Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Assimil Experiment Group Log

  Tags: Assimil
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
344 messages over 43 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 18 ... 42 43 Next >>
Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 137 of 344
06 December 2012 at 9:39pm | IP Logged 
I don't :P
and thanks for the link...i prefer to read about Brazilian football in Portuguese though:P
1 person has voted this message useful



BartoG
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
confession
Joined 5207 days ago

292 posts - 818 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek

 
 Message 138 of 344
07 December 2012 at 12:01am | IP Logged 
L'Egyptien

I alluded last time to struggles hitting a lot of people including kanewai. The retention just wasn't there. I wouldn't care about this if I could still stumble through the exercises, but I couldn't. So I retrenched. This week, I returned to week 2 and I have been doing a daily Scriptorium exercise for the full text of each chapter, in Egyptian hieroglyphic. This is actually the way I worked through Hayes' Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts. I'm now finding things sticking better. In particular, I've found that I can look at the notebook where I'm doing the Scriptorium exercise and sight read what I've written. I had hoped to be past "nefer hentiche pen" (This garden is beautiful) and "iw-wn rem em mw" (There is a fish in the water) by now. That said, the structures at least have started to sink in without a lot of explicit grammar study and the writing is coming not by virtue of careful penmanship exercises repeated but by writing the language down to say things, so in that sense it's still Assimil. It makes me wonder, though, if Assimil shouldn't use slightly different directions for languages you're learning to read than those you learn to speak.
1 person has voted this message useful



kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4649 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 139 of 344
07 December 2012 at 1:16am | IP Logged 
I retrenched too! Just a day ... I spent an hour yesterday transcribing the noun and verb
charts, and copying some of the exercises. I didn't try and memorize them, but writing
them out helped imprint some of it a bit better. Today's lesson was much easier in that I
can now recognize a few more patterns in the dialogues.

I think I'll work in a weekly scriptorum session too. I want to follow the 'method' as
closely as possible, but we also all need to find out what adjustments we need to make it
work.
1 person has voted this message useful



Marishka
Newbie
United States
Joined 5008 days ago

25 posts - 56 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch

 
 Message 140 of 344
07 December 2012 at 3:49am | IP Logged 

Dutch With Ease Update

Lessons 29-35

Finding enough time for my Assimil project continued to be a problem this past week, so I tried adding an extra day to my study schedule. Instead of doing 7 lessons in 7 days, I did 7 lessons in 8 days.

I worked out great! I was able to get everything done, even the drills--all 667 sentences. And by taking dictation from the audio again, I retained so much more than I did on the previous group of lessons.

There's just one problem. In addition to all the activities that make up each lesson--listening, reading, repeating aloud, writing the sentences, and doing the exercises and drills--the instructions this week said to:

  • Keep listening to former lessons whenever you have the opportunity.
  • Read over the neuter nouns of each lesson as often as you can.
  • Go back over the expressions in previous review lessons regularly. They are important because they illustrate idiomatic characteristics of the language.

Oh dear. I have dutifully added all the neuter nouns to my list as they have appeared in the lessons, but have not spent any time reading over that list. And I have barely had time to finish the lessons at hand, so I haven't revisited the audio or texts from any of the previous lessons.

What to do? Today I printed a copy of all the neuter nouns from the first 35 lessons. I watch a 30-minute news broadcast every evening, so I'm going to mute the sound during commercials and use that time to memorize these neuter nouns before the second wave starts in two weeks.

And speaking of the second wave, I've decided to split the passive and active lessons, doing a passive lesson one day and the corresponding active lesson the next day. That way, on active lesson days, besides doing the English-to-Dutch translations, I'll have time to do a thorough review of each lesson, paying close attention to things like the idiomatic expressions. I may even do a second round of the drills. Or not. :-)





1 person has voted this message useful



melkior79
Newbie
Japan
Joined 4391 days ago

16 posts - 31 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Latin, French

 
 Message 141 of 344
07 December 2012 at 12:05pm | IP Logged 
New French With Ease Day 27 Lesson 23

I had a really busy week last week and missed 4 days of Assimil and am kicking myself.
I got back on the horse. I don't have time to catch up now so I will continue the pace of one lesson per day. I don't think I will miss anymore during the challenge now as the busiest part of my schedule if over.

I am following the method I set out before.

I get my pen out a bit more and try jotting down notes or sentence constructions as I come across them. These notes are not systematic, they are just scribblings.

Anyway, I like many others am feeling restricted by this method but I believe that Assimil works and patience and daily study are the keys.

Whilst I wanted to stick to just 30 minutes per day (up until now I have used a timer)
I am now going to allow myself to listen to past lessons over and over during "dead time" in the day. Ie on the bus or train or walking to work.

I too feel frustrated by limiting the techniques and time of study but that was the point of the experiment to me. Plus I don't really have time to do more than 30-40 mins per day.

Plus the book calls for memorization of vocabulary items. This however is not possible to if I study a lesson per day and stick to a 30 minute time limit.

Still I will focus more on "getting a feel" for the language and seeing how the English and French text correspond so my brain can map French out..

I hope to persevere in this experiment

Everyone
Bon Chance

2 persons have voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4467 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 142 of 344
07 December 2012 at 1:44pm | IP Logged 
Le Breton sans Peine (until lesson 35)

What I have learned so far is that the first mutation is really popular. It's not just
triggered by articles but also by half the prepositions, possessives and verbal
particles: and it can make words a little hard to understand sometimes just because
you're getting c'h instead of g, g instead of k, v instead of m, etc. Pretty much
everything forces a mutation, which also means dictionaries are nigh-on useless because
the basic form is practically never found in a text thanks to those mutations.

Oh well, c'est la vie, hein?

Furthermore I have learned to conjugate the verb "to have" in full in the present
tense, I can conjugate pretty much all verbs in the present tense, the habitual tense,
a sort of passé composé form, the progressive tense, and that's it. Time to learn some
more tenses such as a future or an imperfect or a conditional. I know they exist, let's
do this.

Oh I can form imperatives too.

Furthermore I have learned how to use the particle -se which is an epithet indicating
this or that. It's the only thing you use for demonstratives, so, in true Breton
fashion, it's really easy.

That means I am lacking three important grammatical things to speak fluent Breton:

1. Sufficient vocabulary
2. A handle on the other common verbal tenses
3. The mutations that are missing.

Furthermore I don't get any speaking practice, but it's an endangered language. C'est
la vie.

Edited by tarvos on 07 December 2012 at 1:45pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Marishka
Newbie
United States
Joined 5008 days ago

25 posts - 56 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch

 
 Message 143 of 344
09 December 2012 at 5:01am | IP Logged 

I recently ordered a Dutch Complete CD Course from Linguaphone that was on sale for $119. I thought that it might be a good follow-up course to my Assimil course. It arrived a few days ago, and I finally got the chance this afternoon to look it over.

It comes with 3 books and 8 cds. I flipped through the book containing the Dutch transcripts of the audio and was surprised to find that I could easily read most of the dialogs, even though I've only done 37 lessons of Assimil--I'm not even halfway through the course! After completing my Assimil course, this Linguaphone course is going to be a piece of cake.

I'm certainly going to remember this the next time Assimil throws some convoluted sentence at me. You know the kind I mean--by the time you work your way to the end of the sentence, you've forgotten the first part. For anyone currently struggling with anything in Assimil, take heart! You are likely learning more than you think you are.

One of the texts in the Linguaphone course is a book of supplementary exercises, which corresponds to some of the audio on the cds. The introduction explains that the characters in the core material are from Amsterdam, while the scene changes to Belgium in the supplementary material, so those voices mostly have Belgian accents.

When I read that, I realized that I have no idea what kind of accent is used on the Dutch With Ease cds.   Does anyone know? Bueller?

2 persons have voted this message useful



sabotai
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5642 days ago

391 posts - 489 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Japanese, Korean, French

 
 Message 144 of 344
10 December 2012 at 1:05am | IP Logged 
Chinese With Ease

I may be the first casualty as I'm throwing in the towel. It's gotten to the point where it's no longer enjoyable. I feel overwhelmed by the lessons now as I'm just not absorbing enough of each lesson to carry over to the next. Perhaps if I were completely ignoring the characters, and only focused on listening, I'd be making more progress. But I wouldn't want to do that anyway.

I learned what I needed to learn with this experiment. It was a great motivator to get me to do what I had thought of doing for awhile. Good luck to every one else.


4 persons have voted this message useful



This discussion contains 344 messages over 43 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.6563 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.