MichaelM204351 wrote:Hello everyone!
I looked for a thread on this topic, but couldn't find one. Has anyone had any experience working with an Assimil course, doing the active wave from the get-go? Practically, it would look something like listening/shadowing the material in the lesson and entering it into anki from L1 to L2, staying on that particular lesson until you can produce the L2 from your L1. Any thoughts or links to similar threads?
Thanks,
Michael
I'm not sure I can provide much useful information here, but I'll offer my experiences with Assimil, nevertheless.
I have basically always done active waves for Assimil for all waves I completed including the initial one. My use of Assimil is having completed
New French with Ease,
Using French, dabbled (not completed) the Norwegian course and a couple (English and French versions of same content) of Dutch courses. I have always tended to do active waves even first time 'round.
With the French courses I didn't move on until I could shadow each lesson in their entirety without pausing the audio and without making any pronunciation slip ups. Needless to say this took quite a bit of analytical work at times and I didn't get it right the first time most of the time. Sometimes this might take as much as ten goes until I could get through a lesson without an issue.
This method is definitely not for everyone, but it's how I liked to approach it. I didn't always enter the sentences into SRS programmes but for a while I did do this. I simply got tired of SRS after a while.
I cannot recall whether I completely translated every lesson from L2 to L1 with the French courses, as vague as that may seem. I made it a particular thing while dabbling in the Norwegian course to translate NO to FR and then FR to NO just to ensure my French was still getting some practise as well. Actually I did the same with the Dutch course translating NL to FR and FR to NL, which I found bizarrely to be some kind of fun in my language nerd brain. My overall experience was that of slow but sure progress with all the Assimil courses, but I developed very good pronunciation while being slowed down considerably with the rate of progression, which is certainly a negative as daily progression is essential in language learning. Still, I didn't want to end up with poor habits of pronunciation or an inability to produce decent sounding output.