Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby lusan » Tue Sep 15, 2020 4:00 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:
Learning a language shouldn't be underestimated (so don't be surprised if your progress is slower than you hoped), while you ought not to scare yourself either by the size of the task. Consistent application is key, thus if you focus on the moment (the daily task) and apply yourself daily, every single day if indeed possible, day by day you'll improve and in due course you'll have achieved your objective(s). Good luck!


Very nicely said:
PeterMollenburg wrote:"apply yourself daily, every single day if indeed possible, day by day you'll improve and in due course you'll have achieved your objective(s).


Of course, one needs to have clarity about the learning objective otherwise.... :x
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby bedtime » Wed Sep 16, 2020 7:07 pm

PeterMollenburg wrote:I found that repeating every single thing I could when learning French helped (and continues to help) immensely. Imitate by speaking aloud all the course materials (anything you hear, read, even audio you hear while watching where realistic), read aloud (but don't read words aloud you cannot pronounce correctly), learn IPA as it will help you read materials that have no matching audio (by looking them up in a dictionary with IPA phonetic transcriptions you'll know how to pronounce the words) and shadow the Assimil dialogues.

I've been repeating aloud (for the most part) the material I read, and it really does help. I know most of the IPA and my flashcards use the IPA as well. It's great for when you cannot understand the audio. ;)

Learning a language shouldn't be underestimated (so don't be surprised if your progress is slower than you hoped), while you ought not to scare yourself either by the size of the task. Consistent application is key, thus if you focus on the moment (the daily task) and apply yourself daily, every single day if indeed possible, day by day you'll improve and in due course you'll have achieved your objective(s). Good luck!

Indeed, and I've been studying every day since I began for about maybe 1-4 hours per day (generally broken up into 20-40 minutes segments throughout the day).
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby kelvin921019 » Thu Sep 17, 2020 4:13 am

If I were you I would keep going with Assimil and abandon Glossika. It depends on your style though.

I have completed Assimil Spanish few months ago and I would say it is an AMAZING course. Some people in this forum would be against memorization, but I used Assimil Spanish in a rather hardcore manner (put all sentences in Anki, do bidirectional translation and memorize them in full) and this worked, at least for me.

Anyway, lesson 30 is rather early stage of the book and it may sound to me a bit premature to say that the book isn't helping you. I only started communicating by texting (with the help of dictionary) until like lesson 70/100 of the book. I started speaking only after I have finished the book. It takes me quite a lot of training before I can start speaking with some basic fluency. However, I would say that I relied heavily on the sentence structures I learned from Assimil (even up to now, oftentimes I just recite some expressions memorized from Assimil) and people are rather impressed by my ability to control complex sentence structure (while surprised by my lack of vocabulary :lol: ).
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby siouxchief » Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:56 am

For what it's worth (as I don't speak a second language yet) and there are lots of proper experts on here but I found Assimil great for listening and vocab but when I switched to italki my ability to reply quickly was weak.

I did the active phase for about 20 lessons and didn't enjoy it so maybe that's the reason but with italki I discovered my weak point was verbs.

So I put italki on hold and now I'm going back to basics trying to be able to speak the various verb tenses quickly. I found in France this summer if you can't start a sentence (normally with a verb) quickly you don't stand a chance talking to someone no matter how much general vocab you have or how much you can understand (which due to Assimil was quite a bit) their reply.

Everyone's language learning journey is different and finding your weak spots is definitely a key element.

Also for what it's worth I'm finding this guy's tutorials brilliant in regards verbs. No memorizing tables, just all logical tips and shortcuts using sounds. Maybe this technique is common but I'm finding him fabulous and verb tables are flying into my brain without picturing endings in my head.

https://youtu.be/MUhl-xNSbbk
https://youtu.be/q25A5AKHGHw

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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby Kraut » Sat Sep 19, 2020 2:27 pm

https://youtu.be/MUhl-xNSbbk
careful, he mispronounces the verb ending -er, there is no -ei at the end, just -ehhh
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby siouxchief » Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:34 pm

Sorry what do you mean by that, which bit?
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby Kraut » Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:59 pm

siouxchief wrote:Sorry what do you mean by that, which bit?


I haven't listened to all of it, but I heard him pronounnce a diphthong /ei/ in verbs like "parler". He also calls them "ay" verbs, which will mislead English speakers into thinking they can pronounce the French verb ending -er like the English verb "(p)ay".
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby siouxchief » Sat Sep 19, 2020 9:02 pm

I'm definitely missing something then as when I put the infitive parler, tirer etc into Google translate they do sound like Ay endings to my ears. :)

I think he then chops off the Ay bits to give the majority of the present tenses, keeps the infitive sound for vous and adds the "on" sound for nous.

He bases it on adding and removing sounds rather than thinking about lettered endings in verb tables I think.
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Re: Frustrated. Assimil not helping me much—trying Glossika

Postby kanewai » Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:30 am

bedtime wrote: I've been using more than just Assimil to learn French. While doing such, I've been doing about 500-1000 flashcards a day. I've read around 4 novels (at 300 pages or so each) and several Martine books over and over. I also talk in French online everyday. Most of what I've been doing seems to be benefitting my reading but not my speak ability; hence, why I looked to Assimil fix that.


I used Assimil once to refresh my Spanish before a trip. I did about thirty lessons, went to Mexico ... and was horrified to find out I couldn't even ask simple directions on the bus. It was almost as if I had regressed.

I'm a big fan of Assimil, even though it also irritates me at times - but it helps me to read, to develop an ear for the spoken language beyond course book sentences, and to get a sense for the overall structure of the language. It's definitely the wrong choice if you want to focus on speaking abillity!

It sounds like you already have solid reading skills, especially if you've already read four novels.

Given what you wrote, I would guess some of the CLE books might meet your needs. I did one of their Communication progressive du français levels earlier this year, and was very surprised to find how much a book w/audio could teach about speaking.
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