kanewai wrote:This frustrates me across the board, and with almost every popular language program.RyanSmallwood wrote:In my experience, one of the issues with Assimil (and a lot of these old standardized book and CD methods), is that they all share the same design regardless of the distance between languages. So it may work for languages with a lot of shared vocabulary like the original French ---> English course, but I find with more distant languages the process is unnecessarily slow.
I hear this said a lot and I'm going to be the one person to put myself out there and say that I wholeheartedly disagree with this. I think the method of Assimil isn't the issue, but rather the courses themselves. The Linguaphone courses for Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and I assume others are almost universally praised while implementing basically the same method. Adopting the Assimil method for 'Shadowing Japanese' has transformed my Japanese learning; it's absolutely fantastic. I've not tried it myself, but the Hungarian Assimil course is supposedly one of the better courses available to English speakers out of the entire catalog and the language structure doesn't get much more different than that!
The problem with the Asian/Distant language Assimil courses is simply because those particular courses are much weaker. That's it. Working through the 'Arabe sin Esfuerzo' course now I can tell you 100% that it's not the Arabic language that's the problem, but the recordings and dialogs the feel like they were made assuming that absolute worst of the learner. Slow, exaggerated recordings and single-sentence lessons make me feel like the author just thought my poor little brain couldn't possibly handle it. It's gotten better, but I really had to push through those excruciating opening lessons.
So yeah, I'll stand my ground and die on this hill if I have to