Assimil-ating non-Assimil materials

In my last post, I mentioned that I'd been playing around with an idea similar for getting similar benefits to the Assimil programs out of non-Assimil books. Today, I'd like to look at what I've been doing and how it works. This starts by considering just what it is that makes Assimil work, so let's start there.

Assimil books, as those who have used them know, work with facing page translations and extensive notes. The basic idea is that while working with the target language text, you can use your own language as a guide to what's going on. At a more advanced level, this can be problematic - the further you get into a language, the more you need to make it your own, not just a translation of a language you already speak. However, by the time people get to the advanced Assimil courses, they're mostly reading the target language text and glancing at their own language to double-check that they've understood, not to figure out what is being said. So what Assimil does is to give beginners a clear idea what's going on in the target language and advanced learners lots of good reading content. Cue the Michel Thomas quote:

What you understand, you know. And what you know, you do not forget.

There are lots of language textbooks out there that give you dialogs with translations. And there are others that eschew translations but have extensive notes, grammar explanations, etc. What happens in both cases, however, is that the learner has trouble assimilating the language because either it is unclear which words connect with which in the translations, or it is difficult to read the dialogs without turning it into a decoding exercise in flipping between the vocabulary, grammar explanations and the text.

What I have been doing with a Uighur textbook, Greetings from the Teklimakan, is to create a sort of passive phase Assimil course without an Assimil book. Here's what I do:

1) Learn the vocabulary list by whatever means necessary: link words, associations with words from other languages, etc. The technique is not important, because you only need to remember for five to ten minutes

2) Read the dialogs as best you can. Don't worry about understanding how everything goes together, about grammar rules, or whatever. Just try to make some basic sense of what's interacting with what.

3) Skim the grammar summaries, paying attention only to the sections with charts or endings. The idea is not to learn the endings, just to recognize what letter combinations are endings and whether they go with nouns, adjectives or verbs.

4) Re-read the dialog, seeing if you now recognize words you previously didn't since you've got a better idea what's the root and what's an ending.

5) Re-read the dialog once more and see if anything new falls into place.

6) Re-read the dialog the next day. If you think you mostly understand it, you can move on to the next one. If you've got doubts, repeat steps 1-5.

At no point should you actually try to learn anything. This is the passive phase. The idea, rather, is to get to where you're reading text in your target language and sort of understand what's going on.

A last thing: Every five lessons, you should probably skim the last five lessons and make sure they make at least as much sense as when you worked through them the first time.

I did the above with the Uyghur text for the first five lessons, including the re-read of all five lessons' dialogs. What I found is that my understanding of lesson 1-4 was actually pretty solid. Lesson 5 was weaker, but after a second reading, it started falling into place.

Note that if you want to, you can also put the words into Anki or somesuch. I did this, but I find that my recall is far better seeing the words in the context of the dialogs I know them from than in isolation.

When I have read all fifteen chapters this way, I will go back and work through the course - I haven't found a good version of Assimil's active phase to effectively apply yet. The nice thing about this system so far, though, is that I've built a passive vocabulary of around 300 words and I've learned a half-dozen structures without actively trying to learn any. And, I expect, working through the lessons when I'm done with this should be a breeze, since by then I'll be a false-beginner, not a neophyte.

The main thing we're looking at here, as is so often the case on this blog, is creating comprehensible input. New to a language and having trouble finding good materials for beginners? Apply this method to your materials as best you can and work a little ways into your text. Then, when you start to work in earnest, you'll have already assimilated hundreds of words of vocabulary and a few basic sentence types and you can get started with the "whys" of a language you already speak a little bit of, instead of everything being brand new.

Keeping Resolutions, and an update

Making resolutions/setting intentions is easy at New Year's. Especially if you've had enough bubbly and are feeling really good about the world. But the follow-through is harder. The most common resolutions revolve around diets and getting fit. J.D. Johannes and Nita Marquez did a series of posts about just this, but with good advice for all "resolutioneers," starting with this:

It is better to set a lower, attainable and more realistic goal. When you reach it, you can set a new goal or easily maintain it.

Nita, over the years, has found that people who set an un-realistic goal are actually sabotaging themselves. When they ‘discover’ they cannot reach the goal they have a justification to quit.

She has also found that people will work harder to achieve a lesser goal and usually surpass it.

Looking at my intentions and jump-off points, if I simply listen to CDs 8 hours a month for four months, I'll be well over half-way through the jump-off points. I did this on purpose: I wanted easy ways to make a strong start where I could pat myself on the back.

But what if you fall of the wagon? Again from Johannes and Marquez, but here:

“I think the one thing that people have realize is that small changes can lead to big results,” says Dr. Helen Smith, a Knoxville, TN psychologist and exercise enthusiast. “A person should set goals having to do with action.”

Smith says it is better to break it down into individual actions. Small steps, small daily decisions like eating a grilled chicken breast instead of a breaded, fried chicken breast, as noted above, can make a significant difference.

“It is better to break it down and then check off that you did it,” Smith says.
And if you slip once, do not let it snowball. Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t throw it all away. A few hours later you will have another decision and try to get it right that time.

Diets don’t work because people make one mistake and decide to quit. Diets don’t work because some people keep making the wrong decisions.

So if you look up and realize you didn't study yesterday, what can you do? Study now! And if you look up and realize you didn't do anything all last week? Do something now! Even if you're doing a really intense self-study program, say 4 hours a day, that's still 20 hours a day that you're not studying. So don't focus on what you're not doing or when you're not doing it. Focus on the things you actually do, and pat yourself on the back for them. A day of studying missed can be followed by another day of not studying because you'll never find time to learn anyway. Or it can be followed by a day when you do study and pat yourself on the back for having the good sense to get back on track.

(By the way, if you want to be a toned, trim, fantastic looking polyglot, check out JD Johannes' site and get the book.)

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Update

Now that I've looked at resolutions in general, how am I doing so far this year?

My intentions and jump-off points, again, are here.

For the month of January, I ran through Michel Thomas Spanish again. So that's one thing I can check off. And I did the first 18 lessons of Assimil Latin. That's not exactly a lesson a day, but it's a start.

And a final update: The other day, I mentioned stumbling into a different approach to using link-learning for vocabulary with a more traditionally formatted textbook. As I've played with this, I've found some new ideas for what you might call "Assimil-ating" an old-style book. My next post will include some ideas on this and a progress update on how that's going.

Sad News for Language Program Junkies

A bit of sad news for language lovers out there. After years in business, AudioForum is shutting down February 10th. Prior to the internet and amazon.com, the audio-forum catalog was a wonder to behold, offering a surprising range of courses for languages both familiar and unheard of. Unfortunately, excepting the Language/30 courses, most of their offerings were beyond what a hobbyist could reasonably spend on the off-chance that learning Russian, Estonian, Ojibwe or Kannada might one day seem like a good idea.

The only course I ever bought from them was their Colloquial Uzbek pack (sadly not nearly as good as the Routledge Colloquial series) and at the time it was a stretch - $85 for a spiral bound book and 4 CDs for a language I was interested in but had no practical reason to learn. (Still don't, but I'm still studying it, and its sister language, Uyghur.)

Anyway, their inventories are low, but what's left is 65% off. This still leaves a lot of stuff at $100 or so, but it may be the last shot you'll get at some of it. The store is here.

Reviewing with Michel Thomas; Haitian Creole

Readers of this site know that I've been running through Michel Thomas Spanish for the second time. In fact, I'm halfway through disc 8 now and will finish it tomorrow. I hadn't done Michel Thomas Spanish since 1998 or 1999, however, so while the content wasn't new I didn't have the script running through my head (I'd certainly forgotten how hard he harps on stress placement, for example). However, next month, I'm doing Italian. This promises to be trickier because I ran through the first six or seven discs only two years ago and while I'd like the review, I also want something more interesting. Here's what I came up with:

Oh the joys of technology! Once you put a playlist on your iPod, you can listen to it in order or you can put it on shuffle and it will play the tracks in random order. If you're learning with Michel Thomas (or any other progressive course) for the first time, of course you need to do the lessons in order. But what I'm looking for is a survey to make sure there's nothing I've forgotten. Mixing it up is a plus. So I've created a playlist for the discs I've already listened to. I'll listen on shuffle. That way instead of the five-six minute lesson blocks building up, bit by bit, they'll function more as pop quizzes - if I recognize a track as one where the content was easy, I'll skip it; if I remember getting caught on a point or two (or don't remember it that well), I'll listen. I already did this with the first two discs of Spanish since I had taken a few days off and found the variety made it much less tedious than playing the course straight forward and trying to pick out the best places to skip ahead a little.

If you've got a 30 lesson program, you can also do this with Pimsleur, picking up a language you did a while ago and only doing the lessons where the opening dialog doesn't immediately sound familiar.

Speaking of the shuffling, you can also use this for certain types of vocabulary review. For example, if you go to the DLI field support site, you can download the audio for a lot of their phrasebooks. If you make a playlist for each section, then you can review the same lists without driving yourself bonkers repeating the same things in the same sequence 100 times. (I think I've talked about this before).

The basic lesson for today then: If repetition is the mother of learning and variety is the spice of life, using shuffle and playlists will give you a bit of both.

(By the way, I wrote about some of this here quite some time ago. And for those who are really serious about their playlists, here's an old John Biesnecker article that's well worth reading if you haven't seen it before.)

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One other note: With the sad events in Haiti, Haitian Creole resources are popping up. Whether you're planning to go there, think you might work with Haitian refugees resettled in your area or simply think it would show a little cultural solidarity to have a few words of their language on your tongue, let me point out two resources: First of all, there's the DLI field support site that I linked above. The link on the front page didn't work for me, but if you download the PDF and the Basic LSK from the downloads page, these should work. And, if you go to audible.com, you can download the first ten Pimsleur lessons for free (you do have to register for the site if you don't already have an account).