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Assimil Adventure: 6 languages at a time

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tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
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China
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Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans
Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 49 of 94
11 September 2012 at 5:30pm | IP Logged 
A note regarding Latin (the only language on your list I have studied to any meaningful
level) - the passive voice could possibly be used (but check if you are dealing with a
deponens first, there's quite a few of those) to facilitate dropping a subject or object.
Latin's grammatical construction makes it easy for the language to drop parts of the
sentence which can simply be expressed by using a passive voice form of the verb.

My knowledge of the language is fragmental, because I have not touched this language for
seven years now, but I do remember translating quite a bit of it. Latin writers are
masters at constructing sentences using building blocks completely counterintuitively
when compared to English and even French.
1 person has voted this message useful



Kerrie
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Kerrie2
Joined 5185 days ago
1232 posts - 1740 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 50 of 94
11 September 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged 
vermillon wrote:

-Swahili : lessons 36 to 42 : 3h
As usual, I've found the vocabulary a real pain, and this resulted in the post from a few days ago. Fortunately, it turned out I was quite tired and perhaps it was a particularly bad lesson. I've read your comments, and perhaps I was indeed like the kid falling off his bike (though reading my log, the vocabulary & boring dialog issue has been there for several weeks now, so it's more the kid covered in blood here). I tried to think of Expugnator's comment as well, as a way to see Assimil in an optimistic way: vocabulary acquisition can come later and Assimil is probably more about learning how the language works.

Anyway, I still decided to tackle the problem, and this will be a fight to death: I've started an Anki deck two days ago, and I'll try to add all the vocabulary I encounter. Adding two lessons a day should be enough to quickly get me back on track: I add the vocabulary from the day's lesson, as well as that from lesson 1,2,3...

The first day I've done it took me 1h to complete the lesson instead of 25-60 usually, but it's fine because I felt so satisfied doing it: first, it made me discover a Swahili dictionary (had not looked for one), and in this dictionary they return a lot of words based on the root you've entered, which made me realize how much affixation Swahili could use. That really boosted up my mood, as Assimil had not really touched the topic, and the perspective of growing vocabulary by combination is something that I really enjoy (in Esperanto). The second day I could already feel that some verbs that had never stuck before suddenly had stuck after I had added them to Anki. I'll follow up on that, but I think I've found a solution to my vocabulary problem here!


I have been using Anki with the Turkish course, too. I still can't come up with the Turkish words, but I can recognized them, which is good enough for me (right now). Instead of entering individual words, though, I am entering each line of dialog as one Anki card. It seems a lot simpler this way, so I don't have to look up root words, classes, etc. Plus, then I feel like I'm keeping in the spirit of learning through assimilation. It has definitely helped me remember vocabulary.
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vermillon
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
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602 posts - 1042 votes 
Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin
Studies: Japanese, German

 
 Message 51 of 94
13 September 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged 
tarvos wrote:
A note regarding Latin (the only language on your list I have studied to any eaningful
level) - the passive voice could possibly be used (but check if you are dealing with a deponens first, there's quite a few of those) to facilitate dropping a subject or object. Latin's grammatical construction makes it easy for the language to drop parts of the sentence which can simply be expressed by using a passive voice form of the verb.


I didn't have the time to check yet. I think the example that stroke me wasn't deponent (but I may not have a great "feeling" for it yet, so I'll check), but indeed it could be some dropping. As soon as I get time to have a look at it I'll report here.

Kerrie wrote:
I have been using Anki with the Turkish course, too. I still can't come up with the Turkish words, but I can recognized them, which is good enough for me (right now). Instead of entering individual words, though, I am entering each line of dialog as one Anki card. It seems a lot simpler this way, so I don't have to look up root words, classes, etc. Plus, then I feel like I'm keeping in the spirit of learning through assimilation. It has definitely helped me remember vocabulary.


Here the problem is I couldn't even recognize them, sometimes not even realise that these were words that I had seen before, perhaps because in a Swahili verb, there's usually >50% of the letters that are part of the affixation. For instance, "Give me some money" would be "Unipe pesa", in which "unipe" contains the idea of giving only in the letter "-p-" (the rest being u-=you -ni-=me -e=subjonctive). Don't know if that's clear, but the amount of letters/sounds covering the root can be quite small and it makes vocabulary more difficult to retain for me.
I don't really like sentence cards, because they take more time and in the past they made me give up on Mandarin. At least word cards can be processed quickly, and even if it goes out of the spirit of Assimil, it's probably going to help me. :)


~~
Bad day yesterday, didn't study at all, which is the first day in around a month and a half I've missed. I'm not very happy with it, but I don't think I'll try to catch up, and rather simply ignore that day, as otherwise I may burn out trying to catch up for all of my languages. I'm still quite busy and it should change only next week normally.
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emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5322 days ago
2615 posts - 8806 votes 
Speaks: English*, FrenchB2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 52 of 94
13 September 2012 at 4:11pm | IP Logged 
vermillon wrote:
I have tried the "signes de base" however, but just tried (lack of
time again). It has proved a bit frustrating, as out of the fifteen or so that I've
tried, I don't think I had seen more than 3-4, so if those are supposed to be the most
common, then Assimil failed to show them to me unfortunately.


The list of biliterals in my deck shows up all over the web, typically with a few
additions and deletions. I basically cross-checked several lists and took the signs
which seemed to appear on everybody's list.

Here's a relatively short version of
the biliteral list.

(My list of triliterals is very short in comparison, because it seemed that
there were a couple dozen essential triliterals and then a fairly steep drop-off, so I
went this short
list.)

There's a couple of different things which might be going on with the biliteral list:

1) My list of biliterals might be too large. It's possible that some of these signs are
considerably rarer than others. For an analogy, consider the 2000-odd jōyō
kanji, of which about 200 are supposedly pretty rare. It may be that the common
lists of biliterals include similar cruft.

2) Assimil may only teach some of the common biliterals, or it may teach them slowly
over the entire course.

3) The list of common biliterals may be "folklore" of dubious accuracy, handed down
from one generation to the next.

The only thing I can say in defense of my list is that it has very high overlap with
all the other lists I've run across. Whether this has any bearing on actual Egyptian
texts is another matter.

And in any case, standard Anki doctrine applies: please use Suspend Card and
Delete Card. If a card annoys you, or makes you groan, or you can't see the point, get
rid of it.
2 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 53 of 94
13 September 2012 at 4:57pm | IP Logged 
Kerrie wrote:
I have been using Anki with the Turkish course, too. I still can't come
up with the Turkish words, but I can recognized them, which is good enough for me
(right now). Instead of entering individual words, though, I am entering each line of
dialog as one Anki card. It seems a lot simpler this way, so I don't have to look up
root words, classes, etc. Plus, then I feel like I'm keeping in the spirit of learning
through assimilation. It has definitely helped me remember vocabulary.


This is how I built the Assimil Anki deck for Egyptian: I took the dialogs and the
exercises, and I entered entire sentences in hieroglyphs with transliterations and
translations. So my Anki cards work exactly like the passive wave.

My goal was to mimic Assimil's method (which I like) and not to review large lists of
vocabulary. I think that working with lots of complete sentences is especially
important for Egyptian, because the grammar is very different from Indo-European
languages, and it's worth getting lots of practice.
1 person has voted this message useful



Kerrie
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Kerrie2
Joined 5185 days ago
1232 posts - 1740 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 54 of 94
17 September 2012 at 12:31am | IP Logged 
vermillon wrote:
Bad day yesterday, didn't study at all, which is the first day in around a month and a half I've missed. I'm not very happy with it, but I don't think I'll try to catch up, and rather simply ignore that day, as otherwise I may burn out trying to catch up for all of my languages. I'm still quite busy and it should change only next week normally.

I hope things are back to normal soon. =)

vermillon wrote:

Kerrie wrote:
I have been using Anki with the Turkish course, too... Instead of entering individual words, though, I am entering each line of dialog as one Anki card...


Here the problem is I couldn't even recognize them, sometimes not even realise that these were words that I had seen before, perhaps because in a Swahili verb, there's usually >50% of the letters that are part of the affixation. For instance, "Give me some money" would be "Unipe pesa", in which "unipe" contains the idea of giving only in the letter "-p-" (the rest being u-=you -ni-=me -e=subjonctive). Don't know if that's clear, but the amount of letters/sounds covering the root can be quite small and it makes vocabulary more difficult to retain for me.
I don't really like sentence cards, because they take more time and in the past they made me give up on Mandarin. At least word cards can be processed quickly, and even if it goes out of the spirit of Assimil, it's probably going to help me. :)


Turkish works a lot like that. Since you're a lot further along in the passive stage, the grammar part isn't as much of an issue. I am still working out the basic grammar, but it's similar to what you describe. Basically you build entire ideas into words. After the first 30-40 lessons and I have a better grasp on the grammar, I anticipate that I will only choose words, too. =)

Good luck with the active phase coming up. It makes me tired just thinking about it. =)
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 55 of 94
20 September 2012 at 1:35pm | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
There's a couple of different things which might be going on with the biliteral list:

1) My list of biliterals might be too large. It's possible that some of these signs are considerably rarer than others. For an analogy, consider the 2000-odd jōyō kanji, of which about 200 are supposedly pretty rare. It may be that the common lists of biliterals include similar cruft.

2) Assimil may only teach some of the common biliterals, or it may teach them slowly over the entire course.

3) The list of common biliterals may be "folklore" of dubious accuracy, handed down from one generation to the next.

The only thing I can say in defense of my list is that it has very high overlap with all the other lists I've run across. Whether this has any bearing on actual Egyptian texts is another matter.

And in any case, standard Anki doctrine applies: please use Suspend Card and Delete Card. If a card annoys you, or makes you groan, or you can't see the point, get rid of it.


Thanks for your explanation. I guess the extra difficulty of building a list of common hieroglyphs is that you can't simply parse text and count, right? If I'm correct, all the available hieroglyphic texts are sort of images, or at least not analysable as a list of characters? As a side question (and if I'm correct for the first few points), would you be interested in building an OCR program for hieroglyphs? Something that would take as input an image with hieroglyphs and that would output a string of single hieroglyphs, organized on a line. I suppose it'd be "relatively" easy to do and probably get a rather good recognition rate. I'm looking for some programming project these days, so I may put my head into that, if you're interested, drop me a line.

Apart from that, because my very busy schedule recently, I didn't have the time to continue much with the Anki deck, as I had problems with Ankidroid displaying them (at least sometimes?).

emk wrote:
This is how I built the Assimil Anki deck for Egyptian: I took the dialogs and the exercises, and I entered entire sentences in hieroglyphs with transliterations and translations. So my Anki cards work exactly like the passive wave.

My goal was to mimic Assimil's method (which I like) and not to review large lists of vocabulary. I think that working with lots of complete sentences is especially important for Egyptian, because the grammar is very different from Indo-European languages, and it's worth getting lots of practice.


I believe this is a very sensible reasoning. I'm adding words for Indonesian and Swahili mostly because the grammar is not so hard, and it's then faster for now to support my progress through the book. When I'm done studying, I can probably enter the content of all the books, and study that to keep all this fresh in my memory.

Kerrie wrote:
I hope things are back to normal soon. =)

Thanks. I've skipped 2 full days, and the feeling of always having to catch up has then disappeared. Of course I want to avoid skipping days as much as I can, but here it was a reasonable choice I believe. I may try to switch to a "7 lessons per day" rhythm, in order to do a full week in 6 days (and finish mid-December instead of late-December), but that'll depend on my availability.

vermillon wrote:
Turkish works a lot like that. Since you're a lot further along in the passive stage, the grammar part isn't as much of an issue. I am still working out the basic grammar, but it's similar to what you describe. Basically you build entire ideas into words. After the first 30-40 lessons and I have a better grasp on the grammar, I anticipate that I will only choose words, too. =)

Good luck with the active phase coming up. It makes me tired just thinking about it. =)


Ahah, well, I'm not too worried about it. I've started it for 4 languages and it's going very well I believe. As for sentences vs words, I use words mostly as a support, in order not to always feel blocked by the vocabulary I've forgotten from past lessons. I expect to assimilate the language with Assimil, but I'm less convinced by their ability to make me assimilate the vocabulary. Not a big deal, Anki takes care of it.
1 person has voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4497 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 56 of 94
20 September 2012 at 1:58pm | IP Logged 
I don't think it's so problematic to add Anki anyways. The real crux is here that Assimil
is simply a book which teaches you the necessary vocabulary (and adding in repetitions
for common vocabulary). The eventual amount of time it takes to sink in is different for
everyone anyway. Overlearning it by thumping it through a stream of Anki reviews, in
whatever format, does help it stick.


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