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Assimil versus US language programs | ||
Tags: Learner type | Platiquemos | Pimsleur | Reading | Language Program | FSI | Assimil | Accent | Book | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7146 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 81 of 184 30 December 2005 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi Athena, welcome to the forum.
You are right, if you don't like hard work, use Assimil to study the language. By using Assimil I have been able to speak in the languages I have learnt within weeks. After learning German with only Assimil for six months I got a job in Germany translating technical texts from English to German with the help of a German engineer. I was holding conversations with German friends within four to six weeks of beginning. And the German I learnt was useful German - not what to say at the bank or the post office. It enabled me to have a simple conversation. I lecture on logic, mathematics and learning strategies. I assume that all of my listeners are lazy and if I make it hard to learn they will get discouraged and stop. I have specialized in making it easy for people to learn and to calculate. I will be lecturing to language students and teachers at two colleges in the next month and I will be speaking on the easy way to teach and to learn a language. I found it great that you agreed with me that Assimil is the easy, lazy way to learn a language. Look at Ardaschir's story on the forum. He has learnt more languages than anybody else on the forum and worked harder at it. He uses Assimil as his main language-learning tool. Assimil does suit my learning style and has been incredibly effective in enabling me to learn languages. My motto is, if it works, stick with it. FSI has worked for you and for Administrator. It obviously suits your learning styles. Stick with what works for you. And yes, there is hard work connected with learning a language well. But, having fun along the way will enable you to continue when the going gets tough. A lot of people have made the comment that Assimil programs don't tune your ear to the language and give you a good understanding of the spoken language. For me, that is Assimil's main strong point. I have found it very effective in this area; certainly more so than tapes/CDs that teach in the target language and English. We will never agree on which is the better method. So, I say again, if your method is working, it is good. Why give it up? Supplement your method with anything else that helps and keep at it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7092 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 82 of 184 30 December 2005 at 12:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Welcome to the forum Athena! No doubt FSI is a great program and should be the main course for many who want to be fluent in their target language. Please don’t take me for rude, but I believe you just helped prove my points above. Just as there are left and right-handed people in the world, there are FSI style and Assimil style learners in the world. You tried Assimil and it did not work as well as FSI, you know your learning type. By all means stick with FSI, but what about everyone who learned a language without FSI? Saying that everyone should use FSI, or for that matter that everyone should use Assimil, is like saying that everyone should be right-handed. It is just that with learning styles it is not that obvious, it is subjective and provokes strong opinions both pro and con. If you have a knack for “intuitive assimilation” Assimil will work much better than FSI, if you don’t I can imagine how passive Assimil must seem. Thanks for the post! Edited by Farley on 30 December 2005 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7103 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 83 of 184 30 December 2005 at 5:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've refrained from posting anything on this thread to-date until I felt I had something useful to contribute.
I've been using Platiquemos since the middle of August and completed Level III at the start of December. I'd also been doing a bit of Assimil and have in the last few weeks ramped that "a bit" up to "a lot". At this point, I've completed 50+ lessons and am on the "second wave". The main conclusion I have come to is that I see the benefits of both approaches and it will come as no surprise to learn that as far as learning style goes I am straight down the middle - 1's all the way - and I did the test twice with a few weeks gap to make sure. I don't drill ad infinitum - it's wasted effort; if you've got a construct "nailed" there's no need to go through it 18 times. With Platiquemos the only drills I've done more than once or twice are the ones which address language constructs where I've had trouble in the past. Therein lies the point of drills - how else other than rigorous practice do you overcome a stumbling block? If, on the other hand, you don't encounter those sorts of issues in your language learning, then there's no point in wasting hours on something you will find boring. The majority of the time I spend on the course is dedicated to "shadowing" the dialogues - making the vocabulary and the "glue" as ingrained as possible. Yes, the dialogues end up being memorised but that is - and should be - a by-product not the goal in itself. And Assimil? Well at first glance Assimil seems simplistic but if you ignore the painfully slow initial lessons it introduces a large amount of lexis and differing grammatical constructs in an extremely short space of time. It is also extremely simple to use and to customise to your learning style - "to add salt to taste" as Ardarschir put it. Is it entirely self-contained? Well, not even Ardaschir claimed that to be true at all times since he said that for certain languages he would also utilise "systematic grammatical exercises" - sounds like drills to me. Is FSI entirely self-contained? For Oral Production quite possibly. However, I cannot imagine completing Platiquemos without reading Spanish books, listening to supplementary audio material or watching TV and films to improve my comprehension skills. I've found it strange that unlike some others (but not all) I see Assimil as being most useful for Oral Production as opposed to any Passive skills. Certainly, that also seems to be the case with Fanatic's (and also Ardaschir's) experiences of these courses. With Assimil - even in the short space of time - I've discovered a "rounding-out" of my ability to "produce" Spanish. I'd like to make one further point. Perhaps the next time, someone comes on the forum asking for course recommendations for a language, the first post in reply should be "Go and determine your learning style using the tests at the following links. Then come back and post the results". Andy. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7146 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 85 of 184 01 January 2006 at 6:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Athena, I have no idea how I would score on the FSI scale. I do know that I completed a German test with the Goethe Institut when I was in Germany and got an almost perfect score. I taught English in a German school and did public speaking on a regular basis. Assimil was the heart of my German study.
My knowledge of each language I have studied is not perfect. I intend to improve but don't have the goal of being perfect in each language. I would like to be as close to perfect in my knowledge of German, French, Russian and Hebrew, but I will be content to just be able to converse and read newspapers in Malay, Indonesian, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Italian, Spanish and probably Danish and Portuguese. My knowledge of old Greek is sufficient to satisfy my curiosity and, if I get the chance, I would also like to improve my Yiddish and Afrikaans. Please don't compare a knowledge of German and an ability to speak it after six weeks from learning with Assimil and with Pimsleur. I was holding conversations, asking and answering questions with Germans after six weeks. I had a basic knowledge of the language. With Pimsleur you are limited by a very small vocabulary. There is no comparison between the two programs. My brother came to visit us in Germany and learnt some German with an Assimil program and in two weeks he was conversing with our neighbour who spoke no English. Assimil programs obviously work. If they haven't worked for you, then try FSI or another program. I enjoy learning with Assimil and I have no plans to change. All the same, Assimil has not been my major program for learning Russian, Polish or Hebrew. I use other courses and supplement them with Assimil. In fact, I have half a dozen programs for learning Russian (there is a wealth of material available) and I use one program as my basis (Russian For Everybody) and use the others for practice. Again, it comes down to learning styles. The way that people on this forum who are FSI enthusiasts write about the system seems to indicate they regard it as hard work and discipline. I like to learn for the fun of it. When the fun goes, I will stop. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 86 of 184 01 January 2006 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I couldn't agree more!
It might (arguably) not take you as far as FSI but once you're no longer a complete beginner, I think it's best to use native materials (such as books, TV and radio) to continue learning. As fanatic mentioned, it also depends on your goals. Not everyone wants to have extended conversations about deep philospohical matters so you might not need to know your target language "backwards" and "inside out".
I thought he was American. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7092 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 87 of 184 01 January 2006 at 2:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I debated on whether to post my German test scores because I did not use Assimil to learn German. I learned German at the Goethe Institute and went from a non-speaker to an advanced speaker in 4 months. The Goethe Institute used an immersion style method similar to Linguaphone for their course material; outside of class I skipped all the drills and used the fun material to expand German. That included language learning videos, easy readers and then German movies and books. I did not use one note card or one audio-lingual style drill. See the Warum nicht course for example of Goethe Institute material.
Anyway my tests scores after 4 months of this method: ZDF Certificate of German as a Foreign Language The Goethe Institute Murnau, Germany February 26, 1997 Written Examination 78 out of 90 points Oral Examination 28 out 30 points Passed with honors (mit gut bestanden) (The best score was with top honors – mit sehr gut bestanden) As far as I can tell passing the ZDF with honors is like getting a +2 on the FSI scale. Based on the Platiquemos site, you could expect to reach a +2 after complete all levels of platiquemos and then reach the level 3 after a month in a Spanish speaking country. True I only reach the +2 level, but that had more to do with the fact that my student loan ran out, not any limitations with the method. I did the best on oral exam, the one considered to be the toughest. I remember the exam vividly. I had to carry on a conversation with 2 examiners who both ask me a number for questions. One would ask a question, I would answer, and then the other would ask another question based on my answer. One of the questions was, you dial home to your girlfriend but to your surprise another man answers the phone, what do you say to him! Hindsight is 20-20, if I wanted to recreate 4 months of immersion style training similar to what I used, the best way would be to use Assimil and Linguaphone together and then go the German for a month. Perhaps not complete proof for Assimil, but that is an advanced score without using FSI. Edited by Farley on 01 January 2006 at 2:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6943 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 88 of 184 01 January 2006 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Athena: Language learning is not the army. To "be the best you can be" does require practice, but drilling is only one of many possibilites - plenty of people have learned foreign languages quite well over millenia without the type of repetitive oral drills you are talking about. I can imagine that many people who are not on their first foreign language might be quite impatient with methods that appear too slow or boringly repetitive to them. I can see such people getting by the fastest route they know to an intermediate level and then immersing themselves in authentic materials. Other than possibly the accent, it is hard to see what they can't accomplish by such an approach that others may prefer to do with an FSI course. Edited by frenkeld on 01 January 2006 at 7:39pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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