Assimil german without toil review
Although there are some black and white cartoons included in most lessons, there are no shiny colorful pictures.So the choices are somewhat limited, but if you’re looking to study any of the 10 languages listed here, then that’s not a problem. If you’re an English native speaker and you do not speak any Romance or Germanic languages fluently (such as French or German), you will only be able to purchase Assimil in 10 different languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish).Nevertheless, here are a few minor things that I could point out: Also, the passive phase (also known as “First Wave”), in which you only read and listen for the first 50 lessons, followed by the active phase (also known as “Second Wave”), in which exercises are added and reviews of previous lessons are encouraged, is a great idea that improves vocabulary retention and helps solidify learned concept and accelerate conversational fluency in the language.Īny downsides? Well, in fact, I’ve found this method surprisingly good and I haven’t found any major downsides to it. This makes it easier for you to divide your study time and to focus on one step at a time. The lessons are short enough to be studied within an hour (more or less), so they are easily digestible chunks of information.Therefore you learn sentences and patterns rather than words taken out of context, and I believe this is another one of Assimil’s strengths. Every single word you learn comes from the actual dialogues. Forget about long vocabulary lists to memorize. Since the method also tries to use as little English as possible, it gets you to think in the foreign language as soon as possible. When it comes to the dialogues, they are usually very practical, and contain words and phrases that you are very likely to use from “Day 1” when starting to speak a language with actual human beings.You’ll enjoy learning the language the fun way, without getting a headache. So if you are the type of person who has been traumatized by long verb tables and endless grammatical rules at school, this might be the exact fit for you. The grammatical concepts are presented at you through practical conversations, and you get to read short explanations about these concepts after having actually seen them used in actual conversations, which I think is really important. The strength of Assimil truly lies in the fact that you get to understand how the language works without any lengthy grammatical explanations.Besides all this, here are a few additional reasons I think this method deserves serious consideration: I’ve also had a few interviews with Luca Lampariello, an amazing language learner by any standards who speaks 12 languages to a level of fluency quite astonishing, and in Part 1 of our interview he says that this is the method he uses whenever possible to learn a new language.
I’ve personally found this method to work surprisingly well. It’s very intuitive, but at the same time there are helpful explanations about grammatical rules, idioms and other expressions in the footnotes. The word “Assimil” comes from assimilation, and as such the method encourages learners to “assimilate” the language, similarly to how you assimilated your mother tongue when you were a child.