AH-64Dpilot Newbie United States Joined 4618 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 1 of 7 03 April 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged |
I have both this program and the Assimil Spanish with Ease. Which one is the better one
to start with? Secondly, I cannot find a lesson plan for either of them especially the
FSI one. Is there a certain rhyme or reason to which I should approach study? Lastly,
should I commit the vocabulary to memory prior to attempting the lesson? Thank you.
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James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5374 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French
| Message 2 of 7 07 April 2012 at 2:39pm | IP Logged |
Welcome to the forum. I definitely (and strongly) recommend starting with Assimil (or some other similar semi-comprehensive course)... it will make FSI much more tolerable and effective. An Assimil/FSI combo is great... the two best courses for Spanish. There are numerous different ways to do each lesson... I recommend fiddling around (and reading some of the posts about the various ways to do each course) and figure out what works well for you.
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AH-64Dpilot Newbie United States Joined 4618 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 3 of 7 08 April 2012 at 2:08am | IP Logged |
Thank you for the reply. I have already begun to do the Assimil first and I'm now on
Lesson 3ish. I am a false beginner I suppose since I took Spanish two years in High
School and then a year in college. I then went on to take 3 years of Italian in college
so I understand alot of the basic vocab, grammar, and conjugations. From what I have
gathered in the three lessons of Assimil so far is I am breaking off the dust for the
most part and getting back into the Spanish vocab as opposed to the Italian which some
things are extremely similiar.
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 4 of 7 08 April 2012 at 2:45am | IP Logged |
I too would recommend starting with Assimil. The two wave approach to Assimil makes sense. If you have limited study time, I would focus on completing that course first before doing FSI.
As far as how to use FSI Basic Spanish, which is where Mastering Spanish level 1 comes from, I would start with the introduction in the book. The other parts of the course, as well as the books in pdf are available at http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Spanish%20B asic.
Basic Spanish doesn't introduce a lot of vocabulary. It focuses on the core of the language. I would memorize the vocabulary as it comes up. Some grammatical points are used (such as the preterite) before they are taught, but that isn't done very frequently.
Edited by luke on 08 April 2012 at 1:18pm
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AH-64Dpilot Newbie United States Joined 4618 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 5 of 7 08 April 2012 at 3:01am | IP Logged |
Do you suggest I supplement Assimil with a vocabulary book? Just pure raw memorization
along with going through the lessons?
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luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 6 of 7 08 April 2012 at 4:06am | IP Logged |
I think there will be plenty of vocabulary between Assimil and FSI. However, if you have a great memory, stockpiling vocabulary may be useful.
Edited by luke on 08 April 2012 at 1:19pm
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Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5711 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi
| Message 7 of 7 26 July 2012 at 12:35am | IP Logged |
luke wrote:
Basic Spanish doesn't introduce a lot of vocabulary. It focuses on the core of the language. I would memorize the vocabulary as it comes up. |
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Really? I counted 6485 words.
Level 1) 802
Level 2) 748
Level 3) 2153
Level 4) 2782
These are my own counts (took a long time to do using a calculator and a word processor when possible), so of course they're probably off by give-or-take a couple of dozen. Also, they include some proper nouns like Chevrolet and Nicaragua. 99% of the time they DON'T count conjugations as separate words (something I hate about Linqg), which, in my opinion, makes these numbers pretty legitimate. I say "99% of the time" because I think extremely common, highly irregular verbal conjugations were counted as separate words in the vocabulary sections (each conjugation of decir was counted as a separate word, for example). I only noticed this a few times though. It also includes collocations (tengo que), common idiomatic phrases (meter la pata), etc. I think these are all legitimate. This actually makes sense in a way; some words in Spanish do not have a one-to-one meaning in English, e.g. senior de la casa >> host (I'm not saying there doesn't exist a word for "host" in Spanish, this is just an example I thought of off the top of my head). Conversely, the same is true for English to Spanish (of course >> claro).
I got these numbers by counting the "Vocabulary" section at the back of each FSI booklet. I think this includes vocabulary from the reading sections as well. The vocabulary from one booklet does not list vocabulary from any of the previous booklets (at least that I could find). Overall, I'd say that 6000 words would be a good, if not an overly conservative estimate of the vocabulary count in Basic Spanish Levels 1-4. Even without the collocations (which are more important to idiomatic speech than single words are, IMO) there's still more vocabulary here than in Assimil. You could go through each word in the vocabulary and subtract out all the collocations, but you'll soon give that idea up - because they're are too many words!
- Rout
Edited by Rout on 26 July 2012 at 12:49am
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