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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 90 of 184 28 January 2006 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Welcome back, Athena. It sounds like you had a great time.
The answer is quite simple. I think you have misunderstood how Assimil works and how you are supposed to use it. The four hours of Assimil contains as much vocabulary and dialogue as FSI and much more than Pimsleur. The idea with Assimil is that you play a new lesson each day in the first wave and review the previous lessons. So, each day I play seven lessons on my audio player. You get used to reading, hearing and understanding the text. You also read the text out loud and repeat what you hear on the recordings so you get used to speaking the language. This is the passive stage of learning the language with Assimil. Also, once a week I play all of the lessons up to my current lesson. Even more audio. I am not limited by the length of the daily lesson. After about two months of daily learning a new lesson and reviewing the previous lessons you have a very good passive vocabulary and can understand a lot of the language. Much more than with Pimsleur because you have a much bigger vocabulary.
Yes, you are entertained by the text as it is much more interesting that straight drills. It doesn't have to be hard work to be worthwhile. The question is not whether the Assimil users are lazy or trying to avoid work but whether the method is effective. I have found it to be extremely so, and so have many thousands of others who have used the method to learn languages and learn them effectively.
I deceived myself that I had learnt the language fluently after recording my phonograph records on to two audio cassette tapes and was able to travel and work in Germany and perform technical translations for the company I worked for. I was able to speak in public and taught English in a German middle school. In other words, I was fluent. Was my German perfect? No, I used to make mistakes but I was fluent. I attended lectures in German and took educational and technical courses in German. I was fluent for all practical purposes. If Assimil contains all of the material and vocabulary that is on FSI and more than is on Pimsleur, then what does it matter that the total recording time is four hours when the total playback time is closer to seventy hours. Actually, the short audio lessons and the interesting content make it much easier to review old lessons and play them over and over again. Another benefit with Assimil is that the recordings are entirely in the target language, meaning that as you listen you are more likely to think in the language you are learning. I think this is important. You are not translating what you read and hear. You just have to understand it.
You are welcome to your opinion about Assimil or anything else. I don't see the problem as one method being right and another method being wrong, or even inferior. If a method does the job and works for you and the results are good, that is all that counts. I don't criticise FSI (or Pimsleur, although I must admit I don't like it very much, although it does a job and is good within the limitations) because FSI has too much audio and too many drills and is too boring. If it works for you then, by all means, use it. Let's not criticise how others learn. If it works, that is all that matters. And I am prepared to look at new ways of learning and consolidating a language. If I try the method and find it doesn't work for me, then I will abandon it. If I am teaching the language or teaching language learners, I might offer the method as something to be tried, but if no one is able to learn using the method, then it is time to abandon it. Don't call on people to give up learning with Assimil because you don't like it. If they can learn to converse in a language in 5 months with fluency using the Assimil programs, why should they stop? You seem to be worried that it doesn't count because it hasn't cost enough in hard work. I am not ashamed to say that I don't mind learning a language the easy, pleasant way with a minimum of effort and drills. By the way, I am augmenting my language study by watching and taping Unit One on television in Danish, Montalbano in Italian and I watch movies in the other languages I am studying. There will be a movie from Iceland on Thursday. We are fortunate to have multi-cultural television here in Australia. I am afraid this is all entertainment. No hard work here. Edited by fanatic on 28 January 2006 at 10:12pm 8 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 91 of 184 29 January 2006 at 12:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You could reverse the argument against FSI. The FSI course takes too many tapes/disks to teach what Assimil achieves in just four. Also, if you review your last seven lessons in Assimil it takes about half an hour or less. To accomplish the same with FSI it would take three or four hours. You could argue that learning with Assimil is much more efficient. You learn a much larger vocabulary per disk than with FSI.
Through repeated listening, learners are able to recite whole lessons off by heart without any conscious learning. When I was in Europe I often used sentence constructions to form elegant sentences straight from my Assimil courses. Again, it is not Assimil versus FSI. There is no contest. They use different means to do the job. I happen to like Assimil but I wouldn't try to deter anyone from using FSI, Linguaphone, Berlitz, Barrons, Living Language, or any other language program. I like Transparent language programs, and I like Synergy Spanish as a means of learning Spanish. I used it along with Assimil Spanish Without Toil and found it to be effective. I have a stack of Russian learning programs. I became addicted to buying them for a while. They were so cheap and very good. My position is: if a language course is doing the job, enabling people to learn the language well, then it doesn't need defending. Edited by fanatic on 29 January 2006 at 4:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7077 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 92 of 184 29 January 2006 at 6:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Here here. 1 person has 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 93 of 184 31 January 2006 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I am inclined now to think that the Assimil method is simply better than most others. After reading the material from Automatic Language Growth I believe they make some good points.
Firstly, young children don't do language drills and yet learn a their mother tongue as well as second and third languages with ease and learn the languages better than adults who spend thousands of dollars on courses with endless drills. Secondly, the Assimil method requires you to passively take in the new language for a couple of months before you begin the active phase. That means that by the time you start using the language you are used to hearing the language spoken correctly and you are thinking in the language before you begin. You are more likely to begin speaking the language correctly. Thirdly, the method most closely approximates how we learnt our mother tongue as infants and how adults naturally learn a new language by immersion. We listen first, then speak. You can find more discussion on this under General Discussion under Listening Before Speaking The Automatic Language Growth organization seem to teach that it is not a matter of learning style but that the passive, then active method of learning a language is simply the best way to learn to speak like a native. Australia had a big intake of European migrants after the second world war and I had kids in my class who couldn't speak any English when they first began school but, after a year or less, were indistinguishable from native Australians by their accent. My daughter Wendy spoke perfect German and Bavarian in less than a year at kindergarten. My point is that none of these children learnt the language with drills and language laboratory exercises. The way they learnt was much closer to the Assimil method. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| braveb Senior Member United States languageprograms.blo Joined 7197 days ago 264 posts - 263 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 94 of 184 31 January 2006 at 8:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I'm going to do a word study on an Assimil program I'm taking. I'm going to count the number of word occurences and the amount of different words. I suppose then I'll break it down and see what words occur the most.
In case if anyone is wondering, the program is L'Hebreu sans peine(tome 1). I'm taking an audited Hebrew 102 so I suppose this will be somewhat of a test to see how it compares to the grammar approach of a uni course. This certainly isn't passive, so the results could be poor. I'll do the second wave nevertheless. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| braveb Senior Member United States languageprograms.blo Joined 7197 days ago 264 posts - 263 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 95 of 184 06 February 2006 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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So far just 5 lessons have about 110 different words, and I fully understand them when listening. Every day is about 2 hours listening while driving and about 30 minutes making flashcards and reviewing the grammar. Edited by braveb on 06 February 2006 at 8:54pm 1 person has 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 96 of 184 06 February 2006 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Twenty-two words each day is not bad going. I have always been impressed by how much I learn in so little time with Assimil but I didn't realize I was learning so many words. The thing is, you don't commit them to memory but just recognize them when you read or hear the words during the passive cycle. I will do some word counts with some of my other Assimil languages.
By my mathematics it means you learn 1342 words in a 31-day month. They say you only need around 1,000 words for basic conversation and Assimil teaches the most frequently used words, sentences and expressions so you can speak reasonably well after two months. How does that compare with Pimsleur? When I was learning Assimil Spanish Without Toil I often did two lessons in a day so I got through about 30 lessons in about 20 days. Then I tapered off. I was able to go faster because I had learnt French and basic Italian. All I had to do was recognize the words. I found the same with Dutch. I spoke good German so I recognized much of the Dutch. With a language like Chinese I am sure it would take a bit longer. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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