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Concluding Passive assimil lessons | ||
Tags: Assimil | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4053 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 9 of 14 24 March 2014 at 11:38pm | IP Logged |
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My experience is that when Assimil is my primary learning recourse, perfect understanding while shadowing is the absolute last skill to develop. I usually like to get myself to the level where I can understand most of the text while shadowing and looking at the L2 text simultaneously. If I work with the audio so much that I can shadow without looking at the text, then I've usually memorized it by that point, and doing an active wave becomes rather pointless because I'll often know the next line before I even read the English.
If you have an extra 30 minutes of study time and you want to make it easier to understand the Assimil audio without resorting to memorizing it, I would highly recommend watching French in Action videos, which are a really great and fun way to improve your listening comprehension. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| markmsb Newbie United States Joined 3717 days ago 16 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 14 25 March 2014 at 5:28am | IP Logged |
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ynEos, did you find that your speaking lagged behind your listening and reading comprehension while doing this method you were talking about?
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6396 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 11 of 14 25 March 2014 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
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I can't speak for YnEoS, but in general it's normal for speaking to "lag behind". At any CEFR level you need to be able to understand much more than what you can say. Mostly because you'll do fine knowing just one way to say something, but you have to know the many ways native speakers use. (They tend to simplify the wrong things when speaking to beginners) This happens even in our native language - any educated adult can understand poetry and formal speeches, many can read scientific literature and other types of advanced writing, but not everyone can produce that.
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| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4053 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 12 of 14 25 March 2014 at 2:36pm | IP Logged |
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Yes, by doing lots of shadowing and memorizing assimil dialogs, my passive comprehension has shot way ahead of my active abilities.
I can very easily produce random french sentences that I've memorized and I can modify them and substitute words fairly easily. But if there's a specific idea I want to express, it will take me a while to think up the appropriate french words. I've done some active study with Duolingo before and after assimil, it's definitely easier after having used assimil, but it still takes some mental effort to produce new sentences correctly. So my experience so far has been that passive study helps make later active study easier, but active abilities don't immediately appear without active study. I've been studying french for about 1 year mostly shadowing assimil passively, watching french in action, and doing some native material work more recently. By contrast I took 5 years of German in public school classes where we were encouraged to speak, didn't use it for a few years and in the past several months have been reviving it with some assimil and native material work. I could much more readily have a simple conversation in German, but I would understand a lot more reading a book or watching a movie in French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4627 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 13 of 14 25 March 2014 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
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While looking for some background information about Assimil, I came across this:
the-way-we-teach- math-and-language-is-wrong I'm sure it's been posted before, but if you haven't read it, you may enjoy it. I think Assimil has a lot going for it, and it is rightly popular. However, even though it is relatively "active", as the article suggests, people's experience, and perhaps common sense suggests that you will still end up with more passive skills than active ones. That being the case, I believe it would be good to supplement it with as much active work (by which I really mean speaking) as you can, from whatever source, as early as possible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Elexi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5364 days ago 938 posts - 1839 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 14 of 14 25 March 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged |
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Wasn't that the upshot of the Assimil experiment done here last year - If I recall
correctly, a huge number of people didn't get beyond about 2 months because they felt they were able to produce the language they were learning to a satisfactory degree. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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