Lessons from Greek (sometimes the old ways are best)

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BeaP
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Re: Lessons from Greek (sometimes the old ways are best)

Postby BeaP » Thu Nov 11, 2021 3:40 pm

I think Assimil is so popular because a lot of learners discard monolingual resources without giving them a chance. If you want a bilingual resource from a respectable source, the options are quite limited. The shortness of the lessons can be an advantage, seeing that you won't get intimidated by the amount of the things you have to study, and it can be easier to sit down and work if you know that you'll finish a unit in 30 minutes. It gives you a kind of system, you don't really have to plan for yourself, and you can achieve your daily goal most of the time.
I tried to work with Assimil French and failed miserably. I liked the advantages I've mentioned before, but I really lacked the systematic study of grammar and I missed the phrases that are the most useful when you go abroad. I remember there was a 'rat-catcher' or something like that in a unit. I don't remember other vocabulary, but I thought a significant part of it was absolutely useless. I also hated the supposed humour, I found it tiring and lame.
On the other hand, I've learned a lot about 'how to learn a language' from Assimil. I realised the importance of repetition, and also figured out why learning dialogues or any kind of text when using the old-school methods in my childhood gave such good results. If the dialogues are good, by learning them you'll get the pre-made building blocks you can structure your language with. Later on I tried to implement the Assimil method to the CLE en dilalogues books, which I found much better in regards to content. Now I'm experimenting with implementing it to a Spanish grammar book. (It doesn't have audio, but I read the sentences out loud.) I also realised that when I'm a beginner it's good to have a 'big picture' of the system of the language before starting to learn it in detail. Language learning is circular, and for me the first circle in a lot of book series or programmes takes far too long and gives me too much detail.
It might be an interesting piece of information that the creators of Assimil Hungarian are a university professor of linguistics and a translator of literature. The professor was my favourite teacher at the university, he was a theoretical linguist, and he also had publications on phonology. He was a polyglot, expert in Turkish and Iranian languages. The translator translated French literature to Hungarian and back. An odd couple, regarding that most language courses now are written by teachers or teaching material developers specialised in methodology.
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David1917
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Re: Lessons from Greek (sometimes the old ways are best)

Postby David1917 » Sun Nov 14, 2021 4:06 pm

I think Assimil's biggest downfall is that it's sort of a "choose your own adventure" course, because they lay out very little in terms of a plan of study. They always say to review the material regularly. But how? When? That isn't indicated in all courses. In some of them, the introduction gives a lot more on how they suggest using it, but even that varies from volume to volume.
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Re: Lessons from Greek (sometimes the old ways are best)

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Nov 14, 2021 6:23 pm

The ones that I've had a look at (even studied thoroughly), have focused on grammar review every seventh lesson. Maybe that's what they mean. Or that there's some built-in review with the ~50 lesson delay.

Have they changed the approach now?
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mokibao
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Re: Lessons from Greek (sometimes the old ways are best)

Postby mokibao » Wed Nov 17, 2021 10:57 pm

Assimil is cool because you get amusing texts with translation (both word-for-word and literary), recordings and explanatory notes. Most textbooks are incredibly dry, the content is boring, they don't bother with translations ('you must think in the target language' or some other pseudoscientific gimmick) and in the case of non-FIGS languages billingual texts are hard to come by at all.

That said. It's obvious that assimil on its own contains too little content to help you progress to actual B2 let alone C level, so you have to use assimil *on top* of the other more boring, dry resources (or listen to podcasts, do your Anki reps, whatever you like). The important thing is that you actually get up and study everyday even just a little no matter the method, and all the gimmicks about this or that method are only means to that specific end, i.e. stoking your interest to study everyday.
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