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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5322 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 94 19 August 2012 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I've heard Egyptian seems somewhat familiar to Arabic speakers—there are some familiar roots, a few grammatical similarities, and so on, besides the obvious stuff like the feminine -t ending. (Not that I know any Arabic.)
Interesting. I'm having no real problems using a French base for Egyptian. In fact, I barely even notice that it's in French most of the time. There is one interesting difference, though—my Egyptian is much less tightly linked to my French than my French is to my English. Is this because French is my L2? Is this because Egyptian differs more from French than French differs from English? Or is it because I'm less inclined to translate these days? @vermillon, watch out for the active wave. I did New French with Ease at 20 minutes/day, but ended up needing 40 (or sometimes 60) to deal with both waves at once. Other people who put lots of effort into the passive wave only needed a few minutes for the active wave. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4468 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 10 of 94 19 August 2012 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Thanks for this warning, that sounds like something I should pay attention to, and perhaps something that should make me not decide to take on a seventh language... @emk, what did you do in this active wave to make it so long? Assimil suggests it should take 5mn, so adding 20-40mn as you say is a bit worrying. Did you write down everything? How did you tackle idioms?
Were you trying to stick to those 20 minutes? Does that mean you were not doing one lesson a day, but possibly less or more? I feel doing full lessons is an absolute requirement for me, as it gives me the structure needed to go on. With language methods which have very long lessons (let's say, 1h30-2h), I really feel frustrated not being able to complete the lesson, and I feel I didn't really work enough if I close the book with a lesson un-finished. I believe that's one of the good things with Assimil, the lessons are manageable and seem to take between 20-30mn, probably the length of my attention span. By the way, what were those six languages?
Not sure, but it seems to me that you can draw far less parallels between French and Hieroglyphs than French and English... the sentence structure is not the same, the grammar is completely different, there are no transparent words. So you need to think in Egyptian, somehow. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4799 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 11 of 94 19 August 2012 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Vermillon, you are crazy :-D and it sounds exciting. I wish you enough energy and
persistence to get this Experiment to a good end. I have tried two assimils at once and it was too much for me but I had little free time and a lot of other things on my plate by than. So, even if you finish "just" some of these, you will be my hero. P.S. is there any "official" list of htlal heroes? No? There should be one. A stickied topic with fancy design and motivational stories. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6019 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 12 of 94 20 August 2012 at 5:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Wow! I'm not sure if you are a masochist, crazy or both! What an undertaking! I'll definitely be following your
progress! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4679 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 13 of 94 20 August 2012 at 7:25am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Another vote for crazy! And I mean that as the highest praise. I'll be following your progress with pleasure.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6229 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 94 20 August 2012 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
This seems to be my old log. Time flies. I was doing exactly one lesson a day, and simply repeating it more times as time allowed. My assimil technique at that time was to listen to the lesson over and over, 'shadowing' it on some of the passes. My 'shadowing' method of the time was to repeat at exactly the same time as the recording, trying to mimic the pronunciation as closely as possible. The languages: "Italian, German, French, Persian, Dutch, and Esperanto, with Assimil for all but the last". I was using a French base for Persian - the only language on the list without a primarily Romance/Germanic vocabulary stock, and my French was certainly weaker back then. I did have Assimil Esperanto, but I can't stand the pronunciation of the speakers, and think it's one of their poorer courses in terms of content, too. I was already 'fluent' in Italian at that point, but expressed myself in quite a translated-from-English way, so was using Assimil to learn to sound more Italian. I didn't come out of the challenge with much. I'd actually entirely forgotten about that chunk of Esperanto study; it gave me no communicative ability whatsoever a few months later, when I had a reason to use Esperanto and finally decided to learn it properly, which I did in about the same number of weeks - but this time more intensively, and to fluency. Edited by Volte on 20 August 2012 at 12:30pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5322 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 94 20 August 2012 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I pretty consistently spent 20 minutes/day on the active wave, and I didn't always do the fill-in-the-blank exercises. My technique mostly mostly variations on L/R: listening and read in various combinations until I could understand the spoken lesson fairly well. Call it 8–12 reps. The active wave was OK in the beginning, but I eventually started struggling. I often had no chance of completely translating the lessons into French from 50-day-old memory, so I had to read and listen to them a couple of times before attempting the translation. If I got hit by a bad passive and active lesson on the same day, this could occasionally add up to 60 minutes before I could get a really good handle on stuff. But 40 minutes was typical during the combined waves. Despite the my occasional struggles with the active wave, it all turned out fine in the end. Assimil is actually pretty robust. And there are definitely people who make it through the active wave in 5 minutes per day. A big chunk of my problem comes from sentences like:
Assimil is trying to teach "ḫt=s", "mi" and "n(j)" here, and they continue to reinforce those in later lessons. The words "inm" and "nšm.t" appear to be disposable content words, and Assimil doesn't reinforce them anytime soon. (Basically, I think that Assimil actually has a built-in spaced repetition algorithm, which is selectively applied to important words.) These rare words can make the active wave a bit tricky, and force you to make up new rules as you go along. Have you completed any Assimil courses before? If so, which were they, and how did they go? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4468 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 16 of 94 20 August 2012 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
@Cavesa, liddytime & kanewai: thanks a lot! I hope I won't need that extra bit of motivation, but it's always nice to have people to share with. Hopefully I'll finish all of them, Cavesa!
Thanks, I'll definitely read that over the next few days, the beginning really sounds like you were subject to massive wanderlust :)
I'm trying to do that as well, but for several languages (Norwegian mostly) it seems completely impossible to me to go as fast as the speaker... they've had the good idea to take people with different accents, but one of them speaks very fast and in such a slurred way...
No interference from French/Italian nor Dutch/German? I would be quite worried about the last two... Or perhaps it helped? German/English is already helping me quite a bit in Norwegian.
Well, once again, not very auspicious, but I hope I'll be able to put your comments and log to good use!
Ah, thanks for that! I had that strange feeling, but now that you've worded it it appears obvious. In the hieroglyph one they even go as far as having this "basic vocabulary" section, which is good but terribly annoying when you want to look up the hieroglyphs of the non-basic vocabulary... Indeed, I cannot hope to remember these rare words in 50 days... What kind of rules did you make up to fight against that? I think it could be wise to plan that in advance so that I avoid crashing too hard into the active phase wall...
The only Assimil I've used before was German, but I didn't do it the way it was supposed to: the first 50 lessons in 7 days (not a beginner..) and then going at 1 lesson a day and doing the active phase, but once reaching the 100th lesson in the passive wave, I have stopped... so effectively my active wave consisted only of the 50 lessons that I had studied in the last 7 to 50 days (as time went). So this will be my first real contact with Assimil, I suppose. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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