Incredibly frustrated with Assimil Spanish with Ease...what is this garbage? | General discussion | Forum
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18:42
November 21, 2011
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I am currently working my way through Assimil's Spanish with Ease, 1987 edition. The Assimil series gets pretty rave reviews on other sites, so I picked up this book as the next step in my Spanish learning process. I've been using this book for months now, and I have to say, that I have never been more frustrated with anything in my entire life. The idea behind this language learning method is intuitively deducing the rules of the target language by analyzing the English to Spanish translation that is provided. It also provides literal translation which really helps me grasp how to "think in Spanish." This is a pretty good method I would think. However, it hinges on one very important point, you have to provide the learner with a CORRECT, PRECISE TRANSLATION. Besides the fact that the book is absolutely loaded with typographical mistakes, let me give you an example of how it confuses the learner with bizarre, arbitrary translation:
I liked what I saw. --> Lo que he visto me ha gustado.
…really? So if I'm supposed to intuitively deduce language concepts from that translation, I just walked away thinking that "he visto" means "I saw", and that "me ha gustado" means "I liked".
"He visto" means "I have seen". It is present perfect tense. "I saw" is past tense and the only correct way to interpret this is "Vi". I don't care who you are or what your "learning style" is, this is incorrect. This is as incorrect as translation "dog" to "gato". In fact, it's worse because it's so much more subtle. Don't even get me started on their translation of "me ha gustado".
This book is absolutely loaded with crap like this.
I also ran into issues when I moved on to the Active Phase where you are supposed to return to earlier lessons and translate them from English to Spanish. I'm finding that I'm not able to do this accurately because of Assimil's aforementioned arbitrary, crap translations. If you ask me to translate "I liked what I saw" into Spanish, I'm going to tell you "Me gustó lo que vi" because that is the most simplistic, accurate translation.
I'm simply baffled by the amount of people praising Assimil (not as much on this forum as much as others). Can anyone confirm that this is just a problem affecting "Spanish with Ease?" Is FSI the only other method out there which is as comprehensive as Assimil? Are there any other products that provide literal translation?
Thanks for listening to my rant. :-)
01:37
August 19, 2012
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Sorry, I don't know a lick of Spanish, so maybe my answer is totally off base, but have you considered the possibility that perhaps using the past tense produces the most natural and fluent sounding English expression, and using the present perfect tense produces the most natural and fluent sounding Spanish sentence?
I've learned quite a few languages, and one thing that is constant among all these languages is that tense conversions never quite match up, and most of the time you end up using different tenses to produce natural sounding expressions.
In other words, it's a problem of thinking in your source language, not your target language. If you ask me to translate "I liked what I saw" into whatever language I know that you want me to translate it into, I'm not going to go for the most 'simplistic, accurate' translation as you put it, I'm going to go for the most natural, elegant translation. And that requires thinking in the target language, not the source language.
Again, I know 0 Spanish outside of leche, agua, and yo quiero taco bell, so it's quite possible I'm off base here. Just an idea though.
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16:11
Experienced Language Hacker
July 9, 2011
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No, no, divisortheory….I agree 100%
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12:02
November 21, 2011
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divisortheory said
Sorry, I don't know a lick of Spanish, so maybe my answer is totally off base, but have you considered the possibility that perhaps using the past tense produces the most natural and fluent sounding English expression, and using the present perfect tense produces the most natural and fluent sounding Spanish sentence?I've learned quite a few languages, and one thing that is constant among all these languages is that tense conversions never quite match up, and most of the time you end up using different tenses to produce natural sounding expressions.
In other words, it's a problem of thinking in your source language, not your target language. If you ask me to translate "I liked what I saw" into whatever language I know that you want me to translate it into, I'm not going to go for the most 'simplistic, accurate' translation as you put it, I'm going to go for the most natural, elegant translation. And that requires thinking in the target language, not the source language.
Again, I know 0 Spanish outside of leche, agua, and yo quiero taco bell, so it's quite possible I'm off base here. Just an idea though.
That's an interesting point of view. In this case, and in the other cases as far as I remember, the choice of translation seemed to be due more to carelessness and nothing else (since the original Assimil books were published in French). In Spanish, besides in a couple of very obvious cases, tenses match up fairly cleanly.
Assuming that you're correct in your statement though, I make the argument that this learning material would be FORCING me to think in my source language as opposed to my target language, as many do. In fact, this is my biggest complaint about the Spanish learning material in English that I have found is that they don't use enough literal translation to force you to start thinking in Spanish language constructs. For me, the most beneficial translation of:
"Lo que he visto me ha gustado"
would be a direct translation:
"It that I have seen me it has pleased"
and if the writer of the text felt that the translation was getting confusing, an additional idiomatically adjusted (minimally) translation such as:
"It that I have seen has pleased me"
I have no desire to use language learning methods which severely adjusts translations to hide the "weirdness" of the target languages grammar rules, because if you don't learn these rules (consciously or unconsciously), you're simply parroting phrases.
12:08
November 21, 2011
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By the way, I'm a huge fan of the methods used by Michel Thomas and Paul Noble. Although the material isn't perfect, I have had the most success with it by a long shot. If only it was as comprehensive as FSI or Assimil…
05:06
August 17, 2012
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I have no idea about this.
06:06
June 25, 2011
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The truth is, many bad language learning books exist.
If it was bad, why keep with it for months, rather than finding a book that presents a better way of learning?
The fact that it is the 1987 version may have something to do with its teaching strategy, I'm pretty sure in 25 years, language learning methods have changed 
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09:22
July 5, 2011
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Assimil courses are generally excellent but I've heard that there are some exceptions, like the infamously badly-translated Using Spanish. Also, as much as I like the ones I've used, I don't think I'd recommend it as a first course, despite it being marketed towards beginners – it throws a lot of things at you at once which probably won't make much sense if you're not familiar with at least the basic structure of the language, which is taught well by Michel Thomas for example.
I've seen a couple of Assimil Italian books (French base) from the 80s, and they were well-made although noticeably more heavy-going than the more recent ones.
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09:42
July 1, 2011
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jrb0234 said
with bizarre, arbitrary translation:I liked what I saw. --> Lo que he visto me ha gustado.
"Lo que he visto me ha gustado" is more likely to translate as "I liked what I saw", at least, in Castilian dialect. See, in Spain the present perfect is used for things that have happened today, so "I liked what I saw this morning" would use the present perfect (lo que he visto mañana me ha gustado, although in Latin America I think they'd say "lo que vi mañana me gustó"). And the phrase "I have liked what I have seen" wouldn't be nearly as common as that.
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21:41
May 23, 2012
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logie100 said
The truth is, many bad language learning books exist.If it was bad, why keep with it for months, rather than finding a book that presents a better way of learning?
The fact that it is the 1987 version may have something to do with its teaching strategy, I'm pretty sure in 25 years, language learning methods have changed
They have, language theory is a rapidly evolving area of knowledge. But, by 1987 most of the worst stuff was already identified as garbage. You still even now have people that believe in grammar translation as a means of learning a language, but for the most part the techniques in the '80s were at least competent.
There are some weird ones like desuggestopedia which appears to me to be begging for a copious amount of THC and the silent approach which is probably at least as bizarre given that the teacher only speaks infrequently, but there are merits to them and times when the ideas are useful. Grammar translation is pretty much completely worthless under all situations.
Ultimately, after months of study, one should be making definite progress. I'm personally partial to what Benny suggests, but that's mostly because it is a relatively close match for what I had been doing for myself prior to seeing his book. Not to mention that it correlates well with the training I had during my TESL.
TL;DR, not all methods are equally likely to work, but any method will work for some students. But if it works, then it works, even if the reasons behind the method are nuts.
EDIT: @divisortheory, that's a safe statement to make in general. English in particular has had the misfortune of having these tenses and such named in counter intuitive ways. Usually by grammarians wishing to make it like Latin. It's still hit or miss, but people are better off comparing the function of the tense or whatever of the two languages rather than the labels applied. Or really, nixing it completely and just focus on how to communicate whatever it is that one wants to communicate.
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