Assimil Active Wave

[mercutio]

I once emailed Assimil as it's totally unclear which lets to translate and they said

"In the second wave (which starts with Lesson 50), you study the lesson the way you have studied all the previous lessons.

Then you go back to the lesson indicated at the end of the lesson (for example, lesson 1) and translate both the dialogue and exercise 1 from English into Spanish (as opposed to from Spanish to English).

We apologise for any confusion! Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions."

Interesting. I am only about 1/3 of the way through the passive wave, and it is already clear that translating like that above without the prompt of listening to the audio would be impossible for reasons listed by jeff_lindqvist. Perhaps Assimil never worried about developing the proper way to do an active wave because most people throw in the towel before then I mean, really, even amongst the community here and on the HTLAL site, which I'd guess is more likely to stick with languages than the average, and the completing rate must still be minuscule.

I agree most will never finish the book!

[ilmari]

I think you're all getting hung up, and bogged down by the word "translation". The point of the exercise is to help the learner acquire active language skills. The so-called translation should lead to an "a-ha" effect with language learners once they're able to actively recall and reproduce previously covered material. I think the wording was chosen to steer people away from rote memorization.

You are right. Assimil's second wave is not really about translating, but about revising previous lessons and reconstructing actively their content. It is also about vocabulary revision, as they will often repeat first wave words inside (or just before or after) the corresponding second wave lesson.

[Seneca]

Fun to bump my own thread, haha. The active wave for Italian draws ever nearer.

This is how I do the passive wave:
1) Listen with the book closed x3
2) Listen and silently read along with the Italian x3
3) Listen, pause after each line, and repeat out loud 3 times before moving into the next line
4) Compare translations and read the grammar notes at the bottom
5) Listen twice, first reading along silently with the English and second with the Italian
6) Listen and read out loud along with the Italian x3
7) Do the exercises and then read a cultural note if present.

It has gone well thus far! Regarding the Active wave, the directions before Lesson 50 say:

"1. Read and listen to the texts in the previous lesson again, but this time try translating them from English into Italian (both orally and in writing), correcting yourself as you go. This will help you to consolidate what you've learned and to speak increasingly naturally. You'll be surprised at how much you've already picked up. In bocca al lupo! Good luck!"

If I have just read and listened to the Italian, I really don't think there is any magic to then immediately translating it, haha. Anyway, I have yet to start the active wave, but I plan to start it today. There doesn't seem to be anything magic or optimized about waiting until Day 50, so I am starting it tonight, having just finished Lesson 30. I will do the above, namely:

1. Listen to the lesson with the book closed.
2. Listen and read along with the Italian quietly.
3. Listen and read along with the Italian out loud.
4. Cover the Italian, and line by line, try to translate from the English orally. Checking line-by-line
5. Cover the Italian, and translate each line from the English in writing. Check my work.

I am enjoying the method, I want the satisfaction of finishing the course, but I don't want to live in course-land until October, so I like the idea of finishing this ~3 weeks early. I shall keep you all posted on my successes, failures, and challenges.

[CardiffGiant]

Fun to bump my own thread, haha. The active wave for Italian draws ever nearer.

This is how I do the passive wave:
1) Listen with the book closed x3
2) Listen and silently read along with the Italian x3
3) Listen, pause after each line, and repeat out loud 3 times before moving into the next line
4) Compare translations and read the grammar notes at the bottom
5) Listen twice, first reading along silently with the English and second with the Italian
6) Listen and read out loud along with the Italian x3
7) Do the exercises and then read a cultural note if present.

It has gone well thus far! Regarding the Active wave, the directions before Lesson 50 say:

"1. Read and listen to the texts in the previous lesson again, but this time try translating them from English into Italian (both orally and in writing), correcting yourself as you go. This will help you to consolidate what you've learned and to speak increasingly naturally. You'll be surprised at how much you've already picked up. In bocca al lupo! Good luck!"

If I have just read and listened to the Italian, I really don't think there is any magic to then immediately translating it, haha. Anyway, I have yet to start the active wave, but I plan to start it today. There doesn't seem to be anything magic or optimized about waiting until Day 50, so I am starting it tonight, having just finished Lesson 30. I will do the above, namely:

1. Listen to the lesson with the book closed.
2. Listen and read along with the Italian quietly.
3. Listen and read along with the Italian out loud.
4. Cover the Italian, and line by line, try to translate from the English orally. Checking line-by-line
5. Cover the Italian, and translate each line from the English in writing. Check my work.

I am enjoying the method, I want the satisfaction of finishing the course, but I don't want to live in course-land until October, so I like the idea of finishing this ~3 weeks early. I shall keep you all posted on my successes, failures, and challenges.

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.

[reineke]

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/