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Assimil Experiment Group Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4488 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 49 of 344 06 November 2012 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah but you can also phrase questions like Est-ce que c'est vrai que vous avez acheté cette voiture? Est-ce que an sich can be used as a way to politen a request as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chang He Newbie United States Joined 4225 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French | Message 50 of 344 06 November 2012 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I started "French without Toil" at the beginning of the week, and "New French with Ease" on Nov 1st. So far, I'm
actually liking the old-school "French without Toil" more than I expected. The sing-song intonation actually makes the sounds and stresses stick better, much like "baby-talk" does for native speakers I assume. Each lesson is taking about 15-20 minutes apiece, so for now, I'm sticking with the plan to do both, rather than try to do more than one lesson in one or the other per day. If I get busier, I may have to drop one, but I'll leave the decision for later. Bonne chance, everyone. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5474 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 51 of 344 06 November 2012 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Norwegisch ohne Mühe
Day 2: 3 November 2012 Did lesson 3 today, and restrained myself from going straight on to lesson 4. The pronunciation is awfully charming, although I'm having trouble differentiating the vowels in "er" and "har" when I pronounce them (they both come out sounding like the vowel in the English word "are"). When I listen I can tell the difference between them, but when speaking myself I can't reliably produce it. I assume this is something that will just come from practice, like when I learned to pronounce German "e" and "ä" differently. Days 3-4: 4-5 November 2012 For some reason I found lesson 4 quite difficult, although lesson 5 returned to being easy and fun. Looking back on it now, the problem seems obvious: for lesson 4 I didn't have access to my "Norwegisch ohne Mühe" hardcover book and used my "Le norvégien sans peine" PDF instead, plus I did the lesson in a busy café filled with people. The combination of distracting café-goers around me and being unable to set my brain entirely into Germanic mode (as I do when I'm learning Norwegian through German) added up to confuse me during lesson 4. I looked at it again the next day and had no problems. In lesson 5, the definite article trick was introduced: you add it on to the end of the noun, almost like a suffix, instead of putting it out in front. Very cool. This is the first language I've studied that does that. With this lesson, I also felt I was getting a bit more confident about the pronunciation. Day 5: 6 November 2012 I couldn't restrain myself: today I did lessons 6 and 7. Lesson 7, the first review lesson, was quite simple, so I just wanted to get to it so I could offically say I've completed my first 7 lessons of Assimil. Today I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of the sentence prosody a little bit. Reading descriptions rarely helps me in regards to stuff like that; I find that no description can communicate as accurately exactly what the speakers are doing, so I prefer to just listen to them and imitate. The basic idea (simplified) is that the voice rises a bit at the end of multi-syllable words. It produces a lovely melodic effect. Norwegian is being quite easy and fun so far. I do find that "er" and "ar" still both sound virtually identical to the English word "are", so despite the book telling me to pronounce it like the German "ä", I'm going to imitate the speakers instead. Better to go ahead and trust the natives on this one, I think. Edited by Jinx on 06 November 2012 at 9:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vārds Bilingual Diglot Newbie Latvia Joined 4691 days ago 24 posts - 41 votes Speaks: Russian*, Latvian* Studies: German | Message 52 of 344 06 November 2012 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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French withe Ease.
Completed first 7 lessons. At this moment I'm still not able to understand new lesson when listening for the first time. Some words here and there, but thats it. Pronunciation is still killing me. After every lesson my throat feels like swollen - those French "r" and nasal sounds are quite hard. Each lesson takes me about 25..30 minutes. I was thinking about doing scriptorium, but right now I'm just too tired after those 25..30 minutes. Next post after lesson 14. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6378 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 53 of 344 07 November 2012 at 12:05am | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe an important thing is that the natives will pronounce it the way they *think* they pronounce it, and then adjust to fine-tune it? Learners are more aware of what they 'really' say in a foreign language, because we know from the beginning that it doesn't always sound like it's supposed to. Edited by Serpent on 07 November 2012 at 12:07am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marishka Newbie United States Joined 5029 days ago 25 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Dutch | Message 54 of 344 07 November 2012 at 9:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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Dutch With Ease I have completed the first seven lessons (28 pages) of Dutch With Ease, and have settled into a rhythm of study that is working well for me. I was not a happy camper when I first saw the plethora of sentence structure exercises aka substitution drills in Dutch With Ease, but I have had a change of heart after a week of doing them. Doing these drills have helped me get past the feeling of having a mouth full of marbles when I attempt to speak Dutch. That is not to say that Dutch words are now flowing effortlessly from my mouth! I still stumble a bit over some of the words and my accent is niet heel goed, but that will hopefully improve with time. Doing the sentence structure exercises has also shown me that even in the earliest stage of learning Dutch I can construct my own sentences and that there is already so much I can say. There are seven substitution drills in the first seven lessons containing a total of 394 different sentences! Something else I do each day is to take dictation from the audio. I was surprised by how many spelling errors I made at first! The best thing about this practice is that after typing the dialogs I have an almost photographic memory of the material. My feeling that I am on the right track with this was reinforced when I read the following suggestion in Dutch With Ease at the end of lesson 7: Whenever you have a little time, practice writing Dutch sentences. After completing a lesson, which includes reading the lesson, listening to, repeating and shadowing the dialogs, reading the grammar footnotes, doing the exercises and taking dictation from the audio, I take my dog for a walk. While enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, I practice what I have learned by making up my own conversations in Dutch, using the sentence structures and vocabulary I have learned. Fortunately, I live out in the country, so there is no one around to wonder why on earth I am talking to myself! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4947 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 55 of 344 07 November 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Russian has become a living language for me, thanks to Assimil's Il nuovo russo senza sforzo. I'm pretty much used to cyrillic handwriting, and it's a unique feeling to write cursively in a new alphabet. It's not the same as copying down Chinese characters or the Georgian alphabet. It seems like I'm really becoming part of this culture. i'm still benefiting from my previous attempts to learn Russian, and conjugation also starts to make more sense.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4686 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 56 of 344 07 November 2012 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Italienisch ohne Mühe heute
I did the first lessons today. First look: "What twenty lines?", second look: "Oh, we could have put some of them together." I mean do you really need a single line to explain: "Pronto!" (1), "Chi e?" (5) or "Sono Marco." (6) when the person who says them says other short things too? Text-wise I found it very easy, well, first lesson and it's entitled "At the telephone" so what will you say... Verb-wise it covers the present tense of essere. Pronunciation doesn't seem to be that difficult yet (maybe the Italian r), but it is nice to look at the text in the first lesson and have an idea how to pronounce it for a change... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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