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I don’t get it.

  Tags: Assimil
 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes Post Reply
10 messages over 2 pages: 1
Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 6012 days ago

4399 posts - 7687 votes 
Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

 
 Message 9 of 10
16 April 2011 at 6:30pm | IP Logged 
tractor wrote:
Could a possible explanation be that some are slow learners and some are fast learners? Like kids at school, some
learn fast without much effort while others struggle.

I'm not going to drag this thread off-topic.
Instead, I've written a blog post which goes into far more self-important detail than would be acceptable here.

1 person has voted this message useful



BartoG
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
confession
Joined 5448 days ago

292 posts - 818 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek

 
 Message 10 of 10
16 April 2011 at 6:51pm | IP Logged 
As mentioned above, a lot of this has to do with how you do the course and the background you bring, not just to the language but to language learning in general. Assimil gives you general parameters about how to do the lessons. Some people take the strictest interpretation, others the loosest interpretation. And some people come up with their own ways of using the Assimil content.

It's my impression that you can get quite far if you really do make sure you get full understanding in the first wave and really do work at the lessons until you can reproduce their content exactly in the active wave. Using Anki lists and the like may have an affect on how well the other aspects of the process work out.

I recently did an Assimil experiment to see how much you could learn while doing as little as you could get away with. The results were not as impressive, though I've found that since I stopped actively studying I have a lot more Alsatian floating around in my brain than I realized, a fact I realized when I started to talk in German and had Alsatian come out instead.

Of course part of the rub there is that if I was speaking German, I had a headstart on Alsatian. Which is why I'd suggest that Cainntear's offsite post is worth the read. Assimil is largely about soaking up knowledge passively, and that means fitting it into your existing framework of knowledge. If you're in the habit of learning things, especially about language, and are comfortable using language inexactly till you get better at it Assimil can take you some distance. If you feel the need to understand everything you're learning and to get it right, Assimil could be quite tedious because since it doesn't tell you everything exactly you'd probably get a mental block about things that you'd actually be able to come up with if you had to just get the message across.
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