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Making our own Assimil

  Tags: Assimil
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130 messages over 17 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 10 ... 16 17 Next >>
TimoMcGregor
Newbie
United States
Joined 5909 days ago

14 posts - 14 votes
Studies: German

 
 Message 73 of 130
29 May 2008 at 1:01pm | IP Logged 
nice.

I have an old parallel text book that might make a good base for this. I don't know if licensing or copy rights would be still be in effect, but it's from 1958.

Here's a sample in just the English (the first three short dialogs)

1 Where do you live?
116 Schiller Street.
Are you living with your parents?
No, I've rented a room.

2 What is your home town?
Milwaukee.
Do you go home often?
Once a month.

3 Have you ever been there?
Yes, about a year ago.
Would you like to go there again?
I certainly would.


It has about 36 dialogs like that, then 100 longer, more complete dialogs, finishing with 17 longer, specific dialogs for various situations.
1 person has voted this message useful



Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 5935 days ago

675 posts - 724 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

 
 Message 74 of 130
29 May 2008 at 1:24pm | IP Logged 
BGreco wrote:
I have no experience with wikis, but I created one to try to organize our efforts. New pages can be created so that we can help each other edit dialogues, etc.

http://languagelearningprogram.wetpaint.com/

There is an unofficial wiki of the forums, why don't you use it for the project instead?
It is:

http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/
1 person has voted this message useful



awake
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6462 days ago

406 posts - 438 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, Spanish

 
 Message 75 of 130
29 May 2008 at 4:05pm | IP Logged 
Julie wrote:
Awake, I find your dialogs difficult. For example the first one: it includes many different grammar
structures: in few sentences you have Future Simple, Imperativ, Conditional, different modal verbs etc. I think we
should start with writing some simple dialogs and then progress to more difficult ones, as it's not that easy to
organize ready dialogs logically (I mean the new structures and vocabulary, not the plot). I would also prefer
something witty as it makes the learning process more pleasant.


I take your point Julie. But to play devil's advocate, by the end of the course (perhaps even in the middle) those
dialogues should present no problems. I wasn't thinking that they would be the beginning dialogues. I was
hoping to spur lots of different dialogues from different people.   One presumes they will vary fairly widely in
content and structure and difficulty if many of us are contributing. Once we have a bunch, we can start
adjusting and fine tuning them, as well as determining a good ordering.   I'm just naturally nonlinear I guess. :)

We can start off with simple "Hi, my name is bob, I am from london. Where do you live?" type dialogues.
I've been influenced by the AJATT style of just throwing lots of real sentences and letting the structures get
assimilated naturally.   But you're right there needs to be some gradations in difficulty. But I suspect that will
evolve naturally as many people contribute dialogues.

In my next batch I'll try to dumb it down a bit to make it more suitable for some beginning lessons.   Thank you
for the input, I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
1 person has voted this message useful



phauna
Newbie
Japan
Joined 5891 days ago

15 posts - 18 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, French

 
 Message 76 of 130
29 May 2008 at 7:42pm | IP Logged 
Well, I hadn't put the list of functions in order yet, as even amongst different languages there is some agreed order of the difficulty of a function. More importantly, the more useful constructs should come first, so talking about the past present and future should come near the beginning, they are major constructs. The very first dialogue is often the 'introducing yourself' function and 'inquiring about others', as well as the greetings function, which I forgot on the list. Here's an order which can be argued about, from least to most usefulness/ importance/ frequency.

- greeting people, acknowledging greetings.
- introducing yourself, inquiring about others
- talking about the present
- talking about habitual actions
- describing frequency of an action
- talking about time, relative and specific
- talking about the past
- talking about possessions
- talking about ability
- talking about past experience, inquiring about past experience
- talking about likes and dislikes, talking about favourites
- talking about amounts, numbers
- talking about shopping
- comparing things
- talking about the future
- talking about wants, needs, future plans.
- suggesting something, accepting a suggestion, declining a suggestion
- ordering in a restaurant
- talking about permission, restriction, rules
- commanding others to do and not to do something
- asking questions
- describing objects, shape, colour, number, position
- asking for directions, giving directions
- buying a ticket for a train, bus, movie, etc.
- stating an opinion
- talking about hypothetical situations, speculating
- calling someone on the phone, etc.
- talking about two actions happening simultaneously, one after the other, one before the other
- relaying information from another speaker
- being made to do something

I've added a few more functions too. Although this is not a grammar script, in English we can see what structures we would associate with each function. In other languages the grammar would be different of course.

Please discuss this order, in terms of usefulness, importance, etc. Then we can work out the English grammar to associate with each of these points. Finally, we can each mock up some dialogues to discuss. The order should determine the feel of the dialogues, the beginning ones won't be so verbose, and the later ones can include already used functions and grammar. For example, when ordering in a restaurant, you need to be able to talk about quantities, so this should be taught before or in the same lesson.

Also we can talk about more functions to add, although these would already make a solid course I think.

Extra functions:

- Expanding on continuing and finished states and habitual actions.
- Talking about past ability, future ability
- Talking about already, not yet, almost, just now, etc. Hard to name this without using English grammar. Maybe we could call it 'relative time shortcut words'.
- For Asian languages especially, something about politeness levels, inferiority, superiority, giving and receiving. These may be optional for those languages, or incorporated in the appropriate lessons, such as the 'introducing' function.
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Kugel
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6364 days ago

497 posts - 555 votes 
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 78 of 130
04 June 2008 at 5:37pm | IP Logged 
Some questions:

How much would it cost to have a native speaker do the audio for you?

Would it be a waste to find a native speaker in your area and record him or her using a $100 recorder? If so, then how would one go about finding a native speaker on the world wide web who is capable of recording your material? It's not like there is a market for this type of thing.

Personally, I'd pay someone to record my 'homebrew' language program. The problem would be finding someone who can enunciate like a professional actor/spokesman.
1 person has voted this message useful



BGreco
Senior Member
Joined 6219 days ago

211 posts - 222 votes 
3 sounds
Speaks: English*
Studies: French, Spanish

 
 Message 79 of 130
04 June 2008 at 6:04pm | IP Logged 
This forum is full of native speakers who have already volunteered to do this for free.
1 person has voted this message useful



Lucia Ibanez
Diglot
Newbie
Germany
Joined 5725 days ago

6 posts - 6 votes
Speaks: German*, English
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 80 of 130
09 October 2008 at 10:39am | IP Logged 
This might be a little necromany but i wonder whats happend to this project?


1 person has voted this message useful



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