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Ranking of Assimil courses | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4988 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 57 of 64 12 July 2012 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
It seems reasonably priced to me - around £60 for a book and audio, and they can often be found cheaper on Amazon sellers, Book Depository, etc.. For the amount it teaches you, it's miles better value than far more expensive materials like Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone; even a half-year of language classes would cost more and probably teach far less. However I've never used Teach Yourself so I can't compare them. The fact that TY courses are available in every bookshop yet Assimil is fairly obscure and unheard-of outside of this forum does suggest that TY are a much bigger company and so have greater economies of scale and can sell more cheaply. Edited by garyb on 12 July 2012 at 4:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4488 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 58 of 64 12 July 2012 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Assimil is way better than TY in terms of a couple things though:
- more audio - audio has no English; so two hours of "audio" for TY is actually 30 minutes; for Assimil it's actually what it claims to be, plus I have mp3 versions meaning I can listen to the files everywhere - do not only treat typical travel/holiday topics but also other elements - introduce grammar very well (although I would always supplement Assimil with a full- blown grammar - f.e. I have Oxford's Russian grammar) - divide work into easy bite-sized chunks. I can do a TY Unit in a day, but that means I have to spend hours on it and not understand everything, or I need to spread it out (and then I still lack audio and grammar practice). Assimil has much more logical pacing, plus you get a second wave which is what you need to solidify the early knowledge later on. It's a repetition round (like for Iversen's wordlists). The real reason is that of course Assimil is French-based, and thus they'll require a lot of translators. I have used TY Russian and Assimil Russian extensively (almost finished both books) and I prefer Assimil by a long long shot (I have L'Hébreu sans peine too which looks good, but I have not had the occasion to use it yet). 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5346 days ago 938 posts - 1839 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 59 of 64 12 July 2012 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was shocked to work out recently that for every 5 minutes of audio on Oxford's Take
Off in German course, 30 seconds was native material and the rest was either English introduction or repeated sentences of the 30 seconds. You don't get that with Assimil! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| brunilda Newbie United States Joined 4838 days ago 4 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 60 of 64 13 July 2012 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Assimil is better than TY, I agree with tarvos, for the reasons expounded above. The content of TY courses is not very interesting, and I prefer Assimil because it's method is much more sound (it seems to me) for fun and successful self-study. I have worked with TY Russian, Icelandic, Irish, Sanskrit, so I have a fairly good basis for comparison: I could not finish a single one of them. My Russian is extremely poor, my Irish almost non-existent, my Icelandic and Sanskrit non-existent. I speak Norwegian, which I learned with Assimil, and I could not wait to finish the book, that is how good it is. I am currently doing Greek and Turkish with ASSIMIL, and even though the dialogues are not as fun, it is not a chore to go through the units.
Full disclosure: I wrote two conversation guides for ASSIMIL, and work occasionally proofing their books. However, I am trying to be as objective as I can. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| brunilda Newbie United States Joined 4838 days ago 4 posts - 6 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 61 of 64 13 July 2012 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oops! "its" method!!! OUCH!
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5564 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 62 of 64 14 July 2012 at 2:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ooof....I edit my typos and errors out afterwards (that's why almost all my posts are
edited). If I left them in and corrected them explicitly like you do I'd look so stupid! But that's only because I make lots. :-) Edit: case in point (I swear not on purpose)! Edited by Random review on 14 July 2012 at 5:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5564 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 63 of 64 14 July 2012 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm sure I've seen this before in another thread, with almost the exact same wording. Unfortunately half an hour with google hasn't enabled me to find it, so maybe I'm just going mad. Edit: found it! here The wording is not (as I remembered) almost exactly the same, but it's pretty similar. There were quite a few convincing rebuttals of this point of view that Assimil is too expensive given there.
Edited by Random review on 14 July 2012 at 4:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4670 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 64 of 64 10 June 2014 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Bumping this, because I think it's an interesting thread, and I think that folks must
have new ones to add in the two years since the last post. And because I have some to add! Very good: Italian with Ease. I'm currently on Lesson 66. It doesn't have the humor of French with Ease, or the strangeness of Spanish with Ease. But it has a nice pace, and isn't too complicated. I'd recommend it. Mixed: Le Turc and Le Grec ancien. I liked both, but hit a wall on lesson 35 of the Turkish and lesson 66 of the Greek. They just got too hard after a point - there was too much new grammar, and it became more and more difficult to correlate the TL with the translations. Part of this might be that the base level is in French and that adds to the difficulty for me. I think both of these really require outside resources, or prior experience with the language, to finish. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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