Modern Greek and change in tempo with Assimil Le GrecI'm not sure if I plan to go ahead with one Assimil lesson per day as I initially planned. I am now at lesson 29 and struggling under the load of new vocabulary and verb conjugations. Lack of time during the day is not the issue, I'm currently spending 90+ minutes per day on this course, doing a mix of listening, reading, writing, chorusing, word lists and occasional flashcards, and I still feel like I'm not really understanding the language (see below for an explanation).
The most worrisome lack of progress is in my listening comprehension. I start each Assimil lesson with several blind listens, and then I follow up by looping each section of text in Audacity several times while still refraining from looking at the text. I barely understand anything, although I have learned at least 60% of the vocabulary in each given lesson. To test my listening, I went back to listen to lessons 8-14, and there were large chunks of audio that I could only understand because I was drawing from memory of learning that lesson. (I'm not sure if that makes sense. Basically when I hear something like
γιατί τα εισιτήρια είναι πιο φθηνά I understand it NOT because I know all the constituent parts and recognize the words, but because the previous sentence triggered my memory to say, "Oh yeah, that sentence meant
because the tickets are cheaper.")
I'm not saying that I've learned nothing, but that I constantly feel like I'm working with
i+3. Maybe this works for some people, but I don't feel like I'm really grasping the vocabulary or sentence structure. It seems like more time is needed to digest the material over days, not just 24 hours. I was just listening to an old polyglot gathering video where Assimil marketers (I think?) mentioned that they recommended doing 1-2 lessons
per week when starting with a language like Persian, and spending several months to a year working with the specific course.
This is the Polyglot Gathering video in case you were wondering, the relevant part is at about 53:00, and unlike most of the video this part is in English.
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I haven't made any decisions about what I'm going to do next, but there are a few options. I can continue from lesson 29 and work on one lesson every 2-3 days, or I can go back to Lesson 10 and try the same thing. I can also continue at my same pace to lesson 50, gaining as much exposure as I can, and then go back to Lesson 10 and do it all over again and hope by the time I reach lesson 50 I have a better foundation in the language.
I'd be curious if anyone else has had to do this with a course.
(i.e. Please validate me.)I started using Iverson's word lists method to help with new vocabulary, which, if you look at
this random webpage I found online listing the new vocabulary from each lesson, is about ~10 new words per lesson. Word lists are a lot nicer than Anki in my opinion, but I've even resorted to using Anki, which I hate, to drill the aorist verb forms.