CardiffGiant wrote:How far others have progressed when reaching the Active phase. Have others found the Active phase of Asssimil to be worthwhile, and what modifications if any have been effective? I am on the doorstep to Lesson 50 in Assimil and am looking for feedback as to how others have fared.
"Today I completed my 90th straight day of learning my first second language. Here's what I've learned so far...
The Initial Plan
Assimil Italian - One lesson a day at a minimum. Listen to the lesson as often as possible and read the lesson as often as possible in that given day.
Anki - Enter all sentences from Assimil into Anki to review daily. There would be no translations in the Anki deck. Just the sentence in Italian.
The First 625 Words - Using a frequency list from Fluent Forever I would enter each word into an Anki deck. Again, I would use no translations. The front of the card would be the word in Italian with a pronunciation of the word from Forvo.com and the back of the card would be a picture of what the word meant. I would create all of the Anki cards myself.
Listen - I would listen to anything in my target language that I thought would be beneficial.
The Execution of the Plan
The first 30 days were very easy for me. I was entering 30 new words a day into Anki from the frequency list. I was going through the Assimil program daily and really enjoying it. I was entering the sentences from Assimil into Anki and reviewing them daily.
In the second month I began to watch videos in my target language. My preferred videos to watch were Peppa Pig on youtube. The content of the videos is aimed towards very small children and it seemed to fit perfectly for me.
An interesting thing happened at this time (and it continues to happen now). Sometimes while watching a video, I am understanding about 95% of what's being said. I'm not even thinking about it. It's just making sense in my brain.
But other times, it seems like I don't understand one word of Italian and nothing is making sense. It's very strange and can be demotivating...
At times during the second month I would try to put on Italian talk radio or watch some kind of video of adults talking in Italian. I just wasn't there yet in terms of my learning so I decided to go back to the stuff that was at least making a little sense to me. I could pick out a lot of words being spoken on talk radio but they were just words. They didn't form into a cohesive idea in my head.
This last month I have changed things a bit. The reason for this was boredom. I was afraid that the boredom would turn into frustration and I'd again suffer from the same problem that made me quit before.
So after getting all of the 625 words into Anki, I decided to try and watch some movies with subtitles in Italian. I ended up finding a very accurate subtitle file for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on OpenSubtitles.org. I would constantly have to pause the movie to look up the translation of the subtitle while I was watching it. There were a lot of words I had never seen before.
Then I found a program called subs2srs which puts clips of the video with subtitles into an Anki deck. I began doing this about two weeks ago with the Harry Potter movie.
I also briefly tried reading some Italian newspapers online as well as a few Italian books. This was simply too frustrating for me so I stopped doing it very quickly.
The Results
I finished the 95th lesson of Assimil today. I have 1,138 cards in my "Parole Italiane" (Italian Words) Anki deck. I have written out 45 Assimil lesson translations in a Word document with all of my mistakes put in bold letters. I've watched hours of Italian cartoons and hours of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in Italian. And with all of that, I don't think I could accurately grade where exactly I am at in terms of my Italian nor do I want to. The only definitive thing I can say at this point is that I'm way beyond what I knew 90 days ago.
At this point I can understand approximately 90% of everything said in any given random Peppa Pig cartoon and I had no expectations of that happening when I started.
In terms of output of the language this is much more difficult. The only output I got from this plan was from Assimil's "second wave" where you translate English into Italian. I made a lot of mistakes and some of the sentences I wasn't able to translate very well at all. But that's okay. I never expected to be able to write in perfect Italian after 90 days.
The amazing thing for me about the results of these past 90 days is that I rarely realized when I was making progress. There is, however, one particular thing that keeps happening that makes me realize I am learning a lot. In fact, the grammatical thing that made me quit Duolingo due to frustration is now like second nature to me. And so I've learned a very obvious but very important lesson - Things that were once hard will become easier.
I can't tell you why, how, or when it happened but it happened for me. In fact, it happened in a lot of aspects of the language."
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... ht_day_of/