Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

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emer1ca
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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby emer1ca » Sat Jan 27, 2018 1:31 pm

Allow me to supplement what's been said before.

First of all, not every lesson follows this format. The dialogue is repeated only for the first week (or two)

That's correct. I have 4 books (Italian, German, Spanish and Russian) and they all follow the same pattern. On a side note, all the books I owe are the latest released, the Russian, for instance, has been printed in May 2016.

You're aware that the CD contains sliced MP3s (one file for each sentence) with the TL meta data?

That's also correct. I took the liberty to attach the User Manual provided with the USB Key. Download the html file along with the folder. The technicals details regarding the MP3s can be found inside the Manual.

I also took 2 screenshots so you can get a better grasp of what the USB content looks like.

All Lessons
Each Lesson
I hope this will help shed light on the matter.
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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jan 28, 2018 11:49 am

OK, right, so there are still enough courses without MP3s available that being able to cut things up would still be of value. Yes, that still leaves a lot of typing to be done by the user, but that can be worked into a language exercise (similar to the two-way translation exercises some people do here) and I've got a couple of Assimil courses here with CDs and I'll get enough out of the tool myself that it would be worth my time even if it wasn't a first step to other things.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake about the dialogues -- I had it in my head that they were repeated all the way through and that the difference in the first two weeks was that the first time through had longer pauses, but you're right, of course -- no repeat from lesson 15.

Also, I was aware that lesson 7 often had no audio. I've got 2 courses that have no track for the 7th lesson. The other (Català) has a 7th lesson as "lliço <<number>> - diáleg de revisió - <<dialogue>>". I didn't realise that there were other variants.

I'll cheat with the first version and then get feedback for what it needs to do for specific versions that people have.

emer1ca wrote:That's also correct. I took the liberty to attach the User Manual provided with the USB Key. Download the html file along with the folder. The technicals details regarding the MP3s can be found inside the Manual.

I also took 2 screenshots so you can get a better grasp of what the USB content looks like.

All Lessons
Each Lesson
I hope this will help shed light on the matter.

Very, very useful.

I'll make sure that any splitting I do works along the same lines as the official MP3 splits, so that people can use my tool with anything that's been written for use with the official Assimil-produced MP3 files.

So yeah, what I'm doing here will be less useful than I thought, but still (hopefully) useful, and will definitely still get me closer to my longer-term goals anyway.
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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby Random Review » Mon Jan 29, 2018 4:36 pm

Cainntear wrote:OK, right, so there are still enough courses without MP3s available that being able to cut things up would still be of value. Yes, that still leaves a lot of typing to be done by the user, but that can be worked into a language exercise (similar to the two-way translation exercises some people do here) and I've got a couple of Assimil courses here with CDs and I'll get enough out of the tool myself that it would be worth my time even if it wasn't a first step to other things.

Thanks for pointing out my mistake about the dialogues -- I had it in my head that they were repeated all the way through and that the difference in the first two weeks was that the first time through had longer pauses, but you're right, of course -- no repeat from lesson 15.
Also, I was aware that lesson 7 often had no audio. I've got 2 courses that have no track for the 7th lesson. The other (Català) has a 7th lesson as "lliço <<number>> - diáleg de revisió - <<dialogue>>". I didn't realise that there were other variants.

I'll cheat with the first version and then get feedback for what it needs to do for specific versions that people have.

emer1ca wrote:That's also correct. I took the liberty to attach the User Manual provided with the USB Key. Download the html file along with the folder. The technicals details regarding the MP3s can be found inside the Manual.

I also took 2 screenshots so you can get a better grasp of what the USB content looks like.

All Lessons
Each Lesson
I hope this will help shed light on the matter.

Very, very useful.

I'll make sure that any splitting I do works along the same lines as the official MP3 splits, so that people can use my tool with anything that's been written for use with the official Assimil-produced MP3 files.

So yeah, what I'm doing here will be less useful than I thought, but still (hopefully) useful, and will definitely still get me closer to my longer-term goals anyway.


First of all I want to say great project. I'm currently laboriously turning my Assimil Chinese into 2 anki decks (one L2-->L1 and one L1-->L2) and it's a pain in the neck. I didn't really need the extra muscle Anki provides for German and Spanish (the company's method sufficed); but I finally admitted to myself about a month ago that Mandarin really does demand it (at least in my case).
To put the time into perspective, I am turning 7 lessons a week into "active" cards and 7 (further on in the course) lessons into "passive" cards. This is costing me about 3 hours a week on my day off!!!!!
The reviews themselves are daily and take around 45 minutes a day at present.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to say is about that bit in bold. I have two Assimil Chinese courses of different generations. One contains audio for the review lessons (every 7th lesson); the other (newer) one doesn't.
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German input 100 hours by 30-06: 4 / 100
Spanish input 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
German study 50 hours by 30-06: 3 / 100
Spanish study 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
Spanish conversation 100 hours by 30-06: 0 / 100

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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby emer1ca » Mon Jan 29, 2018 7:38 pm

To put the time into perspective, I am turning 7 lessons a week into "active" cards and 7 (further on in the course) lessons into "passive" cards. This is costing me about 3 hours a week on my day off!!!!!
The reviews themselves are daily and take around 45 minutes a day at present.


I urge you to have a glance there : https://huliganov.tv/2014/05/31/the-pro ... #more-3900

TL;DR: passive > active

If continually activating during the process of language learning is something that keeps you motivated in which you enjoy doing, then it’s valuable. Anything which keeps you going in the marathon of learning languages, is your friend. Anything which you find demotivating which detracts from the pleasure of doing it, is not your friend.

Now I personally think, and this is based on 40 years of learning languages (not quite as much as Monsieur Kaufman, for example, but it’s still a reasonable quarantanna) that time spent during the language learning process on activating partly learned languages is usually a waste of time.



Unless your goal is to speak the language ASAP, you're better off sticking to the passive learning plateau.
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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jan 30, 2018 2:02 pm

emer1ca wrote:
Now I personally think, and this is based on 40 years of learning languages (not quite as much as Monsieur Kaufman, for example, but it’s still a reasonable quarantanna) that time spent during the language learning process on activating partly learned languages is usually a waste of time.

Unless your goal is to speak the language ASAP, you're better off sticking to the passive learning plateau.

There is still great disagreement within the second language acquisition community over the role of productive and receptive practice.

I don't put much stock in people whose qualifications are "40 years of learning languages" or similar when dealing with big questions -- I prefer to defer to sources who observe other people learn over years and compare the outcomes.

The post you link to shows a partial lack of self-awareness on Huliganov's part, because while he starts by explicitly acknowledging that other people do things different and that's OK because it works for them, he slowly slips into writing with the assumption that he is objectively absolutely correct, and starts denigrating other people's approaches with references to "performing dogs" etc.

Then he comes up with a path that puts an initial emphasis on reading (which is extremely controversial) based on a rather simplistic argument about time and control, which doesn't give any consideration to the nature of language.

He also shows his ignorance of the topic by talking about listening practice and given Michel Thomas as an example.
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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby Random Review » Tue Jan 30, 2018 3:17 pm

emer1ca wrote:
To put the time into perspective, I am turning 7 lessons a week into "active" cards and 7 (further on in the course) lessons into "passive" cards. This is costing me about 3 hours a week on my day off!!!!!
The reviews themselves are daily and take around 45 minutes a day at present.


I urge you to have a glance there : https://huliganov.tv/2014/05/31/the-pro ... #more-3900

TL;DR: passive > active

If continually activating during the process of language learning is something that keeps you motivated in which you enjoy doing, then it’s valuable. Anything which keeps you going in the marathon of learning languages, is your friend. Anything which you find demotivating which detracts from the pleasure of doing it, is not your friend.

Now I personally think, and this is based on 40 years of learning languages (not quite as much as Monsieur Kaufman, for example, but it’s still a reasonable quarantanna) that time spent during the language learning process on activating partly learned languages is usually a waste of time.



Unless your goal is to speak the language ASAP, you're better off sticking to the passive learning plateau.


Well, I'm living in the country; so I'd maybe quite like to speak it TBH. :lol:
I've been here a year, so I don't think I'm jumping the gun to be fair.

FWIW (and while I can't go all the way with this gentleman or, indeed, the guys at ALG), I do think a long phase of mostly passive work is useful. I see so many people here rushing to speak ASAP and ending up speaking terrible Chinese in a horrible accent. I have actually been ridiculed by colleagues for resisting this temptation. Luckily my experience with Spanish enabled me to ignore it: whenever I started to doubt myself (all these smart people telling me I was silly for not talking as much and as soon as possible), I was able to remind myself that not one of these people recommending this had ever learned any language to a decent level and I had, so I stuck to my guns. Looking at where we all are a year on, I'm glad I did.

Interestingly the foreigners that actually can speak Chinese to a decent level are not particularly interested in telling other people how and how not to learn it. In hindsight I should have seen that earlier.

It's true that a very few people seem able to learn quite well by (to give one prominent example) speaking from day 1; but AFAIK they've never adequately been able to explain how they do this.

My original plan was to try for a long purely passive period along the lines of ALG and I think my pronunciation would be better if I had succeeded; but in practice I wasn't doing it at all, because it was too boring. So my actual method has been a compromise. Having said that, the beauty of Assimil's wave method is that I can already easily understand passively every sentence that goes into my active "deck" (I have heard and understood all of these sentences dozens of times).

Also TBH (and sorry if I'm derailing the thread), my main focus is not on activating the knowledge but on exploring the complex interaction of lexical tone and sentence level stress and intonation. Indeed I'm learning a lot about English! Why, for example, does my brain really not like the high tone (1) or the low tone (3) in strongly stressed syllables in longer sentences? It is hard to resist the temptation to turn them into falling (4) or (less commonly) rising (2) tones! Since English doesn't have a pitch accent, I feel I have *"discovered" some complex link between sentence level stress and intonation in English that I was previously unconscious of.

* Yes, I know that academic linguists have surely been exploring these things for many decades behind the academic pay wall, hence the scare quotes. I have at least read all the EFL stuff on intonation and stress that I could find and it explains some patterns but leaves a lot unexplained. If there any linguistics majors reading this who fancy firing me a PM... :D
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German input 100 hours by 30-06: 4 / 100
Spanish input 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
German study 50 hours by 30-06: 3 / 100
Spanish study 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
Spanish conversation 100 hours by 30-06: 0 / 100

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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby crush » Tue Jan 30, 2018 8:01 pm

Random Review wrote:Well, I'm living in the country; so I'd maybe quite like to speak it TBH. :lol:
I've been here a year, so I don't think I'm jumping the gun to be fair.
[...]

Hey Random,
I just got back from China in June of last year after living there for 5 years. I started off with FSI's Mandarin course, which begins with an intensive overview of the tones and pronunciation which was super helpful to me. I also started speaking early on, but it wasn't until about a year and a half in that i felt like i was able to hold a conversation and probably 2-3 years before i really felt comfortable. After 3 years, it was usually easier to switch over to Mandarin than try and understand someone else's English, even the Chinese English teachers. After getting through FSI Chinese (which was very painful at times, to be honest) i focused mainly on HSK word lists. It took me about 4 years to get through all HSK1-6 words after getting burned out a couple times and starting over. It wasn't really fun, but it was effective and as i read and speak in Mandarin (and Cantonese) now i don't really regret it. However, spending more time on reading in particular would've been nice. I generally have no trouble understanding spoken Mandarin, wuxia series and other historical dramas are a bit of an exception, though.

Most foreigners speak Mandarin poorly because they've never bothered really studying it, i don't think it has as much to do with speaking from day one. If you are using audio courses and have a general idea how things should be pronounced (eg. distinguishing between sh/x, zh/j, etc., understanding the tones and tone sandhis) you shouldn't have much trouble. Mandarin pronunciation really isn't all that different from English, and with all the regional variations and local dialects, you don't need a perfect Beijing accent littered with erhua. And looking at the average accent of foreigners in China, anything remotely intelligible is already great ;)
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Re: Using Assimil? Testers wanted for new software prototype...

Postby Cainntear » Sun Aug 05, 2018 10:53 am

Apologies all for this going silent.

Basically, just as I was getting into this, I got a teaching job for 6 weeks, and I was going to pick it back up after, but then I got extra classes and have been working since then.

Creating language learning tools in my spare time while teaching language puts all sorts of question marks over intellectual property ownership which I couldn't be bothered trying to unpick while on temporary contracts. The annoying thing is that this tool in a more general (not Assimil-specific) form would have helped me a lot in managing files for listening classes, so it will be written at some point, and possible quite soon. I've got 3 weeks left in my current job, then what I'm doing next year is a one-year course on serious games (games for learning) so it'll be programming, programming, programming all the way until the end of next summer.

This is a simple tool really, and one that I'll personally benefit from having to hand in future, so it will get done at some point soon.
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