Assimil - Swedish with ease

Hello dear readers.

It has been a few days since I published my latest article since I was quite busy within the last days.

Today I am going to talk about the Assimil Swedish with ease course. I bought it about a month ago and studied quite a bit with it. I will tell you about it in three steps:

1. How it works.
2. What I personally think of it.
3. How to integrate it into your learning progress and combining it with other methods.

1) How it works.

At the beginning there are some great information on the Swedish language, there is a introduction on how the method works in particular, then there are some pages introducing the Swedish pronounciation to you. It shows you similarities and differences between your mother tongue and the Swedish language by making use of examples of your native language. 

The method is quite similar to the Birkenbihl-Method I introduced in one of my last articles. 

First of all you have to listen to dialogs on audio cds while reading the spoken text. The basic idea behind it is that you get an understanding of the language sounds. You will automatically assimilate the foreign language structures. The dialogs will become more diverse and interesting as you go on in the book. And there is also a translation on the right side, while the Swedish texts are on the left side. Underneath the (in my case) German text, there are tips on some phrases and words, how to use them, what makes them special etc. The German (or in your case English, French... whatever) text is a translation that shows special phrases that are important using a word by word translation.

For example:

Sw:   Och du då? 
Ger:  Und du (denn)?

This is particularly important, because such phrases differ in many times (in similar languages like German and Swedish).

Notice: The Translation is not written in the Swedish manner but in the German one.

There are also some exercises in each chapter in which you train your auditive understanding and your hearing comprehension as well as others where you have to fill in a gap text. Every seventh lection is a revision chapter where the grammar is introduced to you systematically.

You can do this for the first 49 chapters. From chapter 50 onwards you have to translate the german texts into swedish ones. That is the point when you start building your own sentences and comparing them to the swedish original translation. It says that you will be surprised on how much you already know without ever having "learned" something in the way school teaches you rather than just listening.

2) What I think of Assimil

I love the dialogs. They deal with funny topics, they are written in colloquial Swedish with vocabulary you use at everyday conversation, not with useless ones about colours or animals. There are also great little comics beneath the dialogs which are quite funny drawn. 

What I also really appreciate is the fact that you do not focus on exercises and grammar as well as vocab lists (there is no single vocab list in the book). Indeed there are some exercises, but they are more like an addition to what you are doing primarlily. 

It is similar to the way I am learning languages. You listen a lot and read what you are listening to. But one problem I have got with it, the fact that you have no word-by-word translation, is the reason why I personally would change the method of learning. Another problem there is that the spoken texts do not always have a good quality, sometimes it seems like the speakers had no motivation at all doing there job. 

But what strikes me most is the price. The text book cost me about 25€. But in Addition you have to buy the cds which are about 70-80€ for every 50 chapters. The whole bundle is about 150€, whic is (in my opinion) far too expensive. Therefore I advise you to ask a native speaker for recording themself speaking the texts. You could do the same for their Assimil dialoges quid pro quo.

But concluding I want to say that I definetly recommend the book to you! The dialogs are fun to read and to listen to, the vocabulary used is useful, it makes language learning really easy.

3) How to incorporate it into your schedule.

As I said, it is similar to the Birkenbihl Method, but the translation of the Swedish dialogs are no word by word translations. Therefore it is useful to decode the dialogs first, then listen to them actively and then listen to them passively through the day. The exercises can be done as the 4th step of learning (doing actions).

You can also do it the way Assimil says to do, but I think if you do it as written above it may be more efficient, once you did the spadework. 

I would recommend to use Assimil in 5-10 minute-steps through the day and listening to the audio files in the background through the day.

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."                                                           - Mark Twain

Thank you for reading, best regards,
Alex.