The Assimil Method September 24, 2008
Posted by cantueso in ESL, Spanish, assimil, bilingual, language.trackback
The Assimil books are made to be used at home. They are not school books. The idea is to make a difference between active and passive learning. This is contrary to what is done in most places, where students are expected to begin learning like parrots by repeating what they hear.
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They are small books, but rather fat, with your own language and the one you are learning side by side in about 100 lessons, starting with zero level stories and ending with newspaper reports and fragments taken from novels and plays.
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1 You start out the passive way by simply reading about half way through the book, reading stories with the help of captions and translations, sometimes while listening to the CD. You do that for about two months.
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2 Once you have read long enough to be able to guess your way through a story, you continue reading, but reserve some time to begin again on page one, now translating from your language into the one you are learning.
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Sample pages : as you can see, only the English course is made without imagination, but technically it is still very good, careful and clear.
Spanish and French :
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Italian and German :
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English and Spanish :
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Postscript July 13, 2009
I am not connected with the Assimil company in any way.
Okay, you’ve got me interested. Some looking around shows that Assimil is available in Poland. If I see a course in a language I’m interested in picking up/improving I’ll definitely give them a try.
I remember a German textbook (which I only saw in a library and could never find in stores) that began with simple sentences with small printed translations over each new word. IIRC it began something like “Ich bin ein Mensch, ich spreche eine Sprache…” and went on for about two (pretty dense) pages like that before doing anything else.
I found that approach leading the learner straight into the thicket of a single understandable non-simpleminded text to be much more interesting than the usual books; “Guten Tag” conversation-based or the weirdly disjointed sentences out of context “Der Hut liegt auf dem Tisch. Die Vögel fliegen im Himmel.” and kind of … exhiliarating. I was so taken that I changed my schedule for learning German from “never” to “now”.
To Michael
Do you know about ABE books?
I went to Google search, typed in “ABE books”.
When ABE opened, I typed in “Assimil” and this is what came up:
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=assimil&x=56&y=9
As you can see, a second hand Assimil now goes for below $ 6 ,–. That is itself a sign of demand, because at ABE any great book is available for just $ 1,-.
I have been told that it can be pirated, but I truly don’t know how and where. (I don’t even know how e-mule works). I saw them at Amazon for $125,- including 4 CDs, and that is much too much. I know that without CD the new English-Spanish Assimil costs € 30,-. The fact is that nobody needs 4 CDs.
At one Polish page it looked like a book and 4cds went for around 70 zloties (roughly 30$) I’ll be near a couple of bookshops that specialize in (mostly useless) language textbooks (and hawking their own courses) today so I might drop in and see what they have.
On the other hand I’m a lousy test case since I already have an idea about what’s going on in pretty much any European language (and many others) and I’ve switched to the way that most multi-lingual people go about learning a new language (short version: get an overview of the grammar and then skip around polishing different areas at random).
While here. It isn’t that nobody needs 4CD’s as much as most people have no idea how to use them (or cassettes which are better in many ways). Most people treat the recordings as models to just listen to or maybe repeat after. They’re far more effective if the learner listens a few times then says the text together with the recording matching as best as they can. Unfortunately most recordings don’t facilitate this (I’ve been told Pimsleur does but I’ve never used any of their things).
Books depend on the reader (as Ratzinger once said of the Bible when he was young and nearly got ousted as a heretic), and text, unlike sound, is mainly rational in its appeal and so can be used by people who are basically adverse to language learning.
People who “have an ear” are great learners, but awful teachers. I have been told that little kids pick up the phonetics by watching English language Shrek. I would readily believe that. As from age 12 on that ability seems to recede and give way to conditions of reason and will power and simple curiosity, ambition, and imagination.
I checked two of the three stores and all they had from Assimil were ‘rozmówki’ (phrasebooks) so I gave them a pass.
I get the sense that you regard all the books trying to teach English useless. Is that fair to put all the ESL/EFL books into the same category? On the other hand, it would be a gross mistake to reduce language to merely speaking, especially for a blog writer? Or am I wrong?
http://www.turgayevren.wordpress.com
To Turgayevren
I have seen many and they are all the same by now: they are full of illustrations, there is little text, they are large in size (not very portable); they are expensive, meant to be used with other “media” and even together with other books (“Workbooks”!), mainly monolingual; and the texts are all about nothing in particular by completely unknown writers; and they all teach mainly speaking.
The only exception now is Assimil. If you know of other exceptions, please let me know!
To Turgayvren
I think that your books are mainly for small children. That is a different “market” that I would rather not comment on.
“they all teach mainly speaking”
Not only that, they teach an awful, awful speaking style that no one wants to listen to.
The Spanish movie “el otro lado de la cama” had a character who spoke entirely in the most banal platitudes imagineable:
http://pl.youtube.com/watch?v=yHORiK029xc
(the scene picks up half way through, look for the previous installment to get the whole effect).
Anyway that’s what most ESL books (or rather what most students who do well at ESL books) sound like to me.
Pity me, I have to listen to hours and hours of this stuff during final exams every year, what’s worse is that often the students are capable of saying much better more interesting things but they’re afraid to go off the script of what they think is expected.
Peeta’s playn tennis
Peeta’s playn tennis
peeta’s playn tennis
beeeeeeeeep !
Is Peeta playin tennis?
Is Peeta playin tennis?
Is Peeta playin tennis?
beeeeeeeeeep !
By no one’s request:
Typical question: How can you tell if you’re a shopaholic?
(All too) typical answer:
“Well shopping is becoming more and more popular nowadays because everyone wants to show that he’s trendy and in fashion. That’s why some people become shopaholics, because they wants to show that they’re the best, have the best taste and knows the best shops. They like to carry around bags from the most fashionable shops and wear trendy clothes because fashion is becoming more and more popular because everybody wants to show off. So in my opinion, shopaholics, being shopaholic is a very serious problem that’s more and more popular nowadays and those shopaholics need help, maybe they should get money from the EU to solve that problem.”
After about 50 of these I start to think about taking the coward’s way out and jumping out of the (fifth floor) window and if that doesn’t do it running in front of a streetcar.
To Michael:
Is that one real? It is a bit worse than what I have seen. I remember things like:
“John’s got blue eyes, Susy’s got brown eyes,” each with a drawing. And the unforgettable “John’s car is bigger than Peter’s car” and “John’s older than Peter” which in Spanish is “Juan tiene más años que Pedro” so that it would be a particularly idiotic thing to put in the book, if the book had not been made for the German market (“Hans ist älter als Peter” ).
Well I’m not quoting exactly, but the students have to put together a spontaneous two-minute answer and the most common tactic is to string a bunch of cliches together around whatever vocabulary they can remember from the book.
The “X is becoming more and more popular” shows up in about 90 % of them (conservative estimate and I’ve heard it applied to crime! and obesity!!!)
“Everybody wants to show that he is the best” maybe 70% of them as does money from the EU for solving any problem.
There’s also a bunch of PC answers for everything that they give (even when I know the student’s own opinion is very different and more interesting).
To Michael:
Yes, I see. I remember a test, probably Cambridge, where there was a description of ten restaurants and ten families. You had to guess which family would go to what restaurant. There was an additional time-table element, but basically the task was to correlate advertiser’s stereotypes.
I also own a pile of those books. One was to keep up my German and another one was to learn some Greek, but then I bought one for French and one for Spanish, one to have in my car and one to keep at the office.
You don’t seem to think that there is more than one way to skin a rat, do you? I have been doing Spanish on the internet, nothing perfect, but plenty good enough, and that’s what I’d recommend.
Of course I know there are many ways, but not for beginners who have to take what they are given, and that is just too bad.