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Where to go after Michel Thomas? | ||
Tags: Michel Thomas | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5493 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes  Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 1 of 13 07 July 2014 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm curious. If I go through the full beginner and advance programs, along with the vocab builder and the language booster, where should I go after? I feel like Pimsleur is pointless after finishing all of Michel Thomas, and Assimil is good, but my library doesn't have it. Should I drill vocab and work on actual news articles or should I slowly work my way up via lingq? I had two years of German in college so the nominative, dative, and genitive cases are coming back fairly quickly, so I don't feel like grammar is a huge issue.
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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 13 08 July 2014 at 3:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil would be a nice place to go after that. You can buy Assimil books pretty cheap online. Another good alternative would be the Living Language Ultimate courses. Those are somewhat Assimil-ish.
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| soclydeza85 Senior Member United States Joined 3906 days ago 357 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 3 of 13 08 July 2014 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Look on Amazon for Assimil. All of the audio (for German) is on youtube and you really only need the book; it should be fairly cheap to buy used. I wouldn't say Pimsleur is pointless at this point, you can still get a bit out of it and learn things from different angles. If your library has it then go for it. Maybe try the Hugo series; it gives a good rundown of German grammar and has tons of vocab in it. Otherwise, working on news articles is a great idea.
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| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4253 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 13 08 July 2014 at 4:27am | IP Logged | ||
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A good free alternative to Assimil would be FSI German, as long as you don't find it too boring.
Also I would add, that I don't think Pimsleur would necessarily be pointless after Michel Thomas, I frequently find the two programs to be useful together. Though of course neither is completely necessary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 5 of 13 08 July 2014 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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You might find it too similar to Michel Thomas, but you might take a look at "You Speak
German". There are some free lessons, to help you see if you like it, and then you have to subscribe to get more. It's not that expensive though. The emphasis is on speaking and listening, and there is a bit more explicit grammar than with MT. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Silvance Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5493 days ago 57 posts - 81 votes Speaks: English*, Pashto Studies: Dari | Message 6 of 13 08 July 2014 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm at about an A2 level in German right now as it is, thanks to having taken 2 years of
it in University, a lot of it came back really fast. With that in mind, can I still benefit from Assimil? Should I do it based on the instructions, or start from the beginning doing an active phase or an audio transcription since the type of sentences you see in the first 15 or so lessons of Assimil I'm pretty familiar with. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5261 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 13 08 July 2014 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Assimil is highly touted on HTLAL for several reasons, cost effectiveness being one. Short, "graded-reader" type, bilingual facing dialogs (with humor) and the easy going approach to grammar are some of the other reasons. General forum consensus is that it will take you to A2 and maybe, maybe B1. You could benefit from using it but just because you can, should you? Is the cost benefit analysis of time and effort worth the marginal gain if you're already at A2?
Assimil is most often the default recommendation here but there are other especially good, and free, resources available for German learners. I'm quite surprised no one has mentioned the Deutsche Welle Courses and Resources yet. They're free to download and are sorted by CEFR ratings. Forum consensus is that these are good, high quality, resources. Edited by iguanamon on 08 July 2014 at 9:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| soclydeza85 Senior Member United States Joined 3906 days ago 357 posts - 502 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 8 of 13 09 July 2014 at 3:21am | IP Logged | ||
I didn't even think of this, but this is a great idea. As for Assimil, I definitely think you would still benefit from it. The lessons (at least the German version) have different themes behind them that explore different areas: storytelling/literary, colloquial dialogues and expressions that you won't find in textbooks, writing letters, etc. The listening comprehension you can gain from it is excellent; it's a really good way to train your ear around that level. I would start from the beginning, maybe sit down one night and knock out lesson by lesson until start to get hung up on the content and then start doing one lesson per day from there. If you don't mind me asking: how do you know you're A2? Another interesting site you might like is Lingocracy. It basically gives you articles or short stories that go by level and allows you to simply hold your mouse over each word for the definition (or click and drag over a sentence/clause to get more of a rounded translation). Edited by soclydeza85 on 09 July 2014 at 3:22am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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