Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

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Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby Anastasia03 » Wed Sep 01, 2021 9:55 am

Or maybe you have a better resource?
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby iguanamon » Wed Sep 01, 2021 9:36 pm

The best language course is one that a learner will actually use ! The three you mention all have their positive and negative sides. Everyone has their own learning style. Some are better fits than others, depending on the individual.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:32 am

Personally, I greatly prefer Assimil to Teach Yourself. I've never been able to set up a solid routine based around a Teach Yourself book. I really like Assimil's format of short lessons based on a bilingual text plus two translation drills.

But TY does have two advantages:
  1. At least in the US, they have dirt-cheap Kindle editions available, and very often they will also have the audio for these courses available for free through their app.
  2. They have a massive selection of languages and have courses for many rare languages that Assimil doesn't cover (although Assimil does also have a good selection of rare languages that TY doesn't cover, although many of these are not available in English).
I've never used Colloquial so I can't comment on it.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby IronMike » Thu Sep 02, 2021 1:24 am

First, like Iguanamon mentioned, if you use it, it is better.

From my experience using all of these, it is very language-dependent. Some are better than others. For instance, Slovene TY is horrendous crap. I'm doing both TY and Colloquial for Swahili now and I greatly prefer Colloquial. But the TY (actually, Complete Swahili) is not too bad.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby sfuqua » Thu Sep 02, 2021 3:27 am

I'm a big Assimil fan. I like the audio with only L2 on it. I like how I can set up a regular study program with it, lesson after lesson, book after book.
The TY and Colloiquial books seem to vary a lot, both between courses and within the courses. Some are excellent.
I find it harder with TY and Colloquial to set up a regular study program.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby Sonjaconjota » Mon Sep 06, 2021 5:58 pm

Here’s my opinion:
I know that there are a lot of hardcore Assimil-fans, and I don’t want to offend anybody, but personally I would never use Assimil as my sole or main resource.
The combination of text + audio is great as a source of comprehensible input, but I’m not a fan of methods that rely heavily on input and “developing intuition”, and I also find the aesthetics of the books and the exercises outdated.
When it comes to methods, I prefer a more “traditional” approach that starts with very easy, basic phrases and grammar concepts and builds up knowledge building block by building block, in a logical order.
In this sense, Teach Yourself and Colloquial are more up my alley.
I have to admit that I have not worked with these series extensively. I bought both for Greek and have just dabbled with them a tiny bit.
But from what I have seen so far, I think Teach Yourself is more aimed at people who do not have a lot of experience with language learning and / or self studying.
Colloquial seems to be better suited for more experienced learners.
I haven’t really worked with the books beyond the first chapter, but while doing so, I felt a bit underchallenged and treated like a child with Teach Yourself, whereas I felt more comfortable with Colloquial.
Last edited by Sonjaconjota on Tue Sep 07, 2021 6:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby IronMike » Mon Sep 06, 2021 11:17 pm

IronMike wrote:From my experience using all of these, it is very language-dependent. Some are better than others. For instance, Slovene TY is horrendous crap. I'm doing both TY and Colloquial for Swahili now and I greatly prefer Colloquial. But the TY (actually, Complete Swahili) is not too bad.

Forgot to mention that at least for Swahili, TY is focused on the language as spoken in Kenya whereas Colloquial is Tanzanian Swahili. That may be the case for some other languages that have dialectal differences.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby Gala » Thu Sep 09, 2021 3:38 am

Hugo.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby Fortheo » Thu Sep 09, 2021 1:02 pm

Gala wrote:Hugo.


I too love Hugo courses.

Anyways, out of the three courses listed in the title of this thread I tend to go with assimil just because I find it to be essentially a graded reader that provides decent input. Interestingly enough, assimil is a great compliment to a course that is more structured in its approach to grammar, so a course like Hugo's for example.
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Re: Which is better? Assimil, Teach yourself, or Colloquial?

Postby Cavesa » Thu Sep 09, 2021 1:23 pm

For what language, at what level, and with what goal on mind?

Teach Yourself or Colloquial is better, if you want a basic bilingual course and then want to follow up with a normal monolingual series. When you need to follow the CEFR more closely, and when you want a more grammar organized learning.

Assimil is better, if you don't need to care that much about CEFR (because several levels are in one book, and these two approaches are not that closely tied together), if you don't mind a less smooth progress to a different course series later on, and also if you don't mind it approaching grammar a bit differently and vocab in a less organised way (at first sight).

Assimil will usually get you to a higher level than a TY/Col, with some better skills and some worse, but I think it might be more comfortable for learners used to more traditional approaches.

Of course, there are better and worse courses within each of the series, so it really depends on your target language. There are also many other coursebooks, most often specific for just one language, so it makes no sense to even discuss the "what is the best one" question without deciding on a language first.
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