So I’m now one month into the Assimil course (as well as being on LingQ) and am wondering where will I be at the end of the Assimil course? It says B2 but I feel like that’s unlikely and is more of a marketing technique but I love the course regardless. My question is where will I really by?
My other question is:
Should I finish Assimil as quickly as possible, skipping the exercises etc rather than taking my time with it just so I can finish it and get a foundation which I can build upon with something like LingQ?
My third question is, when should I get a language partner? Someone to talk with for 10 minutes or so to practice my French, I don’t see why I should get one yet as I can barely say a coherent sentence that’s not been pre-learned as much like a phrase. I feel that I should wait till I can speak a little, but when will this be? After Assimil? When will I know?
Anyone who’s been in a similar experience, what did you do and what should I?
If I were you I would go through all of the Assimil lessons, briefly go over the grammar, you can always come back to it when you need to and then stick with lingq. Assimil is a great starter course but lingq with give you the vocabulary you need. In my opinion speaking right away is over rated and unnecessary according to almost every youtube polyglot out there. Speak when you feel like it, you shouldn’t feel pressured. You’ll know when your ready, you obviously don’t sound ready now.
From what I hear according to most, Assimil with ease gets you to roughly A2/B1 and there grammar gets you to a B1/B2 level, it’s mainly lacking in the vocabulary department, where lingq will really help out there. Obviously in order to speak well you have to speak eventually and like anything the more time you put into it the more you’ll get out of it.
I don’t think you should finish the course as quickly as possible, you should go back over older lessons and keep revising what you have learned, you should try writing out the lessons as you learn them, assimil covers a lot of grammar and all the important tenses you should know. If you finish the book too quickly you won’t know the material in that book, I think you would be at a b2 level if you know everything. I am doing assimil on lesson 86 now and I started before christmas.
I think you should be try using a language partner, you know I have been emailing a language partner since from about lesson 60,and we correct each other’s lessons, I. Ow recognize what tense I should be using and how to form it etc, I still do use google translate but now I am getting better.
Conclusion
My advice would be to spend even 5-6 months with assimil, it does get a little boring, try and do a lesson every day and keep revising older lessons, I thinks that’s when I actually assimilated the words, try looking at your native language, cover the sentences you are learning and try and say or write them ,and keep doing this.
Let’s say you spend 6 months on assimil and truly know everything within the book, you will be well on your way to speaking the language.
And you should lesson to the audio, after you learn the lesson, and try and recognize the words. And ya begin speaking with a tutor on lingq. I do jot work for assimil!!
I tihnk Luca Lampariello spends around 3 months doing his translation technique on Assimil at the beginning before moving on. He doesn’t rush each lesson. Rather, he revises them in a different way.
I studied French as a compulsory subject at school from the ages of 11 to 16. I scraped through the exam with a grade C and haven’t studied another language since then. I’m now 35 and thought I’d try and learn another language. After browsing the web, I decided to use the French Assimil course. I started the course at the end of November and have just completed the last lesson today. I’m not yet at a stage where I could have a conversation in French. I know some people take longer than others to get to that stage and some people start speaking straight away. For me, I’m happy with my progress. If I were to listen again to any of the second wave lessons I would understand pretty much everything and with more recent lessons I would say I understand over 80%. Yet when it comes to trying to form my own sentences on the fly I struggle. But saying that, I struggle in my native language as well!!!
I completed the both types of exercises in the course. I treated the first one as a listening exercise and then reverted to reading if I couldn’t work out what was being said. I also found the written one useful even though most people say to skip it. I may have been a bit OTT but I also used a spaced repetition system to re-listen to and say out loud the whole lesson 1, 5 and 25 days after first completing it as well as the 50 day second wave. This added an extra 20-30 minutes to my daily session mind!
I still haven’t got a language partner but I think I’ll know when I’m ready.
All in all I enjoyed the whole course. I’ve bought the Using french course as well but I think I’m going to study here on LingQ until I’ve completed the whole of the second phase before I begin the next Assimil course.
You can import them on your own as private lessons. But don’t share them publicly because of the copyright. In the Task dropdown you’ll find “Import lesson”.
Hey Veral! I wasn’t able to express my self in the right way! In fact, I know that I can import the lessons! The problem is that I need the assimil archive in doc so it’s possible to have them imported in lingq, right?! I wasn’t able to find the assimil French to portuguese speakers in doc on the web and also tried to convert my pdf to word but it didn’t work out. Do you know how where can i find this doc?
No, I don’t know. And you can only find illegal copies of that on the internet as you may know. An OCR program should solve your problem to convert the pdf into doc.
I have some Assimil myself and it never came with a digital version of the text unfortunately. But I did hear from somebody on the forum here once that in a version of Assimil they had, the text was on one of the CDs. In that case, you can import it legally into LingQ, so long as you do not share it publically.
At assimil.fr it is possible to buy an application for your computer that includes the book, audio, and some activities. It would be pretty easy to copy and paste into lingq from there, and indeed it costs a bit less than a new copy of the book/cd set. i do not believe that this is available for any native languages other than French.
Tks guys!! It seems then that I really have to buy the assimil course so it will be possible to have the text pasted into lingQ since the e-course is in fact only avaiable in french and i couldn’t use the ocr for my archive.
If you need the lesson texts of the “Аssimil – Nеw Frеnch With Еase”, you may have a look here: http://francaischouette.wordpress.com/
The audio files / CDs may be borrowed from the public library…
Other Assimil languages: just google a sentence from the Assimil course, maybe you will find a digital version of the text for copy and paste…