French

I’m now up to lesson 56 in Assimil’s French with Ease, and, having done about a week’s worth of the “active wave”, I wanted to comment on it.

As I’ve mentioned before, Assimil’s approach consists of a passive wave and an active wave. The passive wave consists of listening to the dialogue, reading over the transcripts and the translations, as well as the notes. The active wave, which starts when you reach lesson 50 in the passive wave, has you go back to lesson 1 and translate from English to French. Before doing so you’re supposed to listen to the lesson.

I’ve had no trouble at all in doing these, but I must say - I think the second wave needs to consist of more than just translating from English to French, and doing a few exercises like filling in the genders of nouns or putting the right ending on adjectives. For an “active wave”, it seems too cursory, a mere add-on to the passive wave rather than a stand-alone part of the course.

That’s not to say that Assimil is bad; on the contrary, I still love the course, and intend to keep using it as my primary material for French. However, I think I may end up altering their prescribed approach rather drastically. I may add all of the sentences to Anki to strengthen my vocabulary, as well as write them all out by hand (which I’m finding helps me remember things much easier). I may also start working through The Ultimate French Review and Practice, a book I received recently. In short, now that I’m in the “active phase” of Assimil, I think I need to dig into things a little more; my passive understanding of the French lessons I’ve done is excellent, but my production skills are more-or-less nonexistent, and I’m not sure Assimil’s official “active phase” approach is going to change that much.

Has anyone worked through an Assimil course exactly as they recommend? If you have, could you comment on the end results?

I’ve recently throttled back on studying Russian, largely because I feel that I just don’t have enough time to continue enlarging my German vocabulary, learn the basics of French with my Assimil course, and learn the basics of Russian. I’ve not ran into any troubles in continuing with German and starting with French, probably because when I started French, I was quite familiar with most, if not all, of the grammar of German, and had a decent sized vocabulary. My German learning now consists of just learning more (and more) vocabulary; there aren’t any new concepts being added.

Trying to learn the basics of two drastically different languages has proven a bit more difficult. For French, I’ve been usually spending 30-45 minutes a day, doing one Assimil lesson a day. I don’t really have enough time in the day to spend a similar amount of time on Russian as well, and doing anything less, I feel like I’m making little to no progress. There’s so much to cover when starting a new language, and with the Russian declension system, it seems even worse. With the limited amount of time I’ve been able to give it, I feel as if I’ve done little more than learn enough to get things mixed up.

I think my attack plan at this point is going to be to finish the Assimil course, which, if reports from folks online are trustworthy, will give me a very good base in French on which to build. Perhaps at that point I’ll be able to continue with German and French, and start over with Russian. I’m going to continue peeking at my Russian texts, but I’m not going to try and set any real goals for myself with it right now, because I think I’d just be setting myself up for failure.

In short, I believe that, in jumping in with both French and Russian, I bit off more than I could chew.

As an aside (I’ll blog more about this soon), I’m nearing lesson 50 in the Assimil course, at which point I’ll start the second, or “active” wave. I’m looking forward to seeing how my understanding of the language progresses from that point on; thus far I’ve had a blast using the course, and I’m at least passively understanding everything. Most importantly, it’s been fairly painless work - the Assimil course is fun, which is not something I can say of cramming grammar tables.

I was rereading through the introduction to New French with Ease earlier this evening, and came across this gem of a quote from Rivarol:

Grammar is the art of lifting the difficulties out of a language; the lever must not be heavier than the burden.

Something to definitely keep in mind when studying a language; I know from experience how easy it is to get bogged down in the grammar, losing sight of what you’re really after: understanding, and the ability to communicate. Grammar is needed, but it’s a piece of the pie, not the whole thing.

By the way, if you’re curious, here’s the original French quote:

La grammaire est l’art de lever les difficultés d’une langue; mais il ne faut pas que le levier soit plus lourd que le fardeau.

I’ve not posted about how my language learning is going for a while now, so here’s the obligatory update.

My German is going extremely well. It’s mostly just an activity of vocabulary acquisition at this point. I’m familiar with all of the grammar, and can read most things with a bit of help from a dictionary. I’m still working on my listening comprehension, by regularly listening to German podcasts and audiobooks. I’m slowly chipping away at the German version of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen.

I’ve shuffled my learning plan around some in regards to Russian. I was initially just working with the texts I have, Russian for Beginners (Duff) and New Penguin Russian Course (Brown). While I was making so-so progress with them, I felt like I wasn’t really learning how to say anything. So, I’ve added in a final element, which comes with a huge amount of audio: the Princeton Russian course. I posted about this previously, and sadly, it appears Princeton has taken the course material down. However, I downloaded it all when it was available. I’m listening to one dialogue a day, repeatedly, until I understand it in full. I’ve already found that I was overpronouncing a lot of things, in particular, the y soft sound on е, ё, etc. Despite my efforts, I’m still finding that my progress with Russian is much, much slower than my progress was when I started learning German. However, I think from listening to the dialogues regularly from the Princeton course, I’m starting to get a better feel for the language.

Finally, I’ve decided to throw another language onto my list: French. I’m using the Assimil course, New French with Ease, and am loving every minute of it. For those not familiar with Assimil, the setup of the course is thus:

You have the audio portion, and the book. The audio is all in the target language. In the book, you have a transcript of each lesson on one side of the page, and the translation on the opposite page. There are also grammar and vocabulary notes for each lesson, but these are generally kept relatively short. You go at the material in two waves: the first passive, the second active. You do the first 50 or so lessons passively, simply listening and repeateding the audio, and making sure you understand all of it. Once you’ve reached lesson 50 or thereabouts, you go back to the beginning of the book, and go through the lessons “actively”, doing the exercises and translating from English to French. While doing this, you obviously continue on with the passive phase until you reach the end of the course. I’m about 10 lessons into the course now, and I really like it. I wish I’d started learning German with the Assimil course. I’d nab the Russian course, but they don’t offer a new version, at least not with English as the base version. I guess there’s not much market right now for English-speaking people wanting to learn Russian.

I just recently started reading A History of India for a course I’m taking at the university. I came across the expression bête noire in the book, in this sentence:

In this connexion there was another bête noire which cast its shadow on much of the early writing on ancient India.

Having not a clue as to what the phrase meant (other than the fact that noire meant ‘black’), I dutifully looked it up. According to wordreference.com (I currently have no proper French dictionary), I found that it means “peeve” or “pet peeve”.

Having said that, I must say: I find the habit of scholarly writers dropping in random expressions in other languages, without a translation thereof, a bit odd (not to mention rather frustrating at times). If there were a decent reason for using the foreign word, fine - but what was to be gained by the author by using the French version of “pet peeve”? I can obviously understand why there are, for example, many Sanskrit words in the text (usually with a definition or something similar, I might add!) - but French? I don’t see the point.