kanewai's book shelf (current: italian)

[lingua]

Kanewai, do you like the German Assimil? I know a lot of people on this site like Assimil but I've felt a reluctance to use it. However, my German needs more structure so I'm considering it. I keep flitting from source to source never quite satisfied.

[kanewai]

Kanewai, do you like the German Assimil? I know a lot of people on this site like Assimil but I've felt a reluctance to use it. However, my German needs more structure so I'm considering it. I keep flitting from source to source never quite satisfied.

For the most part I like it ... but this is also my third round working on it, and I've never made it past lesson 50. Those times I took breaks from German completely, though, not just from Assimil.

What is your reluctance based on? Assimil is expensive, but figure it will take a minimum of 150 days to complete - and probably much more. I'd say it provides good value for the money. The method was very useful for me for the Romance languages, though I struggled with Assimil Japanese and Turkish.

The biggest drawback for me is that I just cannot pick up declensions using this method. There will be a footnote along the lines of by now you've realized that des is the masculine genitive article, and I will think No I certainly have not realized that. I had the same problem with Assimil's Ancient Greek course. Sometimes you need old-fashioned drills to learn grammar. Or at least I do.

[kanewai]

Ten weeks into quarantine, and I still haven't finished a single book. I seem to be doing a lot of many things and only making slow progress in each.

I finished Memrise Turkish 1. It was briefly useful as a review of a language I used to speak, but became tedious at the end. These spaced-repetition courses always seem to have a choke point where you stop making progress because the words you need to review increase faster than is possible to keep up. Lingvist has the same problem - I took a pause from the French course, and now my statistics are, words learned: 1800. Words to review: 1500. It would take me a month just to finish the review.

Memrise really confuses me, because it looks like a fair amount of work went into making the recordings and designing a nice-looking site. The European languages have cute videos that are fun. And yet there does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to the vocabulary. There might be two verbs in the infinitive, a third verb in the third person subjunctive, a fourth in the second person imperative, and the final verb in the past perfect. It is impossible to pick up any patterns with this method. Worse, it's all sentence fragments - the lessons never build up to any dialogue. It's rare to even have a complete sentence.

With a language like Turkish, which has beautifully regular patterns, this is a total failure. They never even introduced any of the basic patterns of vowel harmony or agglutination in the first series. These are usually covered in the first or second chapter of a regular coursebook.

Final grade:
As a low-effort re-introduction to a language: 2.5 stars out of 5. Limited utility. More of a diversion than real learning. Based upon finishing Turkish 1 and Arabic 1.
As an introduction to a new language: 0 stars out of 5. Absolute fail.

Otherwise, I'm enjoying the Great Courses Greek 101 immensely. I also started the Learning German course. My pace is to watch a video lesson, then spend a couple days doing the assignments, so I think I can balance the two. I want to avoid having two video lessons in one day. I put German Assimil aside temporarily; I'll get back to it when I have a stronger base in all the dang endings.

I still have Memrise Arabic 2 loaded on my phone. I have the same frustrations as with all the other languages, but it is still useful to practice reading the script quickly.

And ... I've officially made the cut to be part of a delegation to a conference in Marseille this upcoming January. Sometime soon I'll reopen the CLE books and get back to work. French will be a priority language for most of the year.

[DaveAgain]

Kanewai, do you like the German Assimil? I know a lot of people on this site like Assimil but I've felt a reluctance to use it. However, my German needs more structure so I'm considering it. I keep flitting from source to source never quite satisfied.

I almost bought a German grammar course yesterday, but then I checked my library's website, and they have two useful looking books there.

It might be worth checking your local library's catalogue to see if they have a German course that would suit you.

[kanewai]

June Update - what I've been up to this past month. From the most active to the least:

Epic Greek
This is my second attempt, and I am in love all over again with this language.

It turns out that the Great Courses Greek 101 with Professor Hans-Friedrich Mueller follows the structure of Pharr's Homeric Greek, so in a way I'm redoing Pharr but with audio. It's really well done. I'll watch one video lesson, and then spend two to three days working through the exercises. Their's a pdf, but the exercises are identical with Pharr so far.

All the exercises so far deal with angry gods and plagues and funeral pyres for the dishonorable Achaeans. It's more topical than I was expecting.


German
Oh, German. I was so impressed with the Great Courses' Greek that I bought their Learning German. Luckily, it was on-sale. I was hoping that it would provide the structure that I was missing with Assimil - but it's nowhere near as rigorous. It's a lot of filler, and a lot of explaining the basics (as in, what is a pronoun? and, how do we identify the subject of a sentence?). It's hard to believe this is a college course.

I'm quitting at Lesson 7. It's not worth my time. I played around with Memrise and an Anki deck I found, but I'll probably move back to Assimil and just take my time.

A big problem I have is with gender, number, and case. I understand the concept easily enough. But the Greek course will use a word like "goddess" to teach the tables, so we know we're dealing with the feminine. The German courses - all of them so far - seem to jump around a lot, so I never quite internalize the patterns because I'm never quite sure what the gender is.

I tried to watch a couple movies by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but didn't find any I thought were good. I wonder what I'm missing? I suspect they might have been daring in their day in dealing openly with gay and lesbian themes, but good intentions don't always make for a good movie.


French
I'm so close to finishing Le temps retrouvé; every weekend I think I'll wrap it up, but don't quite manage to. I'm finally seeing why folks call this a masterpiece.

I restarted Kwiziq, and pushed on to reach 90% of A1, 55% of A2 and 25% of B1. I'll keep working on this and the CLE course the rest of the year.


Spanish
Listening to lots of podcasts, and am still reading La traición de Roma.


Italian
I studied a few more rimes from Petrarca. It's really enjoyable. I want to simplify my schedule so I can do more. Also listening to the podcast Storia d'Italia regularly. We've only reached the 5th Century - after 50 episodes - so I think this one will be around for awhile.


Arabic and Turkish.
I've started in on Memrise II for both, and have debated keeping going with both when I have free time. However, Memrise always ends up taking up more time than I intend. I might hit the pause button on them so I can focus on Greek and German.


English
I loved the new Metamorphosis audio book. Some of the older translations are downright dull, and I think that is the reason Ovid isn't more popular in the US. The Raeburn translation, and the actors in the audio book, bring it to life. It was a revelation for me.

I don't watch much tv, but I just subscribed to a BroadwayHD channel & now I think I'll be spending a lot of nights watching. The theater has offered a wonderful, albeit brief, escape from the madness engulfing my country. As a bonus, I have a lot of theater friends who are sending me recommendations, so we'll have something in common to talk about. More people have seen Broadway and West End shows than have read Homer, at least in modern times! I started off with Oklahoma!, filmed in London in 1998, and starring a young Hugh Jackman. Check him out:



Tonight's night at the theater: An American in Paris.

[Dagane]

A big problem I have is with gender, number, and case. I understand the concept easily enough. But the Greek course will use a word like "goddess" to teach the tables, so we know we're dealing with the feminine. The German courses - all of them so far - seem to jump around a lot, so I never quite internalize the patterns because I'm never quite sure what the gender is.

Hi Kanewai. This is a common problem and you just need to memorise many words... I still have problems too and then my head hurts! However, there is some way around. This is one of the best pieces of advice I got: If it finishes with "-ung" you're sure to be looking at a feminine word. And this is probably the most common ending.

[Carmody]

kanewai
I'm so close to finishing Le temps retrouvé; every weekend I think I'll wrap it up, but don't quite manage to. I'm finally seeing why folks call this a masterpiece.

Does that mean you have read all 6 or 7 books and if so how long did it take you to read from start to finish?

Thanks for your updates.

[kanewai]

This is a common problem and you just need to memorise many words... I still have problems too and then my head hurts! However, there is some way around. This is one of the best pieces of advice I got: If it finishes with "-ung" you're sure to be looking at a feminine word. And this is probably the most common ending.

True. What I think I'm missing with German, though, is the way Latin and Greek are taught.

For example, in Greek, we are introduced to the word θεά (thea, goddess), and right away a courses will have the student drill: θεά θεᾱς θεᾳ θεᾱν; θεαι θεων θεαις θεᾱς. And the professor will than have you do it again. And again. And then probably again at the beginning of the next lesson. It's brutal, but it works. It's the way Latin was taught in my high school, and it's the way French was taught at my college in the 80s. Eventually you internalize the rules and it feels natural. In the beginning it takes brute force memorization.

In German (and, I suspect, in most American coursebooks for any language these days), the pattern is: In lesson 8 we'll finally look at the nominative and accusative cases. Don't worry, we're not going to ask you to memorize tables and charts. We'll get to the other cases later. Then they wait until lesson 17 (!) to introduce something as basic as the dative case. They seem to not want to scare us students.

This kind of soft approach worked for me with Italian - but I had already studied French and self-taught Spanish. German is so inflected that I need the old-fashioned drills and charts. I ordered one of those laminated German-grammar charts on-line, but it's not organized the way I would have done it. I'll probably need to set some time aside and make my own.

Does that mean you have read all 6 or 7 books and if so how long did it take you to read from start to finish?

Thanks for your updates.

Thanks. I think I started about six or seven years ago. My original plan was to have a "year of reading Proust," but it's turned into reading one book per year instead. It takes me around two months for each book, but my pace ebbs and flows. I often have to stop and look up the characters in Proust, ses personnages. There are a few parts that read quickly. There are parts that are so genuinely beautiful that I stop and re-read them, or that set me off drifting into my own memories. And there are long parts, honestly, that are just a slog.

[Carmody]

Wow!
Awesome achievement.

[DaveAgain]

In German (and, I suspect, in most American coursebooks for any language these days), the pattern is: In lesson 8 we'll finally look at the nominative and accusative cases. Don't worry, we're not going to ask you to memorize tables and charts. We'll get to the other cases later. Then they wait until lesson 17 (!) to introduce something as basic as the dative case. They seem to not want to scare us students.

This kind of soft approach worked for me with Italian - but I had already studied French and self-taught Spanish. German is so inflected that I need the old-fashioned drills and charts. I ordered one of those laminated German-grammar charts on-line, but it's not organized the way I would have done it. I'll probably need to set some time aside and make my own.

Two Routledge books have shown up on UK university reading lists: Basic German, and German Grammar in Context. (one of the Basic German authors is also a co-author of TY Complete German).