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Assimil | ||
Tags: Shadowing | Polyglottery | Alexander Arguelles | Reading | Language Program | Learning Technique/Method | Assimil | Book | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Hoopskidoodle Senior Member United States Joined 5281 days ago 55 posts - 68 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 201 of 278 04 November 2009 at 3:08am | IP Logged | |||||
Hey, you're the dude from Youtube! Your videos led me to *ahem* acquire the 1940 version of Assimil "French Without Toil." Just as you stated, it is, IMO, much more densely packed with pertinent information than the modern courses I've seen (which tend to be heavily padded for whichever reasons.) Thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kubelek Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland chomikuj.pl/Kuba_wal Joined 6633 days ago 415 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC2, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 202 of 278 04 November 2009 at 10:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for the clarification. I thought it would be more like the Assimil software for Japanese or Chinese. They had the whole lesson displayed, and individual sentences were clickable.
I think this is still a good tool if you want to achieve good pronunciation - it's easier to catch some nuances with individual sentences on the loop. If you use it to drill individual sentences, you're not really following the original method (which I find really effective). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5374 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 203 of 278 01 February 2010 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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How are people getting on that started Assimil at christmas or at the dawn of the new
year. I'm up to lesson 39 now so not long until the active phase kicks in. I am hoping that going over and reviewing them again along with the extra work such as the translations will really begin to get the language to sink in. I have memorised a number of the sentences through my constant listening to them. However, I'm sure this isn't in the method, in fact my Italian with ease even says not too memorise things but I was wondering if just simply reviewing with a bit of translation will take me to the point where i can manipulate vocab and structure to suit. Personally, although I have spent a lot of time reading through and being inspired by some of the people who say they learnt the language to a good degree (B2 etc) using this method alone, I am incline to think having done a chunk of this course now that they have devoted their life to the course for the duration of the course or more likely, have backed up the teachings from the book with conversations with natives/friends etc. I have signed up to a conversational course so I may be able to practise some more but Assimil alone I think will be ill equiped to make me conversational. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5374 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 205 of 278 03 February 2010 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes Buttons - you are right! I have come to realise that variety is important. Luckily
my local library has a copy of an old lingaphone course so I have checked that out and I'm working through it slowly. I wonder how fanatic or anyone else for that matter has progressed using Assimil alone for the other languages they know. I would be interested to know to what stage they reached in say a language that was unrelated to a priorly learnt language (as obvious this would interfere and probably accelerate learning). After a lot of trawling I came to the conclusion that the majority of people here praised either the FSI courses and/or the assimil courses. The Italian FSI is poor so I went for Assmil. I think my listening abilities have definitely progressed and my vocabulary increasing but there is a problem that I find. This being that when I started learning Italian using the michel thomas course, everything was thought out and the sentence constructions made sense. Now I am using assimil, I know that they include idiomatic expressions and also taking into account the apparently awful translation - some the sentences I am reading either do not make sense or are not consistent from one lesson to the other. Oh well, I dont know if there was a point to this rambling but maybe some of you have experienced similar disappointments with courses you are working through. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5234 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 207 of 278 03 February 2010 at 9:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is an excellent advice I think.
How many in here really use Assimil as their only tool? It seems to me that quite a few advocate combining various methods. (I do agree that having studied languages beforehand do make it a lot easer to spot patterns and structures.) Edited by tractor on 03 February 2010 at 9:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5374 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 208 of 278 03 February 2010 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you for the advice. It is excellent advice. The linguaphone course, for those
who don't know, comprises of cassettes (it's old) and 4 books, the main book with lessons in, another with notes on the lessons with explanations of grammar etc, then 2 books with exercises in (orali e scritti). To my surprise (having only ever seen their 'listen, repeat, forget' adverts the course is excellent. The drills in the exercise books are good, and I have read somewhere on here that this course includes over 2000 words and can take you to intermediate level. The lessons are long and a guide I find on how to complete each lesson suggested that such directions would take around 2 hours to do. Therefore, I am only only lesson 4 of 30 (having only had the book out of the library for a week). So, I think this might cover the grammar aspect as you rightly suggested. Maybe once I have gone through the linguaphone course a bit more I can brush up on the meanings in assimil as I proceed through the active wave. My disappointment with assimil comes from the scant explanations on grammar. Of course the idea is to assimilate the language. I have always been a person who hates terminology of any kind (in I.T. or cars for example) so I thought assimil would be ideal (as was michel thomas with all his diving board stuff etc) but maybe I need to reassess things. Maybe I need things explaining clearly and dryly. I wonder how people who have taken the same path as me (MT then assimil) have found the change in technique of how the material is presented. Anyway, another ramble over with. Lesson 42 tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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