetition than that provided by Assimil. The problem is that with six languages (and I try to do the revision of German), my hope is that Assimil can do its job as it claims, as spending an extra ten minutes on each language rapidly adds up to a lot. Alright, I should try to stay confident, but perhaps amend my method a bit. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4676 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 24 of 94 26 August 2012 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Now at the junction of weeks 4 and 5, I'm lacking time to post my backlog, but hopefully this is will be done quickly enough for me to post real-time logs soon. Fortunately this one will be much shorter than that of the first week.
Assimil Adventure - Week 2 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : lesson 8 to 14 : 4h30 This week's material has been great. After the first week teaching the writing system by means of single words, this second week touches with sentences. Of course they're quite simple, but I found it quite refreshing and I'm really eager to find out what next week has to offer. My concern now is that it's still taking quite a bit of time everyday, even for lessons that contain three sentences of two or three words. If it grows within the next few weeks, I'm not sure I'll be able to cope with the rhythm every single day. -Latin : lesson 8 to 14 : 2h Still very happy with Latin this week. The lessons are always quite funny, and that really makes my motivation to study stay at the top every day. As for the revision, it really helped me fixing in memory what I had somehow assimilated during the week, and that's what makes Latin my favourite Assimil language for now: new grammatical items are introduced effortlessly, occur frequently enough that by the time of the revision, they are almost completely internalized and the little structure provided completes the process. This week has also been the opportunity to try reading aloud both while walking and while not, thinking of Alexander Arguelles about shadowing saying that the results are much less when sitting, and I clearly agree. I don't know why, but it seems that being in motion makes the brain also work faster, and "I felt like" I was understanding better the text when I was walking than when not, it also felt more "mine". This is probably not new for most people (that physical activity aids learning), but it was for me. I've subsequently decided to try it for all my relevant languages: all but hieroglyphs, which I don't intend to speak and that demand from me too much concentration to analyse how to read, but perhaps I'm wrong. -Norwegian lesson 8 to 14 : 3h15 I'll try to keep that one short. This week has been much harder than the previous one for me, the reason being that the pronunciation is VERY difficult to understand, and even when I've studied the text well, all these slurred r's give me the impression that the actor is just mumbling. That has an impact on listening, but also on speaking: it is difficult to imitate speech when there are several actors with particularly distinct accents. Assimil explains that accents in Norway are very diverse and that it is good to have exposure to them, ok, but that raises the question of which accent it is best to learn. As in every other language I've studied, women are much easier to understand than men, but being a male it is not necessarily a good thing to base one's speech on female speech. Of course, that suggests that more practice is needed, and by shadowing many times, trying to be as close as possible to the recording, things seemed to fare better. (stating the obvious here) I'm also somehow surprised by spelling: to me, it is not close to what is spoken, which I can easily understand, but then it doesn't even look like the spelling of the cognates from other languages of the family... For now I won't bother too much with trying to retain spelling, I want to see how much I can internalize by exposure through Assimil lessons. -Polish : lesson 8 to 14 : 1h25 Here I have the feeling that there was almost no content for a full week, as the time spent can suggest. To give an idea, the revision lesson is less than a double page, where other languages have between 2 and 4 double pages. I don't feel I've learnt anything during this week. -Swahili : lesson 8 to 14 : 2h20 Good week for Swahili. Each lesson introduces the right dose of grammar, and enough examples occur within the next lessons so that grammar items seem very natural within a few days. The vocabulary, however, is a real pain: as the morphology affects the beginning of words, while it affects the end of all the other languages I've studied, it tends to make the radical easier to forget for me. Perhaps it is because I am used to the end of words carrying less information, but this is a real problem: if grammar sinks in without effort, vocabulary remains a mystery for me. I have tried reading aloud while walking, it seems to help, but perhaps I should consider dedicating some time learning the vocabulary itself and maybe using Anki. For now I'll continue like this, but will keep paying attention to this vocabulary issue, and if it persists I will definitely remedy to it. -Indonesian : lesson 8 to 14 : 2h30 Here I'll mostly repeat what I've said for Swahili about vocabulary: I don't remember it if I don't try to. The reason here cannot be inflexions, so I suppose that's my feeling that all these words sound more or less the same and don't have their own auditive "footprint". The additional problem is that the grammar (until now) is limited to grammar words (no inflexions, and no affixation for now), so not remembering words equals not remembering anything. The dialogs are still very dull, but somehow I'm still motivated and will continue. I've tried walking too, and here too it helps, but as I'm moving back to my small flat, I won't have much space to walk, and as for walking outside, I live in England, which means rain all the time (at least not rarely enough to make it a routine solution). I think solving that matter is going to be the challenge of the next coming weeks... 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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