2022 Assimil Spanish?

[haziz]

I recently became aware that the online/digital version of Assimil Spanish, and also the book form of the course actually is a new text as of 2022. I have not seen much information regarding this online. The initial lessons are unusually short although they do seem to get longer fairly quickly. There seems to be greater emphasis on informal colloquial Spanish. The grammar section seems fairly detailed. The grammar section looks thick until you realize it includes a 100 page glossary (dictionary), it seems to be effectively shorter than the immediate prior edition. The physical (dead tree) version of the book does appear unusually thick.

The printed edition has the highlighted sections in red, together with delineation of the grammar section also in red.

https://www.assimil.com/en/with-ease/18 ... 09113.html

Has anyone tried to compare this to earlier editions? Any opinions or feedback?

[elAmericanoTranquilo]

Interesting, I worked through an older edition last year and I wasn't aware they had updated it. I noticed they make available a preview pdf of the newer edition that includes lesson 1 and lesson 100: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

If those 2 lessons are a respresentative sample, they've rewritten the dialogs. Were you planning on getting the audio files as well? Note that the audio can be very slow during the first 50 or so lessons, so much so that some people preprocess it in Audacity or a similar tool to speed it up.

I ended up having mixed feelings about Assimil Spanish after I worked through it. At least in my edition of the book, I liked the grammar explanations, but it was challenging for me to come up with a study routine for the material that was effective and engaging. I felt like I got more out of other resources including Language Transfer, Pimsleur and (later) Platiquemos / FSI. My takeaway was that Assimil is great for experienced language learners who have used it to learn other languages but (depending on your learning style) there may be better options available, particularly for languages that are as popular as Spanish.

[tritiumoxide]

A few years ago, I went through both Spanish Without Toil (SWT) and the latest Spanish (2022 English translation of the 2017 French original by Juan Córdoba) and I can say they both have their place.

I went through SWT first, though I recall stopping the the active phase just past halfway through since it was becoming quite cumbersome and I was more interested in focusing on receptive skills (CI) up front, getting my intuition down before struggling through the discomfort of producing language. The text flowed nicely and had a story that kept things moving through most of it which I have found adds greatly to being able to listen to it in the background, for instance, without the disjointed lessons feeling like such a burden. The songs leading into every review lesson were nice, though they tended to introduce quite a few new words and had relatively opaque grammar (as with much poetic and literary work), but I appreciated the challenge. Even once the main story ended, there were multi-lesson story arcs which I think we could use more of in the more recent generations. I thought it covered new words and grammar rather well, with good pacing and reuse in subsequent lessons as well making lots of connections to related English words in the glosses and notes. There were excerpts from plays throughout in an attempt to bring "natural, contemporary, spoken dialogue" into the mix, though given that the French original was written in 1934, even those parts have quite a "literary" ring to them nowadays. I actually find this a plus, since I much prefer reading over interacting with live humans even in my native language anyway. Added bonus, I'm now more comfortable reading the Reina-Valera Antigua than I am reading more modern but less beautiful (though more accurate) Spanish Bible translations.

One downside to this book's age from my perspective as a Millennial from the US, even though I'm arguably well-read, reasonably well-educated, and moderately cosmopolitan, and grew up watching BBC programs from decades before I was born on the local public television station, I still found myself confused at times by both the concepts in the Spanish as well as their English explanations, given that the text is translating pre-WW2/pre-Franco Spanish language and culture to pre-WW2 British English and culture (my goodness now much more complicated clothing was back then!). There's one point that comes to mind where some distinction was being pointed out between two different subjunctive forms in English, one of which I'm fairly certain no longer exists in either British or American English and to my ear just sounded "formal" rather than embodying the nuance the author was trying to elicit in comparison to the other subjunctive form which I did understand and still use (I was accused at a very early age of speaking written English!). This, in and of itself, was eye-opening for me. It made me realize how perhaps modern speakers of various languages are in a position to rather easily over-estimate our understanding of older texts where words "make sense" but perhaps no longer hold all of their original nuance. This very likely applies to an L2 as well, so it's something I have tried to keep in mind since then when working with both older texts and translations. This actually inspired me to obtain a copy of La pratique de l'anglais not just for the extra French reading practice for when I eventually got around to picking up French, or even to merely feed my Assimil collecting addiction (not that anybody around here would know anything about that ), but to perhaps glean some more lost nuance from my own native language as it was written and spoken less than a century ago.

The latest Assimil Spanish offering is in many ways similar to what I see in other books from the latest generation I've gone through (or just leafed through, since there's a larger stack waiting for me than those I've yet read). It doesn't take the reader quite as far with grammar as SWT does, but it is quite modern in its audio and textual content, which is why I wanted to go through it after SWT. I found it broke the mold with regards to the audio, though. The pacing of the recorded dialogues even in the very first lessons was, to me, surprisingly natural, not nearly as slow as most others, with the pauses being inserted between sentences and (sometimes a bit awkwardly) between phrases rather than between individual words (which is quite awkward but all too common), and getting up to "full speed" by about the end of the second week. Also, I would remind any previewer that the final lesson of most modern courses is usually a throwaway and not an accurate reflection of the level of linguistic complexity achieved nor necessarily a reflection of the pace of the average "full speed" lesson audio. While the pacing does vary from lesson to lesson depending on content, I'd have to say that there's audio much "snappier" than that of lesson 100. Also of note, the last few weeks ramp down a bit on grammar progression and focus more on culture, history, and domain-specific vocabulary, touching topics like the story of Don Quijote and a glimpse into Mayan civilization. I will note that I did also begin an active phase with this book but got less than halfway through before simply moving on to listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos in Spanish. I found the main dialogues to be easy enough to reproduce in Spanish after only glancing at the right-hand page, since they had full glosses interspersed to help guide exact phrasing where it's ambiguous, though those glosses are absent in the exercises as well as revision dialogues, making them more of a challenge. The glosses seem to have been dropped from exercises in the post-Chérel "second generation" books, and when the revision dialogues were added (not a bad addition), they followed the new standard for the exercises. Based on my bookmarks still stuck in the book, it looks like I gave up on the active phase after a revision lesson and I think this disconnect was one of the reasons (in addition to the active wave being of lower priority from the onset, as mentioned above).

My recommendation is that both are useful and interesting in their own ways and complement each other well, especially if one wishes to become acquainted with both the modern and more historical/literary language. I chose SWT first (when I started it, the English translation of the latest wasn't out yet, nor had I begun on my French journey to have been able to have tackled it in French) but I can easily see somebody working through them in the reverse order. In fact, I nearly have my French up to the level of being able to go though the advanced courses, both the most recent Perfectionnement Espagnol as well as Chérel's original La pratique de l'espagnol, and I will probably go through them in that order, acquainting myself with the more modern and more approachable subset of what's covered in the earlier volume.

[tritiumoxide]

Another wall of text incoming, look out below!

After my last post, I started thinking about how OP was probably interested more in comparing the latest book with the previous two editions, both by Francisco Javier Antón Martinez, for which audio is still available for download, rather than SWT, but since the latest and SWT were what I had used, I offered what I could. However, the data-lover in me decided to try to see what could be discerned among the books with data I could get my hands on, and so I grabbed the text of the lessons, exercises, and revision dialogues (when applicable) for each and did some basic analysis. While looking at just the words can drastically undersell the value in the grammatical/syntactic/structural exposure as well as the notes and explanations, it's what can most easily be done and it does seem to point to a few things clearly enough.

I looked at the 4 beginner level Assimil courses for Spanish. The French originals/earliest for each generation were the following (with title of first chapter in parentheses, since that can be quite helpful, especially when trying to identify a translation or second-hand audio):

Code: Select all

A. Chérel - L'espagnol sans peine - 1934 (Alberto va a Paris)
3h audio
112 lessons, 96 lessons with text, 96 lessons with new vocab
19544 total words,      204 per lesson with text
4117 unique word forms, 43 new per lesson with new vocab, 21 new per 100 words
2641 headwords*,        28 new per lesson with new vocab, 14 new per 100 words
78% coverage of the top 1k most frequent words**
39% coverage of the top 5k most frequent words**


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F. J. Antón Martinez - Le Nouvel Espagnol Sans Piene - 1981 (Un encuentro)
3h30m audio
109 lessons, 94 lessons with text, 94 lessons with new vocab
15368 total words,      163 per lesson with text
3404 unique word forms, 36 new per lesson with new vocab, 22 new per 100 words
2183 headwords*,        23 new per lesson with new vocab, 14 new per 100 words
75% coverage of the top 1k most frequent words**
36% coverage of the top 5k most frequent words**


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F. J. Antón Martinez - L'Espagnol - 2004 (Un aperitivo)
2h30m audio
100 lessons, 100 lessons with text, 86 lessons with new vocab
9707 total words,       97 per lesson with text
2422 unique word forms, 28 new per lesson with new vocab, 25 new per 100 words
1719 headwords*,        20 new per lesson with new vocab, 18 new per 100 words
66% coverage of the top 1k most frequent words**
28% coverage of the top 5k most frequent words**


Code: Select all

J. Córdoba - L'Espagnol - 2017 (Qué sorpresa)
3h audio
100 lessons, 100 lessons with text, 86 lessons with new vocab
16373 total words,      164 per lesson with text
3321 unique word forms, 39 new per lesson with new vocab, 20 new per 100 words
2163 headwords*,        25 new per lesson with new vocab, 13 new per 100 words
76% coverage of the top 1k most frequent words**
36% coverage of the top 5k most frequent words**


* actually stems as determined in Python by NLTK's SnowballStemmer for Spanish (not the original Porter stemmer algorithm) It's an imperfect but consistent way of getting an approximation of headwords, though lemmas would be better. It under-counts what would be found by a proper lemmatization process, though from a comprehension standpoint it might better represent individual lexical units of meaning, since if one already understands the adjective form of a given root/stem, the meaning of any other part of speech derived from the same root should be much clearer even if it would have its own headword in the dictionary. This metric gives those roots.

** based on the 2018 OpenSubtitles dataset It isn't perfect, but it reflects spoken language (admittedly not everybody's goal) better than, say, text scraped from the internet, newspapers, or digitized public domain literature (skewed strongly in both in both age and style). The main critique of this dataset that I have heard is that many of these subtitles are translations, which therefore don't necessarily represent native speech as well as would be ideal. I believe the greatest value here lies in the relative comparison among books, for which I believe this corpus forms a sufficient basis, however anyone who takes issue with the biases of this dataset is free to ignore the derived statistics. While it seems that there's a correlation between text length and coverage, as one might presume, I would think this is still a decent metric of how ready one might be for native material after finishing such a course. I'm actually a little surprised by how well SWT holds up in this metric, given its age and literary leaning versus a movie dialogue database that's heavily skewed towards contemporary speech.

I initially ran some time-based metrics, minutes per lesson, words per minute, etc., but decided that it couldn't be done in any reliable way without actually analyzing the audio itself, so I left that as a potentially collaborative exercise for later. In particular, I found the calculated average words per minute to not match the listening experience well at all, so without some sort of silence clipping/normalization, any such metric would be more misleading than helpful (and, of course, naively clipping all silence would be just as misleading as it would destroy the natural rhythm of the speech anyway). Perhaps the main takeaway is that recording duration should be mostly ignored, but I hope that length of target text in number of words is at least a decent indicator for whatever one may intend to glean from the audio stats.

One metric I calculated but didn't list with each because it was nearly identical is what percentage of the text is in the top 1k vs 5k most frequent words (kind of the inverse of the listed statistics, but a decent measure of how well the text keeps to a subset of the language), and the answer for each is 70% of the text is in the 1k most frequent words (72% for the 1981 edition), and 85% is within the top 5k. I would also like to note that I think some people around here (and on YouTube) may overstate the need for any one piece of learning material to strictly conform to some frequency list, especially since all native material, once finally consumable, will, by definition, conform to the frequency distribution of native material (at least within a given type of communication), so while I'm not in that extreme camp, I believe there truly are benefits in having a beginner (still needs hand-holding to be able to handle native content) level resource that stays within a common pool of vocabulary in which already-known high-frequency words are chosen more often over downright infrequent words that can much more easily be assimilated via native content once the learner has a sufficient base. (I will forever know how to say hunchback in Swedish. Thanks Assimil! LOL) While I'm not aware of any existing data on the topic, I would be shocked if assimilation of grammatical patterns with well-known words weren't far more efficient than assimilation of grammatical patterns with brand new words or ones only seen once or twice before. There obviously needs to be a balance between the ability of a text to expand the reader's vocabulary versus grammatical skill.

One obvious conclusion is that the 2004 edition is by far the most meager of them all and while it may very well make a fine introduction to the language in its own right (I'll leave that judgement for those who have gone through it), it's a much smaller introduction than is available in any of the others, all else being equal. It's still impressive how many new words the author was able to squeeze in per 100 words of text, though, depending on how it's being used (the lessons are shorter and can therefore be repeated more times per 30 minute session), that could be a plus or a minus. [Edit: Among the remainder we see a range with regards to vocabulary density, with SWT not only covering more vocabulary in total but also being more dense in vocabulary per lesson (made more so by the fact that the lesson notes themselves introduce related vocabulary not contained in the text or exercises, and hence not included in these numbers).]

Obviously none of this speaks to the learning curve, amount of grammar covered, or how enjoyable the material may be to use, but for those who focus on vocabulary and want to know how they compare, we actually have some numbers! I must say, though, that the most interesting statistics were when I looked at the three advanced level Spanish courses, and then looked at how well they complemented each one of the lower level courses when their vocabulary was combined. Spoiler alert: the latest advanced course from 2015 by David Tarradas in combination with SWT gives shockingly good coverage of core and advanced vocabulary while exposing the reader to a wide range of language, from contemporary to more dated, and from colloquial to more formal and literary...the best of both worlds! I won't derail this thread with an analysis of the advanced courses, though.

Edit: Upon running the numbers again with some tweaks, I realized the numbers previously listed as the coverage for the 5k most frequent words were actually for the 20k most frequent words! Sorry about that. I also added a distinction in the "per lesson" statistics to be against either the number of lessons with text or number of lessons with new vocabulary to better estimate target language reading and new vocabulary loads in a given study session. While this doesn't account for the fact that revision dialogues are somewhat shorter than the texts from regular lessons, I figured this was still a more accurate representation. The raw base numbers remain the same, so the original values (or any others) can still be calculated, if desired. With this update, calculated numbers are now more consistently rounded, so there may be a few minor variances from the original post, apart from the ones intentionally changed as per above. I also added a note about vocab density, given the new text lesson calculations.

[tritiumoxide]

Interesting, I worked through an older edition last year and I wasn't aware they had updated it. I noticed they make available a preview pdf of the newer edition that includes lesson 1 and lesson 100: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

If those 2 lessons are a respresentative sample, they've rewritten the dialogs. Were you planning on getting the audio files as well? Note that the audio can be very slow during the first 50 or so lessons, so much so that some people preprocess it in Audacity or a similar tool to speed it up.

I ended up having mixed feelings about Assimil Spanish after I worked through it. At least in my edition of the book, I liked the grammar explanations, but it was challenging for me to come up with a study routine for the material that was effective and engaging. I felt like I got more out of other resources including Language Transfer, Pimsleur and (later) Platiquemos / FSI. My takeaway was that Assimil is great for experienced language learners who have used it to learn other languages but (depending on your learning style) there may be better options available, particularly for languages that are as popular as Spanish.

You'll also find the sample PDF of the 2014 English edition (2004 French) still hanging around here for comparison: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

Is this the version you used?

[elAmericanoTranquilo]

You'll also find the sample PDF of the 2014 English edition (2004 French) still hanging around here for comparison: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

Is this the version you used?

Indeed, that's the one!

[haziz]

You'll also find the sample PDF of the 2014 English edition (2004 French) still hanging around here for comparison: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

Is this the version you used?

Indeed, that's the one!

There is now an even newer edition, dated 2022 at least for the Spanish text with an English base.

[tritiumoxide]

You'll also find the sample PDF of the 2014 English edition (2004 French) still hanging around here for comparison: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

Is this the version you used?

Indeed, that's the one!

There is now an even newer edition, dated 2022 at least for the Spanish text with an English base.

Yes, the latest one is the one I went through and made several mentions of in my first two posts, the 2022 English translation of the 2017 French text. I was just trying to help elAmericanoTranquilo say exactly which version he had gone through since he had already told us it wasn't the latest text. We now know he went through the 2004 edition that we saw in my numbers above to be the shortest text by far and with the least vocabulary. Given my numbers and his lackluster review, I think it's relatively safe to conclude that the latest is superior to the previous generation, which I believe directly addresses your initial question.

[haziz]

You'll also find the sample PDF of the 2014 English edition (2004 French) still hanging around here for comparison: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

Is this the version you used?

Indeed, that's the one!

There is now an even newer edition, dated 2022 at least for the Spanish text with an English base.

Yes, the latest one is the one I went through and made several mentions of in my first two posts, the 2022 English translation of the 2017 French text. I was just trying to help elAmericanoTranquilo say exactly which version he had gone through since he had already told us it wasn't the latest text. We now know he went through the 2004 edition that we saw in my numbers above to be the shortest text by far and with the least vocabulary. Given my numbers and his lackluster review, I think it's relatively safe to conclude that the latest is superior to the previous generation, which I believe directly addresses your initial question.

I was actually replying to elAmericanoTranquilo. I think he was under the impression that he was working with the 2022 edition when in fact it was the 2014 edition that he used.

I actually prefer the 2014 edition when compared to 2022. I think the grammar discussion is much better written in the 2014 edition compared to the current one.

[tritiumoxide]

You'll also find the sample PDF of the 2014 English edition (2004 French) still hanging around here for comparison: https://monachat.assimil.online/extrait ... xtrait.pdf

Is this the version you used?

Indeed, that's the one!

There is now an even newer edition, dated 2022 at least for the Spanish text with an English base.

Yes, the latest one is the one I went through and made several mentions of in my first two posts, the 2022 English translation of the 2017 French text. I was just trying to help elAmericanoTranquilo say exactly which version he had gone through since he had already told us it wasn't the latest text. We now know he went through the 2004 edition that we saw in my numbers above to be the shortest text by far and with the least vocabulary. Given my numbers and his lackluster review, I think it's relatively safe to conclude that the latest is superior to the previous generation, which I believe directly addresses your initial question.

I was actually replying to elAmericanoTranquilo. I think he was under the impression that he was working with the 2022 edition when in fact it was the 2014 edition that he used.

I actually prefer the 2014 edition when compared to 2022. I think the grammar discussion is much better written in the 2014 edition compared to the current one.

I guess I should have let him respond them. He stated he had worked with an older edition with different dialogues than the latest one he linked to, then I linked to the previous generation and he confirmed it matched what he went through, so my understanding was that he knew he had gone through an older edition.

But that is useful to know that you got to compare the two and found the grammar coverage to be greater in the previous generation.