Assimil Review

Assimil Review

Average cost of the method: ~$50-125 for the Book + CDs Edition or MP3

Available in: 10 languages offered for English speakers learning another language, and many more for French and other European language speakers.

Type of method: Dialogues with minor grammatical explanations in footnotes. Audio, entirely in the target language, is included.

Assimil is personally one of my favorite language learning methods, and it’s the favorite one of  many  well-known polyglots.

Although Assimil is not that well-known in North America, it is an extremely popular method in Europe. While it’s probably not the cheapest alternative you can find out there among available language textbooks (roughly $50 to $125 for both the book and CDs), it’s still reasonably priced, and it’s an option seriously worth considering because of the quality and effectiveness of the method. So what is it, how do you use it, and why do I recommend it?

Overview

Assimil is a French company, and the series was created back in 1929 by Alphonse Chérel. The company publishes several different series, but their most widely published one is the “With Ease” series for beginners. This series enables beginners to acquire an average vocabulary of 2,000 to 3,000 words, learn the basic grammar rules, and gain a command of everyday conversation. The “With Ease Series” takes you to Level B2 [high-intermediate] of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in a few months. The “Advanced” (or “Using”) series is aimed at more advanced learners, and teaches more advanced idiosyncrasies and idioms of the target language.

Assimil is available, on the whole, in more than 100 languages, although if you are a native English speaker you will only be able to purchase the books in 10 different languages. For an exhaustive list of the available languages, please visit this Wikipedia page.

How Does It Work?

Assimil is focused on learning whole sentences, for an organic learning of the grammar. It begins with a long passive phase of only reading and listening, and eventually adds active exercises. The “With Ease” series consist of a coursebook with 100 lessons on average (~4-6 pages/lesson), with the active phase starting on Lesson 50. The “Advanced” series is very similar, except that there is no “passive phase” as in the “With Ease” version. Each lesson includes a short dialogue, getting progressively longer throughout the book, written in the target language, together with a translation after each dialogue, as well as short exercises to test your comprehension.

                                                A page of a lesson from Assimil’s Chinese method.

You are recommended to spend as much time on each lesson as needed and to review them every once in a while. Generally speaking, though, going through one lesson should take you anywhere from one to three days. As you follow through the dialogues, you listen to the audio and read through. The audio does not contain any lengthy explanations in English; it is 100% in the target language.

Good Points

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. It’s very intuitive, but at the same time there are helpful explanations about grammatical rules, idioms and other expressions in the footnotes. I’ve personally found this method to work surprisingly well. Here are a few additional reasons I think this method deserves serious consideration:

1.         The strength of Assimil truly lies in the fact that you get to understand how the language works without any lengthy grammatical explanations. 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. 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. You’ll enjoy learning the language the fun way, without getting a headache.

2.         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. 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.

3.         You learn words from context. Forget about long vocabulary lists to memorize. Assimil has no such thing. Every single word you learn comes from the actual dialogues. Therefore you learn sentences and patterns rather than words taken out of context, and I believe this is another one of Assimil’s strengths.

4.         The lessons are short enough to be studied within an hour (more or less), so they are easily digestible chunks of information. This makes it easier for you to divide your study time and to focus on one step at a time. 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.