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New Assimil Books 2014 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4507 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 73 of 102 16 August 2014 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Anyone tried Yiddish?
http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/yiddish 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4507 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 74 of 102 17 August 2014 at 1:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Also of note the German course from the English base is still nowhere to be seen :(
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| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4484 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 75 of 102 17 August 2014 at 2:55am | IP Logged | ||
I only listened to the three sample lessons on Soundcloud. I decided that it likely wouldn't be worth it for me. It sounds like they don't really get very far and take things really slow and simple (compared, e.g., to their German course). For a beginner, I'm sure it'd be worthwhile, at least, but I don't know beyond that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mutant Groupie United States Joined 3707 days ago 45 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German | Message 76 of 102 17 August 2014 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Still waiting on Le Khmer to get here. That's weird about the German course...I guess I'll either use German with Ease when my friend is finished with my copy, or maybe try L'Allemand.
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| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4050 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 77 of 102 20 August 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just got my copy of Assimil Cantonese today, haven't had time to go through it extensively, but I'll give my initial impression now, and perhaps write more detail on it in the future.
Some Background: Despite rumors to the contrary, there are quite a few solid beginner Cantonese courses out there, but they all have issues. FSI, DLI, and the old TY/Linguaphone don't have their dialogs in colloquial written Cantonese, but instead use romanizations. The new Teach Yourself and Colloquial Cantonese have colloquial written Cantonese, but for some reason no English translations of their dialogs. Sidney Lau Cantonese comes the closest, in that it was colloquial written Cantonese and English translations, and someone made native recordings for it, but these recordings are a bit frustrating to use without editing them. So while a learner can use a combination of these resources to learn Cantonese, there's no single solid perfect all around beginner course. Assimil - The Bad: As mentioned before, the dialogs don't sound 100% native and the recordings are in that slow manner that Assimil seems to do with "difficult" languages. They get faster later on, but not a lot faster. Additionally this is one of Assimil's shorter courses, despite having 100 lessons, there's only 2 hours 35 minutes 40 aeconds of audio, and when I truncated the silences out of the dialogs I was left with only 1 hour 16 minutes 02 seconds of audio. Most of my other Assimil courses have at least 1 hour 40 minutes of content once the silence is removed, and quite a few go well over 2 hours. Assimil - The Good: Well, it's almost the perfect formatting, colloquial written Cantonese, french translations of dialogues, and straight continuous audio of the dialogs, albeit crummy-ish audio. The other advantage is that despite it being small for an Assimil course, it's quite big compared to most other Cantonese courses which typically have less than an hour of content. It also seems to have a very slow gradual learning pace, which is actually quite welcome for Cantonese courses. DLI is by far the heavy weight of Cantonese courses out there with tons of audio content, but it's learning curve is quite foreboding, so any stepping stones to working with DLI are quite welcome. Overall Feelings: I had really high hopes for Assimil Cantonese, I wanted to finally have the perfect beginner Cantonese course, and unfortunately, Assimil didn't quite live up to those high expectations. However studying Cantonese has taught me to not be too picky, that imperfect courses can be modified to work better, and combined with other imperfect courses to compensate for their deficiencies. So Cantonese learners still aren't able to join the ranks of language learners with solid respectable courses to guide them through the language learning process in a smooth and fun manner, but we have another useful tool to put in our box mangled cut and paste textbooks and our looping mixtapes of any little sound snippet of Cantonese speech we manage to come across. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4073 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 78 of 102 06 October 2014 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Someone shared the audio materials of Assimil Cantonese with me. I would like to repeat my
impression: the dialogues are okay - and it should be, given the author grew up in Hong Kong - but I advice against using the recordings. It is intelligible but far from being accurate. You may try Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews' courses, published mostly by routledge. Some say they are good but I have not had a look at them yet; I know them since they author Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar, which I am reading. Edited by Paco on 07 October 2014 at 10:51am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4507 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 79 of 102 08 October 2014 at 1:07am | IP Logged | ||
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What do you mean that the recordings are intelligible but far from accurate?
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| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4073 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 80 of 102 09 October 2014 at 9:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I can understand the speakers perfectly, and fellow Hong Kong people would certainly think
that they are trying to speak the language we use everyday. However, there are systematic errors as well as random errors in their speech which identify them from native speakers of Hong Kong Cantonese the first moment they open their mouth. And that is why I hesitate to categorise the voice actors as native speakers in previous posts. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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