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Assimil - level B2 in 5 months possible?

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16 messages over 2 pages: 1 2 
JS-1
Diglot
Senior Member
Ireland
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Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), German, Japanese, Ancient Egyptian, Arabic (Written)

 
 Message 10 of 16
09 December 2009 at 3:43pm | IP Logged 
Assimil courses do not all reach the same level. The Arabic course, for example, doesn't
come anywhere near the level of the French course.
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draoicht
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Ireland
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 Message 11 of 16
10 December 2009 at 3:50pm | IP Logged 
The CEFR mainly uses “can do” statements to ascertain what level you’re at, but I was curious if they used vocabulary size to do this as well and apparently in the early days they did.

Materials for A2 and B1 came with wordlists, A2 had 1000 words and B1 had 2000 words.

I’m not sure how many words you would need to be at B2, maybe 2,500 to 3,000, therefore if your Assimil course contains this amount of words then it would be reasonable to say it takes you to B2.

Buttons wrote:
All I can say is trust the UK with their overall dismal foreign language abilities to be way behind Germany!

The paper I got this information from discusses this as well Link

Edit The author of the above paper, James Milton, states in his book “Measuring Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition”;

“Learners of French as a foreign language will probably need to know 2000 or more of the most frequent 5000 words to move from CEFR A2 to B1.
They will probably need 3000 words or more to move from CEFR B2 to C1.”

So a figure of 2,500 words would seem about right for B2.


Edited by draoicht on 10 December 2009 at 4:41pm
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Sennin
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Bulgaria
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5 sounds

 
 Message 13 of 16
10 December 2009 at 7:50pm | IP Logged 
Buttons wrote:
Interesting article and probably confirms what many of us in the UK probably suspects ;0)

However, I am a little confused over the levels. I think I have read previously that the levels compared to the UK exams are roughly:

A2 GCSE
B1 A level
B2 End of second year uni

but this article is saying:

B1 GCSE
B2 A level
C1 End of second year uni

Is there a difference between the European frameworks and the CEFR levels at all?


What percentage do you need to pass the French A-level? I'm not sure those that pass with C are B2... probably only the good grades.

It's worth mentioning that UK universities require C1 English for entry into undergraduate degrees, and the better unis only accept a pass with A or B (the corresponding percentage in TOEFL/IELTS). That means foreign students already have C1 by the time they leave school.

I was first year in university when I took the CPE exam (C2 English), but there are many people who take it by the time they leave school. Based on that, I'd say A-levels in French are pretty pathetic, especially the lower grades. However, I believe most French universities only require B2 for undergraduate degrees, so those that take their A-level French with a good grade probably can study abroad.


Edited by Sennin on 10 December 2009 at 7:54pm
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draoicht
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 Message 14 of 16
10 December 2009 at 8:38pm | IP Logged 
James Milton talks more about this in his book here

He says that the CEFR levels have been dropped onto existing language teaching systems and while for some systems it has worked out fine, in the UK they have underestimated what is required to be proficient at every level.

Have a look at page 187 in chapter 8 where he looks at students learning French in the UK, Greece and Spain.
At B1, a student of French in Greece will have a vocabularly of 2422 words while a student in The UK will only have a vocabulary of 850 words.

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fry
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United States
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 Message 16 of 16
16 December 2009 at 8:39pm | IP Logged 
fanatic wrote:
I completed Assimil German Without Toil in six months and I managed quite well in Germany. I didn't use any other learning material but I did practise speaking with German friends. I managed the grammar quite well and just mumbled when I wasn't sure which form of the article to use.

I sat an exam with the Goethe Institute and got a near perfect score. I would say using the course for half an hour a day was equivalent to five or six years of school.


Which exam level did you take? Zertifikat Deutsch für den Beruf, Goethe-Zertifikat (B2)?

I'm working through German with Ease now, and getting a lot out of it. Unfortunately, it appears Assimil no longer offers (if they ever did) an "advanced" German course with English as the base language.


Edited by fry on 16 December 2009 at 8:40pm


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