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Assimil flaws ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Everything Diglot Groupie France Joined 4500 days ago 87 posts - 167 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 7 10 March 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged |
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What do you think Assimil should improve and why ?
What are its flaws ? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 7 10 March 2012 at 12:32pm | IP Logged |
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It's very hard to generalize across the whole series; the courses vary quite a bit in quality. For many of them, better recordings would help - they're often too slow. Some need a bit more explicit explanation of grammar (I hear Assimil Finnish does); some need better translations (Assimil Spanish for English-speakers is a bit notorious on this forum). They should definitely improve their instructions on how to use the course; the explanations vary from book to book, and seem to leave most people baffled.
I'd personally like if they brought back more literature (as some of the earlier courses had), and cut down slightly on truly low-frequency vocabulary in non-literary scenarios that don't require it: higher-frequency words could often pack the same punch, without making students wonder why their first 1000 words include some that they haven't used actively in their native language all year. It's not a course which grants active use from day 1 - but I see this as a design tradeoff, not a flaw. The quality and contents of footnotes for each lesson also vary wildly from course to course. At their best, they contribute a lot; often, they seem somewhat pointless. I think their basic concept is sound, but some of their courses could have done with better quality control, and a few were poorly designed. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5630 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 7 10 March 2012 at 3:47pm | IP Logged |
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Volte - Which specific Assimil courses would you say are best, and which ones do you think have problems? Edited by COF on 10 March 2012 at 3:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4708 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 4 of 7 10 March 2012 at 9:33pm | IP Logged |
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I'm using Assimil's New French with Ease. I agree that I need more explicit grammar instruction than is given in the course, but that is contrary to the intention of the course. As it says at the end of lesson 14, "So much for the rules. In time you will 'feel' the correct usage, so don't try to do too much at once." The most explicit statement of how the method is supposed to work is at the end of lesson 36: "Do you find that you are beginning to understand things without needing detailed explanations? We hope so!"
I don't think that expanding on the grammar explanations would improve the course. I am happy enough to find further grammar explanations elsewhere. Besides using Assimil, I'm reading BBC's Talk French Grammar, and slowly working on Living French, which is a grammar-heavy introductory course. I am on lesson 36 of Assimil, but only chapter 3 of Living French, which gives you a good idea of which course is more enjoyable. At the end of the day, if I like doing it, I keep on working on it. Edited by Jeffers on 10 March 2012 at 9:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5384 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 5 of 7 10 March 2012 at 10:01pm | IP Logged |
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I definitely think French with Ease is their best, and German and Italian take a close second. I'm just finishing up German with Ease. I loved it, and while I can't recite every lesson word for word, I can read and understand a good bit of what I'm reading, and listen to music and not be totally lost. Some of the footnotes are worthless, but the exercises are very helpful, at least for the German course. They present sentences you could really use in real life, and I found that really enjoyable.
I really back Assimil for anyone starting a language, it wasn't my only attack plan, but it definitely got me up and running! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ikinaridango Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5924 days ago 61 posts - 80 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese, Italian Studies: German, Polish | Message 6 of 7 13 March 2012 at 11:37pm | IP Logged |
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I would suggest that Assimil could really improve their localisation skills. It seems
that rather than being truly adapted for different language markets, courses are just translated. What this means is that if there are five notes for a certain lesson in the original then there will be five notes in the adaptation. This doesn't always make much sense. Sometimes it doesn't really matter. I found it amusing that Assimil German with Ease, adapted from the original text for French speakers, found it necessary to point out that the German word 'bevor' meant 'before' in English. However some things are obtuse, for example notes explaining the agreement of Italian past participles with preceding direct objects clearly only made much sense if you had an understanding of the same phenomenon in French. I fortunately had studied French before tackling Italian, but I do think that had that not been the case I would have been most perplexed. Assimil need to take into account that speakers of French, English, German and so on will have different needs when studying the same language, and that the adapter of the text should therefore be allowed to tailor the notes accordingly. There are also chapters that are clearly designed with speakers of the language of the original target audience in mind. Spanish with Ease has an awful chapter called 'False Friends' which is mostly useless for the average English-speaking learner as it deals exclusively with words that have similar or identical spellings but different meanings in French and Spanish. There a couple of similar chapters, I think, in French with Ease and Using French, but as those were originally written for an English-speaking audience they didn't affect my studies. I suspect that readers of, say, the Italian or Spanish adaptations of Assimil's French courses, might on occasion be somewhat bemused however. I will say that I've not noticed this problem so much with the most recent generation of Assimil courses. Gah. I could go on. I like Assimil an awful lot and will almost always turn to them first when it comes to studying a new language, but I do find them frustrating at times. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| michal Pentaglot Newbie Czech Republic Joined 5103 days ago 16 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, German, Russian, French Studies: Latvian, Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Polish, Yiddish, Greek, Hungarian | Message 7 of 7 16 March 2012 at 11:05am | IP Logged |
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Consistent IPA pronunciation transcriptions would help. Presently they use ad-hoc transcriptions based on French orthography (or base language's orthography), not very consistent from book to book. IPA is definitely not unheard of in France, it is used in monolingual French dictionaries.
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