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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6259 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 81 of 94 06 November 2012 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I recommend learning the roots, and additionally any affixed forms that are commonly- used and that fulfill one of the two following conditions: a) they differ a greatly in meaning from the root form b) you have had trouble understanding them in context 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4504 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 82 of 94 06 November 2012 at 3:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Well....if the person is sick, you've gotta admit that it kinda makes sense.... =P [/bad_joke_alert] Edited by fabriciocarraro on 06 November 2012 at 5:58pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4798 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 83 of 94 07 November 2012 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I love your log and experiment and you are my hero! :-)
Three languages till the end and through the active wave are no less impressive than the six. It's awesome to see how much you enjoy them. I am quite surprised that the Polish Assimil seems to not really push the grammar inside you, there must be a hell lot of grammar for French and English speaker in the Polish language. And Swahili seems to suit you really nice. Good luck with the Little Prince. I have just started my Swedish for the Assimil experiment. The scandinavian languages are really beautiful! And inspired by you, I intend to really do one lesson a day, till the 100th lesson of the active wave! (first temptation came today, the first lesson was really easy, I had the urge to go right to the next one but I want to go properly, to prevent burning out eventually.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4955 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 84 of 94 14 November 2012 at 7:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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vermillion, for noen grunn er øvelser til i dags leksjon (78) ikke registrert på Assimils lydfilen. Er det sant for alle de gjenværende leksjonene?
vermillion, pour une raison quelconque les exercises de la leçon d'aujourd'hui d'Assimil (la quatre-vingt-dix-huitième) ne sont guère enregistrés dans le fichier sonore. Est-ce que c'est bien le cas pour toutes les leçons qui restent? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4467 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 85 of 94 14 November 2012 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Thanks for the advice. I think this is indeed the most sensible option. I guess I'll still learn them with the idea that they're related, as more connexions are more likely to help me remember. I'm really having a hard time remembering the vocabulary, but I think that may be because I'm only following Assimil. I've more material for later, and I hope more exposure will simply make things stick.
"YOU" are sick! But indeed, difficult not to imagine the reason for this curiosity... :)
Thanks for your kind words, that's very nice to read! And I'm very happy to read that it inspired you to follow a wiser track. How is it going along? I didn't have much time to follow logs lately unfortunately...
Dessvere har du gjettet... fra leksjon 78 av finnes det ikke lenger øvelser på lydfilene. Jeg tror at grunnen er at leksjoner blir lenger og det kunne ikke holder på 4 CDer. Jeg synes det er ikke noe problem, for jeg foretrekker å ha lenger leksjoner enn øvelser med lyd... (ouch, det er den første gangen jeg skriver på norsk... du får unnskylde mine feil..) Edited by vermillon on 14 November 2012 at 11:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4798 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 86 of 94 15 November 2012 at 12:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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It's going quite well. But I had to move today's lesson to tommorrow. My Swedish learning
is a secret and today, I just had no time alone at home to use. Other than that, I am quite sticking to one lesson-one day plan but it is a bit painful. I'd like to progress faster. But I am as well still resisting the urge to open a grammar book and study all the points covered so far to more detail, which is good :-). The pronunciation is strange. I had done the fsi pronunciation lesson long time ago, I have no major problem with repeating after the audio or reading aloud a bit after having heard it, I say the words quite correctly but I still feel I miss something. Perhaps the "melody"? Have you encountred something like that in Norwegian? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4467 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 87 of 94 15 November 2012 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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This is the penultimate report I will write for the passive wave, as I've reached lesson 91 in all three languages. I expect next report (lesson 100) to be for Sunday, but as usual I might be delayed. I must say that the end nearing has had quite a negative impact on my implication, as I really want to finish it and re-think my methodology. This clearly shows on the clock, with Swahili taking me an average 13 minutes per lesson (having skipped the active wave during this week).
There's a good reason for that, I believe: I feel that my level doesn't really match that of the lessons anymore for Swahili and Polish. I hope I'm not being dishonest by putting some of the blame on the method, but by now I can make a pre-conclusion: I think Assimil can be quite good at dealing with grammar - Swahili is really well explained - and it can also be average, as I've found was the case(!) for Polish: explanations come in the notes, revision lessons don't seem to focus on anything special and the layout is very unclear (where are the declension "tables"?), and I feel that I still don't know much about the declensions themselves (I'm completely ok with the cases and their usage). As for the vocabulary, there's not much surprise: the closer the language to something you already know, the easier it is: Remembering Swahili and Polish vocabulary is still very painful, and I am failing more and more cards, while Norwegian seems to pose no problem at all (thanks to German, mainly). I believe these two items can be dealt with during the rest of the active wave, especially if supplemented by a second active wave ("the third wave") and by adding some more material: I have Routledge's Essential Polish Grammar to try to make more sense of Polish, and for vocabulary I'll try to give myself some exposure to the languages (music, news, children stories). I'll continue until lesson 100 and then will try to spend a few days thinking of how to study until the end of the year. It's likely that if I decide to do a third wave, I'll add German in the process, as I had studied it until lesson 100 but hadn't continued the active wave past that point. As I've already written that much, the following sections merely indicate the time spent and a few short comments. Assimil Adventure - Week 12 -Egyptian Hieroglyphs : no lesson : 0m Stopped. -Latin : no lesson : 0m Stopped. -Norwegian lessons 85 to 91 : 5h30 Same comment as last week. Anki is helping me a lot in acquiring the knowledge of the vocabulary, syntax, idioms and prepositions, and I'm definitely going to apply the same principle to German, as I believe I would get the same results (due to the fact that they're similar). The lessons are still introducing huge loads of vocabulary and idioms, and the next few weeks I'm going to finish adding all the lessons to Anki (currently at lesson 50). I expect that by the time I get all this mature, I'll be quite comfortable expressing myself about daily topics (is that B1? I'm excluding listening comprehension here), which is quite encouraging. I haven't read many articles using my software this week, as I've mostly spent my time making it more robust and adding a few simple features. It still lacks an important key feature to be "good" in my opinion: it doesn't separate compound words (fedrelandskjærlighet should be 2 words I believe... or at least it makes no sense to consider it's not understandable when you know fedreland and kjærlighet). Of course there are other things like improving cognate detection, and improving the scoring function, but that's acceptable for now: I can read Norwegian articles and that's the main point of this software. Oh, and if you're reading this and read Norwegian news online, I'd gladly hear about what sources you use for that. I'm reading from Aftenposten, Dagbladet and Klartale at the moment. -Polish : lessons 85 to 91 : 2h05 I think I've said it all in the introduction. Here I feel that Anki is not bringing AT ALL the same benefits as Norwegian, and I'm failing an awful amount of cards (where Norwegian is close to 100% success). Perhaps it is not the right approach, and perhaps I'll have to use other textbooks and work at a slower pace to get some knowledge of Polish. -Swahili : lessons 85 to 91 : 1h35 Considering the very limited amount of time spent on Swahili this week, I don't have much to say. There were still new grammatical items, apparently completing the list of verb suffixes. I feel completely ok with the grammar, and only the vocabulary is giving me a hard time. I believe I need to get a lot more exposure to the words I want to learn, but the verb morphology is so complex that you can't just google your infinitive and find results: I either need a dictionary with lots of examples, or to get some lemmatizer for Swahili (which would be ideal). -Indonesian : no lesson : 0m Stopped. A final note: See you on Sunday! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5321 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 88 of 94 15 November 2012 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Yeah, if you can express yourself comfortably about daily life, that's probably about B1. The DELF B1 sample exams, for instance, include a role-playing conversation where you need to apologize to a police officer for having parked in the wrong spot. The A2 exams tend to be more along the lines of ordering dinner and telling the waiter where you come from, and the actual topics on the real exam are far more predictable. It's interesting that out of 6 Assimil courses, you're on track to reach B1 in a single language, and that's going to require overlearning the material with help from Anki. This is certainly consistent with my experience (weak A2 in French with no overlearning). Assimil's claims that their beginner courses will take you to B2 are pretty ridiculous, and I'm surprised that no French government agency has ever called them on it. This doesn't mean that I don't love Assimil courses. I'd just like to see more truth in advertising. (And even there, Assimil is vastly better than some Pimsleur distributors.) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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