Using Assimil

[FiveHippies]

I have been taking my language studies with Spanish seriously for about 2 years now, and I am now pretty fluent in the language. I am traveling to Europe this summer (Spain and France), and would like to speak French at a decent level before I go. I've also always just been interested in learning French. Unfortunately, until a few days ago, I haven't really taken much time to start my French studies. I took a basic French class in high school, however it moved very slowly because of the people in my class (note to highschoolers: don't take basic language classes senior year; you will grow tired of the freshmen). So anyways, I recently received Assimil's "French with Ease" course for English speakers. I am very impressed with how it's set up, and have completed 3 lessons so far. There are 113 lessons, and it is intended for you to complete 1 lesson a day. I was wondering, because I do not have enough time to complete all the lessons, would I still learn French effectively if I did 2 lessons a day, especially considering I already speak Spanish, or should I just do 1 lesson at a day to learn as much French as I can by the time I go to Europe in two months?

[spanglish1205]

I haven't used Assimil so I couldn't say for that method specifically. I think for a beginning crash course I think Pimsleur is awesome to give you a base conversational functionality in the language. Levels 1, 2 and 3 are 90 half hour lessons all together and its all audio so you could do it while driving to work. Even midway through level 2 I was functioning pretty well when traveling to Italy. Best of luck

[lushlala]

Assimil sounds like a fantastic way of learning a new language! I wouldn't mind giving it a go!

To be honest, I'd never heard of it until you mentioned it here. I think only you can answer your question, because only you know the level of your ability, and you have experience of the programme. So you're best placed to decide how many lessons are ok for you per day. I'd say do what feels right for you.

I've heard people say there are similarities between Latin languages, I have some basic French French and Italian, but never could pick up those similarities between the two or even between those and Spanish. Maybe it's just me

Good luck with everything and your trip to Europe. I hope you enjoy the experience

[anna3101]

Assimil is something that works well for some people and not so well for others. I belong to the latter category. It's too simplistic for me, I've tried learning Dutch this way and no, I'm not going to try it ever again. As a way to learn some useful phrases or repeat certain patterns - yes, for this purpose it works just fine. But I'd never be able to write and speak fluently if I used Assimil because for me grammar is an importand and indispensable part of language learning. For Assimil it isn't...

[Wanda Kaishin]

Assimil is probably the highest rated (by polyglots) multi-language program there is, but it doesn't work well for me either. To be fair though, I haven't used it from the beginning for a language that's supposed to be easy for native english speakers. I bought French to listen to in my car after I already had a good grasp on the language. It was fine for that purpose. But I used Russian from very early on and got results that weren't nearly as good as advertised. I'll probably never use it again.