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Assimil x4 for Film Studies - TAC’14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4048 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 57 of 99 11 March 2014 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Finished my last lesson of Assimil Using French, which was my last English base Assimil course in my routine. Though in the future I might try out Business French, which I think is only available in English base.
Also decided to start a new Assimil course today Olaszul Könnyűszerrel, which is the 2nd generation Italian course from a Hungarian base. So Italian will be the first language I try all 3 generations of Assimil in, so I'm really excited to compare. I was holding off on starting this course for a bit, because my Hungarian isn't as strong as my Russian, and it seems like 2nd gen Assimil courses tend to move the fastest. Still I figure it doesn't hurt to pick up what I can from it, and if it ends up moving too fast, I can always re-start from the beginning later after I've practiced more Italian and Hungarian. I've also updated the first post with 2 new sections. I'm going to rank each Assimil course I complete and write a short review of them. I'm also going to list all the courses and bases I complete in order I completed them in. Part of my decisions in my Assimil routine has been to satisfy my curiosity about different generations of courses I hear discussed here, and also test some ideas about studying multiple languages and utilizing L2->L3 study. I've certainly been learning a lot about my own learning process, and I hope if any of this information is in any way useful to anyone else, I can make it as easy to find and readable as possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 3801 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 58 of 99 12 March 2014 at 12:35am | IP Logged | ||
Congratulations!!!! I just started Assimil Using French. How did you like the course? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4048 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 59 of 99 12 March 2014 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks! I really enjoyed it, and found the content to be a lot more interesting than most basic Assimil courses. The lessons give a lot more information about France, and the various provinces. There's also a lot of lessons on French writers with short excerpts of their work.
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| nancydowns Senior Member United States Joined 3716 days ago 184 posts - 288 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 60 of 99 12 March 2014 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello. I have enjoyed reading your log and am going to begin my own. I am wondering
where and how you got all of your Assimil courses? I have to admit to being a little limited on funds. I did get Spanish with Ease and have really enjoyed it, and I found a used copy of French with Ease. I am trying to mainly learn from free sources online like FSI. I look forward to seeing how you progress! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4048 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 61 of 99 12 March 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can't discuss everything in too much specific detail due to some of the rules of this forum, but there are a few pieces of advice I can offer.
If you want to use the same Assimil course in different language bases, the audio will be nearly identical so long as the courses are the same generation so once you've gotten ahold of the audio from one course, you only need to get the textbook with the different language base. A lot of the older courses, which I tend to prefer, will show up on places like amazon marketplace and abebooks for as little as $5 or $10 sometimes. A lot of the audio for the old courses can be found on various places on the internet if you search around enough for it. Though I'd encourage anyone downloading an old Assimil course to purchase the modern equivalent of the course as well. Assimil doesn't make any money off the old courses anymore, but clearly internet piracy has made a significant hit to their sales and they haven't been able to release as many languages as they have in the past. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nancydowns Senior Member United States Joined 3716 days ago 184 posts - 288 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 62 of 99 12 March 2014 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you! I am definitely not interested in anything illegal! I was amazed at how many
of the books you had and wondered if you had found them at a used place. So thanks for the answer! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4048 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 63 of 99 13 March 2014 at 4:53am | IP Logged | ||
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So I usually try not to type up my initial impressions of courses early on but so far I couldn't resist with Olaszul Könnyűszerrel. I think may I've heard some complaints about this course somewhere being painfully dull and slow (I may have also made this up in my head), but this is kind of exactly what I need for being foolish enough to attempt Hungarian --> Italian. The dialogs so far are borderline FSI drills in how much they re-work the same vocabulary, but I'm actually picking up a ton more about the structure of Italian than from my other two Italian courses, and its not bad review for my Hungarian so far.
Hopefully the course will speed up and get more interesting, but I think I like the initial dialogs being long, simple and re-using the same vocabulary. The really short dialogs that usually begin the 3rd generation courses, are beginner-usable but I find they don't necessarily provide a solid grounding in the language. Also wasn't expecting a whole lot of two-way transparency exchange between Italian and Hungarian, but an English speaker can indeed figure out "chemistry degree" in Italian and Hungarian given the two words side by side. Marco ha una laurea in chimica. - Marconak vegészdiplomája van. (okay you could probably figure it out with just the Italian, but the Hungarian makes it more obvious) I get excited over dumb stuff. Edited by YnEoS on 13 March 2014 at 4:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4048 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 64 of 99 14 March 2014 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Had a bit of a wonderful realization today, though of course more practice is needed to see how it effects my studies in the long term. Going to be a bit of a long explanation as it requires me to go through a bit of my learning history.
For the first time in a while, I picked up one of my old methods that I used a lot last year, which is Shadowing through a number of Assimil lessons without stopping, while looking at the translation of the dialog. This used to be the entirety of my Assimil study, as I was certain is was the absolute quickest way for me to learn a language. However I found that over time I got tired of it, and while I could recite most Assimil dialogs perfectly after doing the process for long enough, I found that successive waves didn't really give me a detailed understanding of the dialogs, I only ever picked up the gist. Though this was in part, because I only shadowed the texts like this, and I usually skipped the grammar explanations and didn't even bother to read the L2 text at a slower pace without the audio. Recently I've switched over to using more intensive study of Assimil using scriptorium, and doing blind shadowing instead for extensive practice. Not that blind shadowing is superior, but it's easier for me to maintain in a daily routine, because I can multitask and move around while doing it, and it's a useful way to reviewing content that's partially known and highlighting content that's unknown. You can even guess words you've forgot when the dialogs have a logical flow, especially if they're set up, punchline joke dialogs. Now I know I've voiced off several times about the difficulty I've been having with Assimil Hungarian. Well, I tried shadowing a big chunk of the course with the text today, and it seemed to be remarkably more effective. A lot of words I seemingly never remembered going through the course regularly suddenly stood out to me when working through a lot of the course withe the translation at hand. I think it's because I'm still not 100% comfortable with the way the Hungarian language functions, and because words are so heavily inflected, that blind shadowing seems much less effective. So while I don't think I'm ever going to go back to shadowing with text for all my courses, I think I too hastily discarded it. It seems like it's an incredibly useful tool that I should keep using, especially for non indo-european languages, and languages with only 1 generation of Assimil. I'm going to focus mainly on shadowing Hungarian, but I think it might benefit my Romanian as well, so I'll just kind of keep it in my arsenal of tools I can use when I find extra study time. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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