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Vocabulary learning in Assimil | ||
Tags: Vocabulary learning | Assimil | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5283 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 15 23 February 2012 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Do you learn all the vocabulary and grammar of a lesson before you move on, or do you just work on it
until you understand it passively, and then move on, waiting for the active phase for translating? I ask because normally when doing a language lesson I would learn all the vocabulary, and be able to translate back and forth before I continued, but since there is this passive phase/ active phase thing, I am wondering whether I could skip a bit lighter over each lesson, and hope that the active phase will make it easier to do the words I am struggling with the first time over. What do the rest of you do? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5330 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 15 23 February 2012 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm now working with Assimil finnois, and it was my first time using Assimil. I first intended to go through the book only once, but it's so dense and there is so much useless vocabulary, that it's quite hard (and often useless) to learn it all. The explanations are not all that great either, so even if you stayed on the same lesson forever, you wouldn't necessarily get it anyway. So, I move on pretty quickly, and I go back to review earlier lessons, alternating between reviewing an older lesson or two, and doing a new one.
If I tell you to read all my lessons in a so-called passive wave, and then to read it all again in an active wave, I not only increase your chances of success (if you do as I say), but it also removes the need for me to create effective, well-thought-out lessons. The problem is that going through the whole book is also a lot less motivating, so I think a lot of people would just give up. I'm stuck within the confines of a time-limited challenge, otherwise, I don't think I'd continue with Assimil. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5283 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 15 23 February 2012 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lots of love coming your way right now!!! I was starting to think I was being dense. I much prefer thinking
that the book is dense. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5481 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 15 23 February 2012 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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You're way better at learning languages than I am, so I won't give you any
advice. :-) But I'm happy to share my own experiences. When I did Assimil, I was terribly lazy about everything except listening and translating. I made no effort to study vocabulary or grammar. I'm not even sure that I did all the exercises at the end of the lessons. And it all worked out OK—I wound up with the conversational skills of a toddler, which frankly seemed like a miracle. But then, I had never learned a language before, and I had no idea what I was doing. I just cranked through the book, one lesson at a time, and discovered HTLAL after finishing the active wave. I didn't discover SRS until I was reading my first book, and I needed to shore up my vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6546 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 15 24 February 2012 at 12:37am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5330 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 6 of 15 24 February 2012 at 3:38am | IP Logged | |||||
I've been studying for 3 weeks. What am I going to do with dill, handset, diplomatic corps, fur-lined, elk, and centipede? I haven't used any of those words in any language for AT LEAST a month. Have you? It's not that they'll never be useful, but they certainly aren't useful to a beginner. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6100 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 7 of 15 24 February 2012 at 10:42am | IP Logged | |||||
I often ring the diplomatic corps on my handset, to see it they're coming to those trendy Helsinki bars that serve Elk and Centipede Martini with a hint of dill in a fur-lined glass. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5514 days ago 938 posts - 1840 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 8 of 15 24 February 2012 at 11:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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I personally think this is a problem with the older Assimil courses, or those modelled
on the older courses - where the words/scenarios are often used to fit the Cherelian (?) humour of the publishing house. I found German With Ease to be very hard going (but ultimately useful) for this reason - scenarios with lots of useless words and idiomatic constructions from almost the start (not to mention the myriad of translation errors) in situations I would never find myself in. I have just finished going through the newest L'Allemand and was struck (when compared with German With Ease) how the author had tried to include more 'real-life' scenarios and useful language, even touristy language, from the beginning. As to using Assimil - I tend to ignore the passive/active wave thingy and have a go at translating almost from the start. After doing the passive wave instructions of listening and repeating, I parse the first weeks' dialogues to infer the grammar so that I can come back a week later and make a translation. From this I can see if I had made the right connections the week before and whether I remembered the words/idioms in the text. When I come across a word I don't known I glance at the text and say it out loud a few times. I am too lazy and ill-disciplined to be bothered with cards or entering words into Anki or such like. This works for me because I also use post-it sticky tags to mark where I am - when I get to the start of a new 7 day block of lessons I start at lesson 1 again and I do this for about 6 complete waves of reading (so at lesson 36 I am also doing lessons 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29) - that way I have a kind of inbuilt SRS without the (for me) dreaded cards/computer. I have started doing this for most self teaching language courses as I have no memory for grammar or vocabulary and tend to forget them pretty darn quick if I don't continually revise them. Edited by Elexi on 24 February 2012 at 12:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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