Assimil: Am I doing it wrong?

Discussion in 'Learning Techniques and Advice' started by BAnna, Apr 29, 2014.

  1. BAnna

    BAnna Active Member VIP member

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    I got the Russian Assimil about a week ago, and have been following the instructions from this site:
    http://languagegeek.net/2010/05/12/how-to-use-an-assimil-course/#sthash.1uMDzvEY.dpuf

    I replaced "Dutch" in that blog with L2 below...

    1. Listen to the text with the book closed. It does not matter if you do not understand what is said. You will gain a general impression of the sounds, hearing the pronunciation without being influenced by the spelling.

    2. Listen to the recording a second time while looking at the English translation.

    3. Read the L2 text aloud (with the aid of the phonetic transcription if necessary). Be sure you understand the meaning of each sentence, comparing it with the translation as required.

    4. Now read the L2 text again, but this time without looking at the translation.

    5. Listen to the recording twice, once while looking at the English translation, and once while looking at the L2 text.

    6. Listen to the recording again with the book closed. At this point you should understand what is being said.

    7. Listen to the recording once more. Stop the machine after each sentence, and try to repeat it aloud.

    8. Carefully read the comments several times. Examine the L2 sentences being explained. These notes are very important.

    9. Read the exercises. Repeat each sentence several times. The exercises review material from the current lesson and from preceding lessons. If you have forgotten certain words, consult the English translation.

    10. Examine the examples of sentence structure. They show how words and phrases are combined in L2, which is not always the same as in English.

    At this point I would add step 11: throw the book across the room and shoot yourself out of boredom.

    If I don't do steps 1-10, and just listen to the dialogue, read it and look at the notes I spend only 5 or so minutes on it, but everything I've read said people spend 20-30 minutes on each lesson and they love it. I'm trying to keep an open mind...

    Help! Is it me? Or have I missed something? It could be me. I also find Anki unbearable...
  2. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    rofl!
    Unfortunately, I'm not an Assimil lover, so I probably can't help you. But I did this course as recommended by the manufacturer, which is much "lighter" than the way Language Geek, Professor Arguelles, and many others suggest to use it. Bottom line, it didn't even come close to making the grammar sink in. Penguin was the best choice for me for learning grammar, but everyone is different.

    You might want to dig up Professor Arguelle's Assimil method from HTLAL. The thing I like about it more than the one you posted is that he doesn't move onto the next lesson until has accomplished his specific goal for that lesson. That might mean spending different amounts of time on different lessons, but that totally makes sense, because Assimil ramps up significantly in some lessons.
  3. BAnna

    BAnna Active Member VIP member

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    Good idea. I am having no luck with loading HTLAL pages at the moment...terribly slow then eventually loads an error message.
    I'm not ready to throw the computer across the room, but getting there...
  4. tastyonions

    tastyonions Member VIP member

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    I like Assimil but I am generally pretty grammar-averse. I mean, like any learner material it can get a bit boring, but I have not found anything I liked better, except perhaps French In Action which unfortunately is peerless among language learning methods as far as I can tell (well, there is also Destinos but it didn't charm me as much for some reason).

    For my usage of Assimil I don't really follow any particular recommendations I've seen. I spend like half an hour with a lesson per day but don't put much effort into memorizing anything because I find that I remember things naturally if I both practice conversation and listening as often as I can and return to the same lessons cyclically (at two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, and so on).
  5. luke

    luke Member VIP member

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    Another approach I've used... This is somewhat like Professor Arguelles talks about.

    1) Use Audacity to "Truncate Silence" in the recordings. Now there's less time for boredom.
    2) Do the current lesson and several before or after. (depending on length of lesson, etc).
    3) Each day, move forward one lesson per day.

    For instance, French Without Toil had lessons about 90 seconds long. Say the new lesson today is 21. Start the recording back 10 lessons. The lesson you've done 10 times now you may be shadowing and it's easy.
    The lesson you've done 5 times you may be reading the notes.
    The lesson 3 days ago you may be reading the Target Language.
    Today's lesson you may only be reading the translation.

    That's how to cover 10 lessons in 10 days. Each one is repeated 10 times in total (over the 10 days). Each pass through is slightly different because you understand more than the previous time.

    Then, after completing the course, you do it again. Each time, you understand more than the previous time.

    There are many approaches. The secret is to find what you like.
  6. luke

    luke Member VIP member

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    In another thread you mentioned being goal oriented and the Manifesto of Done. In that vein, another set of Assimil approaches I've used is. The A/B/C/D/E isn't necessarily an order in which to do them, they're just options.

    Wave A: Listen/Read entire course in L2/L1 (total time commitment - only as long as the recordings last. Less than 4 hours).
    Goals: Understand the structure of the course. You can say, "I've been through ...".

    Wave B: More conventional wave, repeatedly listen, read everything. Try to understand pretty well.
    Goal: Learn the material pretty well, within the constraints of your time.

    Wave C: Do some other variation, such as write out dialogues.
    Goal: Improved writing, vocabulary, etc.

    Wave D: Read only wave. No audio.
    Goal: Improved reading, vocabulary, etc.

    Wave E: Listen only wave. Do you understand everything? Could you spell it?
    Goal: Listen with ease. Notice things you might want to know more about later, etc.

    The idea with distinct waves is you can do a particular wave and you're done. Some are more suitable for just banging it out quickly. Later, when you want to get more out of the course, you do a variation.
  7. BAnna

    BAnna Active Member VIP member

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    Thanks all, for the ideas. I'm definitely going to play around with it some because I do think it has a lot of potential, it's just figuring out how to make it work for me. HTLAL was behaving nicely, and I did manage to read some of Prof Arguelles's and other people's posts on this topic as well. Fortunately I got past the first one of the Professor's I happened to read (see excerpt below), which almost turned me off completely with the comments I highlighted in bold. Egad. My brain is simply not wired the way his is. It's ok, though. I may not have the level of sophistication to use the power drill as a power drill and get the full benefit from the tool, but I can still use it as a hammer substitute to drive the nail in. But then somewhere else he says the new Russian Assimil is a travesty and he gave it away or maybe threw it away...

    "The instructions provided at the beginning of each book are adequate, but you need to tailor them to suit you. How do I do this? First and foremost, I edit the tapes by getting rid of all the gaps so that I obtain at least two hours of solid and continuous narrative in the target language only. I then shadow this tape repeatedly until I begin to grow familiar with the pronunciation and intonation, and until I have figured out as much as I can of what is being said on my own. Then I turn to the book and shadow while reading the teaching language so that I understand globally what I have been saying. Slowly I switch to shadowing while reading the target language so that I learn to read it. Each day I go through the notes of several lessons to catch the fine points. When I have done them all, I then write or type out the target language lessons in their entirety, sometimes several times. In other words, I thoroughly internalize the contents of both books and tapes. I know that I am 'done' when I can successfully 'play' the advanced lessons through my brain while I am taking a shower. Depending on the difficulty of the lesson, I might have to listen to the tapes hundreds of times, and likewise repeatedly review the book. However, by taking a chunk of the language like this and peeling it layer by layer like an onion so that you come to ever greater understanding of how it works, this rarely grows boring, and when it does, I am advanced enough to move on. With 'easy' languages, I can then generally cope fully with both texts and all sorts of conversation, with 'difficult' languages I then go through systematic grammatical exercises and begin reading primers."
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  8. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Agreed. Best language program ever, imo. Assuming the book is basically the same length, do you think Assimil will work as well with Russian as it did with Spanish or French?

    I'm not sure the new(2012?) english based Russian is the same as the older (1990's?) French based, which he was probably referring to. But the really old (1951) english based one is available free (public domain, apparently). I actually really liked that quote. I wish I had the patience to do that. It would take a long time, but I've been studying Russian almost 4 years, and I'm just approaching B2. I wonder if he is B2 by the end of Assimil?
  9. tastyonions

    tastyonions Member VIP member

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    If by that you are asking whether it will get you to the same level in the same amount of time, I think the answer is probably "no," at least if we are talking about native English speakers. For us there are more foreign concepts and opaque vocabulary to pick up in Russian than there are in Spanish. But that is just my gut feeling, since I have never actually learned Russian.
  10. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Yeah, I agree with you. Assimil might actually work the way they say it does with French and Spanish (for a native English speaker), but I think for Russian one would need to spend significantly more time with it than they seem to suggest. On the other hand, they occasionally say things like "If you don't understand, repeat the lesson", so I guess they are covered.
  11. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    My first experience with Assimil was buying the Basque and Catalan books simultaneously. The Basque book was Spanish-based, and the Catalan French-based. My Spanish was far stronger than my French at the time, but while I had no problem picking up Catalan, I never got anywhere with Basque. In fact, I found with the Catalan book that if I didn't understand the Catalan from the transcription (by comparison to French, Spanish and Italian) I couldn't understand the French translation either.

    I think Assimil got where it is today as the most popular languages are relatively easy for French speakers to learn. And language that needs taught is going to be difficult with Assimil...
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  12. evilado

    evilado New Member

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    I can certainly say that Assimil's Chinois sans peine is nowhere near as complete, and much harder than frances sin esfuerzo, the two courses I have used. My method for both was listen a couple times, notice what I don't understand, read the script if necessary(didn't start from scratch with either language), listen again until I catch everything passively.
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  13. emk

    emk Member

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    My strategy for Assimil's New French with Ease was relatively straightforward:
    1. Listen to each lesson 8 to 12 times, while looping the audio, and randomly reading the L1 text, the L2 text, and often shadowing things.
    2. When I could understand 95% of the L2 text without looking at the L1 text, and at least 80% of the audio with my eyes closed, move on.
    3. Do the exercises in lazy and inconsistent fashion.
    4. Read the grammar explanations briefly.
    5. During the active wave, try to reproduce the L2 text, and generally fail. Re-read the L2 text, and try again, in short sections, etc.
    This got me to a week A2 in about 6 months, mostly because of the way that steady exposure to comprehensible input adds up over time.

    I'm currently using Assimil for a non-Indo-European language, L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique. Here, it takes substantially more time to reach the 80–95% comprehension threshold that I aimed for with NFWE. So my secret ingredient is Anki: I mine the book for sentences and make cloze cards, and this drills stuff into my head with minimal effort.

    Basically, Assimil is just a graded, bilingual reader with accompanying audio and footnotes about grammar. Oh, and it's divided into bite-sized chunks. It's nice if you like extensive methods mixed with occasional grammar study, but you want to start out with something gentler than native materials. But if you're an experienced language learning and you're tackling a really close language, you could just do L/R with Harry Potter or something, and occasionally flip through a grammar book, and it would work out about the same.
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  14. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I think that is a little simplistic and that the structure of the course as originally designed by Alphonse Chérel had more to it. Besides the features you list above, it contains some system of repetition of vocabulary, at least up to a certain point (obviously the vocab introduced later in any course is not going to be repeated as much), entertaining dialogues and explication of sentence structures (the exercises) among others. And while I have never read of a scientific study of the original instructions for use for each lesson, I suspect that there is something to it with alternating between looking at L1 and L2 while listening to L2, repeating L2 out loud, and then listening without looking at the text. The same for the use of a passive and active wave. Also it is supposed to be pleasant and stress-free, which I don't think I have ever heard the highly intense method of L-R described as.

    Plus he seemed to actually get the L1 translations and notes right, while later editions of Assimil, especially for English bases, seem to be plagued by bad translations. And the current company's catering to CEFR considerations, perhaps out of a sense of competitive necessity, seems to have detracted from the brand in the opinion of many reviewers, including Dr. Arguelles who often decries the dumbing down of courses in the past two or three decades. Of course Alphonse Chérel seems to have been exceptional, while his progeny are not.
  15. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    In a thread some years ago on HTLAL, Assimil Learning methods, the posts by Linguamor (always worth reading) are noteworthy for proposing slightly different way of going through the whole course.

    To summarize Linguamor's method:

    1) Listen to a lesson while reading the text - then read the text using notes and translation to insure meaning is understood - listen again reading the text - proceed to next lesson.

    2) Review 5-6 previous lessons in a session or throughout the day, and 5-6 new ones. But only 2-3 previous/new for more difficult languages.

    3) Acquires pronunciation through mimicry, being only good enough at the beginning, but progressively getting better and better with more and more exposure.

    4) Goal of doing 10-12 lessons a day (less again for harder ones), is to get through the basic structure and 2500-3000 most frequent words/phrases as quickly as possible so as to be able to get on with using native materials and conversing with natives.

    5) Takes 2-3 hours daily to go through 10-12 lessons, often in shorter mini-sessions during the day, but also often spread out over 2-3 days since she uses several courses in parallel when beginning a new language.

    6) After completing the Assimil course, she would often do it again, going straight through at a quicker pace without reviewing previous lessons, and continue to listen to audio until aural comprehension very good.

    7) Don't let how good/bad translation is be an obstacle. During passive phase focus on understanding L2, and if translation are helpful use them, and if not to some degree, then use a dictionary. The goal is one of reading and listening to text, using whatever means possible to understand the meaning, until you can read and listen to the L2 without translating.

    8) When ready to begin active phase, use own translation as source for translating into target language. Do this by dividing up text into chunks of language on basis of meaning, and translate those first, i.e. smaller parts, before translating entire sentence.

    9) If one feels the grammar explanations by Assimil are not adequate, find another grammar.


    She also said she never felt the need for translations of source material, instead just using wordlists with a lesson or at the back of a book, plus explanatory notes provided, to understand the language in the recorded dialogues. The goal was always to read/listen to dialogues or readings until she could understand them, and until the language was familiar enough to begin speaking the language.

    A quote of hers worth excerpting exactly:
    She also once said on HTLAL that she did not regard her accomplishment of learning 10 languages to be especially remarkable, since they were all Germanic or Romance languages which built on each other respectively as she learned them.


    Also of note for using Assimil is the Luca method. Basically it is starting the active wave near the beginning. Go back a few lessons, make a translation from L2>L1, wait a few more days, and then translate back from *your* L1 translation (not Assimil's) to L2, keeping this rolling/dual wave process going to the end. HTLAL thread on same.
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  16. hrhenry

    hrhenry Member VIP member

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    The only Assimil course I've really looked at closely is Le Turc Sans Peine. I didn't use it at all as it was meant to be used. But, by the time I got around to the course, I had already completed a couple other courses. I was bored to tears. It did give me some extra vocabulary, though.

    Since I don't speak French (but can read a fair bit), I just used the course for the dialogues and didn't focus on any grammar. It was still a pain, since I had to go through and translate some of the French to English, which was time-consuming due to some of the idiomatic expressions being what I can only assume are French-oriented.

    The other big gripe I have with the course is that the dialogues NEVER get up to natural speech speed. Again, this particular gripe of mine may be due to the fact that I'd already completed a couple other courses beforehand. Regardless, the speech never seemed natural and always felt sort of forced.

    R.
    ==
  17. MikeT

    MikeT New Member

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    This has been my problem too, and makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong since just about everyone else online seems to be raving about how easy the active wave is, how the Assimil magic happened and the words now just roll out effortlessly. I listened to the lessons in the passive phase and got to the point where I understood them. Even now I follow the Assimil instructions and listen to the active lesson once (and I understand it), say it once while reading, but when I cover up the French all of a sudden I realize that I don't really know the vocabulary that well. Worse, I was expecting that the Assimil approach was supposed to be a more natural way of learning phrases instead of just pumping word lists into a SRS, but I find myself unable to reproduce the phrases that I can understand when I hear them.

    So any tips to make this go better? Or have I just discovered I don't have the knack for picking up a language with Assimil?
  18. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Welcome to the forum MikeT!
    Just discovered you're not one of the cool kids? Join the club. I've never been very impressed by the method. I think Assimil is a great resource; graduated native material going from zero to B2 in 100 or so lessons, high quality audio and print, somewhat interesting and funny. But I would get nowhere near the level some seem to be claiming by using it in the prescribed way. Maybe by going to the extent that Prof Arguellas does.
  19. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    The problem is what current versions of Assimil products claim to teach, i.e. B2-C1, versus what they are actually capable of teaching, i.e. a solid A2. They simply don't have enough vocabulary for anything else no matter how much of the 2500 words or so they choose are B2 type of words, or how many trendy and "relevant" C-level topics they discuss (homelessness and environment). So there are two types of possible disappointing outcomes for a current generation Assimil product: 1) doesn't get a learner to a strong A2, and 2) doesn't get a learner to anywhere near a true B2/C1. Only the first result says something about the method, *provided that* the learner follows *all* the instructions faithfully, which includes *lots* of reviews of previous lessons.
  20. Cainntear

    Cainntear Active Member VIP member

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    Personally, the only Assimil course I ever found very useful was Catalan... and that was after having learned French, Spanish and a little Italian. The Basque one completely stumped me. Corsican (very similar to Italian) was OK, but I found it tough and tended to block up.

    This, to me, indicates that there's a big gap in the method, and either I was successful with Catalan simply because it was little more than a recombination of rules I was already familiar with, or because the author's intuition had resulted in a better ordering of material than Assimil's guidelines generates.

    Either way, the method is not complete, and as with all incomplete methods, it is only really effective with learners who are predisposed to filling those particular gaps.
    Last edited: Aug 21, 2014

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