Assimil - New courses, new look?

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Polyclod
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Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby Polyclod » Thu Aug 13, 2015 11:05 am

I was browsing Amazon France yesterday when I saw this: http://www.amazon.fr/Superpack-perfectionnement-Espagnol-livre-audio/dp/2700580656/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_img_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0Z753ASFJ8RAHSE23JB8

So not only are Assimil coming out with a new advanced Spanish course, but they're updating the look of their courses as well. I know that content is more important, but I can't help but ask: What do you think? Personally the cover looks crammed, and it reminds me of the newest versions of Teach Yourself. Hopefully these newer offerings will maintain the same Assimil quality.
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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby Arnaud » Thu Aug 13, 2015 11:45 am

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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby samfrances » Thu Aug 13, 2015 11:51 am

Any idea if they are making a version for English speakers?
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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby Polyclod » Thu Aug 13, 2015 12:34 pm

Probably not. Assimil seems to be less interested in offering English versions of their courses. But Using Spanish is still floating around out there. The English translations are awful, but if your Spanish is good enough you can ignore them and enjoy a really good course.

I can only speak for the advanced German course, but it seems the "dumbening" (to quote Lisa Simpson) has spread to the Perfectionnement series, the newer German one is complete crap compared to the one that was designed to follow German With Ease.

Here's hoping that's not the case.
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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby galaxyrocker » Thu Aug 13, 2015 1:54 pm

I really hope Assimil doesn't follow the path of Teach Yourself and Colloquial.
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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby Polyclod » Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:27 pm

Well the stuff they're offering now is still better than TY, but I don't understand why the courses need to be watered down so much, I've never heard anyone complain that "That Spanish with Ease was too hard!"... *thank God they haven't messed with New French With Ease*...yet.
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Star Trek The Next Generation Tod im Winter: 82 / 348

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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby tastyonions » Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:44 pm

Not long ago my parents bought me the English-base "Italian With Ease," which, judging by the frequency with which the characters smoke, among other things, is clearly of the previous generation. I notice that with French as the base language they now have "L'Italien," and I have wanted to take a look at that one to see if any of the infamous "watering-down" has occurred.
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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby Arnaud » Thu Aug 13, 2015 2:49 pm

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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby emk » Thu Aug 13, 2015 8:05 pm

OK, these are from a wave of updates a couple of years ago, but I'm guessing they haven't replaced these yet. More data points:

L'Espagnol (the reasonably recent French-based beginner's Spanish course, without the sans peine) definitely starts out a lot easier than New French with Ease does, with much shorter and less humorous texts, to the point that it looked a little boring. I was happy to jump ship for subs2srs + Avatar during my Spanish experiment, which is basically a home-made version of the same L1 text + L2 text + L2 audio idea.

L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique, on the other hand, has an ultra-aggressive learning curve between lesson 10 or so (about when they stop teaching the basics of the writing system, IIRC) and lesson 50 (at which point they've covered much of the core grammar of Egyptian). I'd be really impressed if somebody actually did all those lessons in 40 days. There's a few obvious mistakes here and there, but I still think it's one of the two best Egyptian courses I've ever seen by a very wide margin.

So it's not entirely clear to me what their current strategy is, in terms of course difficulty. I definitely get the impression that the more recent courses are easier than the ones from 10 years ago, especially in the initial lessons. But it's not a company-wide trend. Assimil has always been a small family company full of polyglots, and they don't seem to talk a huge amount about how they design their courses.
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Re: Assimil - New courses, new look?

Postby kanewai » Fri Aug 14, 2015 2:50 am

I liked Italian! I don't have past versions to compare it to, but on it's own it wasn't a disaster at all. It was significantly easier than Spanish - which had some surprisingly dense and difficult chapters towards the middle. I'm not sure if the version I used for Spanish (it was a couple years ago) is the same as the current one.

The new jeux de langues sound interesting:

En octobre on commencera à penser à Noël avec la parution de deux jeux de société consacrés aux langues : Etymolinguo et Délirolinguo. Ces deux jeux nous ont été proposés par Henrri-Sébastien Erhard, un professeur de lettres classiques qui s’est fait une spécialité des jeux de langues. Etymolinguo propose aux joueurs de trouver un maximum de mots français dérivés de racines latine ou grecques. Délirolinguo permet, par le jeu, de découvrir et d’apprendre 30 expressions communes de 12 langues (anglais, italien, espagnol, allemand, russe, arabe, portugais, turc, mandarin, japonais, hindi et français). Chacun de ces jeux est jouable à plusieurs à partir de 11-12 ans.

In October our thoughts turn to Christmas with the release of two games devoted to languages: Etymolinguo and Délirolinguo. These two games were proposed to us by Henri Sébastien Erhard, a professor of classics who specializes in languages. In Etymolinguo asks players to find the most French words derived from Latin or Greek roots. Délirolinguo allows one to discover and learn 30 common expressions in 12 languages. ​​(English, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi and French). Both are designed for players from ages 11 to 12 and up.
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Spanish: 50 / 50
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