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Assimil - what to do after active phase? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| pagare Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3541 days ago 16 posts - 15 votes Studies: English | Message 1 of 6 19 January 2015 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just finished the Assimil Italian with ease book active phase lession 50-105 passively and 1-50 actively. Now what? I don't feel that strong yet with my speaking or listening skills? What should I do? Do the book over again from the beginning? The lessons IMO are getting rather boring especially from the beginning to listen to over again.
Just looking for any advice thanks guys. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 4864 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese | Message 2 of 6 19 January 2015 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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You still need to do the active phase for lessons 51-105.
Plus... How well do you know the material? You probably need to active what you have learnt. You should test yourself in various ways. For example if you have written out the lessons you could make copies of your work, delete certain words in each sentence then fill in the gaps a few days or weeks later. This is similar to the exercise in the book, however you don't write out the English word to help you. You should delete words in such a way that you can decipher the missing words from the text which remains. Once you can fill in the gaps you can take it a step further. You can take your fill the gap pages, read along in a loud voice while listening to your cd and then fill in the gaps in a loud voice in real time. This can be tough even if you know the lesson well, but not off by heart. To practice writing you can once again take your fill the gap sheets, re-write them by hand filling in the gaps. Always write complete sentences never just the individual words. That is not thorough enough. I would do this drills with certain time period between each one. Otherwise it is too easy. For example you take lesson X, make your fill the gap sheet today. In three days time you could either re-write it (by hand), or just read by reading aloud but not while listening. Then one week later you do one of the other drills and then 2 or 3 weeks later you do the final drill. This way you need to think about the words and use them at varying intervals. You do exactly the same thing with lesson X+1, then X+2 etc. Another good exercise is to do diction just like you would have done in school. Listen to a sentence, write it out and then correct your work. But by far the best thing is talking. It is probably now time to start chatting. If you have a language partner, you can read the lessen to them, they can correct your pronunciation and then ask you questions about the text. This works quite well because it usually leads to further conversation. If you don't have a language partner, begin your search today, it is the most critical factor in your language endevours. To further improve you will need to begin further reading, easy material is fine and watch a film/s or TV series in Italian with subtitles. Just listening without understanding is usually a waste of time. There are easy Readers available, Italian newspapers on the Internet, you can watch Italian TV over the Internet... The possibilities are endless, just use your imagination, try out a few things and mix it up, don't just do the same old reading and listening. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pagare Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3541 days ago 16 posts - 15 votes Studies: English | Message 3 of 6 20 January 2015 at 1:57am | IP Logged | ||
Thank you. How do you do the active phase for 51-105? do i listen to the audios still or just abandon them now? What I meant not knowing the material is there are ''gaps'' in the audio on certain lessons were like 3-4 secs go by and I don't know what I am hearing :( especially if its a lesson I did like a month ago. Also why do I get the feeling when watching television I am ''hoping'' I hear words I've heard before because I feel very lost sometimes watching Italian television ESPECIALLY the news where it is sooooo fast! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6371 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 4 of 6 20 January 2015 at 7:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd recommend you to start reading native books. Not classical works from the 19th century, but some popular books, maybe aimed for an adolescent market. Read them with a popup dictionary if you can. If you find it hard or frustrating, you could try the Listen-Read method, where you listen to an audiobook in your native language and read along in the same book in Italian. The key is that you need to get a lot of exposure to comprehensive input, even if you have to "cheat" to make the input comprehensible.
Oh, and by all means keep wrking on the Assimil course. Have you heard about shadowing? I find it a great technique for working Assimil courses more intensively. I also recommend listening to the Assimil lessons on "shuffle" throughout your day. On the bus, while walking, before falling asleep, etc. Listen to them again and again. You could also use Anki to reinforce the vocabulary. Add any difficult words to an Anki deck and keep working on them. If any of these terms confuse you, just ask, or google them. We'll be happy to explain! EDIT: Oh, and regarding listening, that's very hard in the beginning. You brain needs to learn "paring", which means it needs to develop the ability to parse the incoming stream of sounds into words. It's actually not that fast, but being unable to parse the words makes it seem overwhelming. This is an ability that will take a lot of listening and a lot of time to develop. Don't stress it! Keep working, and keep listening, trying to find relatively easy material. I recommend quiz shows! There's a lot of repetitive input ("Spin the wheel!", "For 400 Euro", "Is that your final answer?") and a lot of stuff which is transcribed (like when a question is displayed on screen and read alound). Edited by Ari on 20 January 2015 at 7:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6698 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 6 20 January 2015 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||
The active phase is the same, so whatever you did during the active phase for lessons 1-50, you do again (look at the (English?) translation, translate back to Italian, do the exercises (if you haven't already done them) etc.). If you need to listen to the audio an extra round, do that - and since the course itself doesn't cover every Italian word, you need to use other material, possibly native material (as Ari suggests). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lemberg1963 Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States zamishka.blogspot.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4028 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Ukrainian* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish | Message 6 of 6 23 January 2015 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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The goal is to get yourself off learning materials and on native content. Have you tried
watching Italian news reports for learners? These are often podcasts, the language is simplified and spoken at a reduced pace. If you find that you still have trouble understanding, my experience has been that the problem is insufficient vocabulary and exposure to colloquial sentence structures. I'd suggest going through Glossika Italian. As a reference, I also use Assimil Perfectionnement and Routledge Frequency Dictionary to boost vocab, but I don't think those are available in English-Italian. Edited by Lemberg1963 on 23 January 2015 at 6:48pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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