Assimil French

"The first one is Assimil. It’s a language learning method. It’s French and it’s very traditional, it was founded in the 1920s. It’s very simple. When you open the page, you have one story on the left-hand side of the book, and you have the translation on the right-hand side. There’s audio as well. It’s a bit old style and traditional, but it’s very helpful, because you can control how fast you want to go. You can just do one story every day, or two or three a week, depending on how much time you have. The book I wrote is a little bit the same concept, you have one story per day. Have you heard about Assimil in England? Exactly. In my book, you have very little grammar. After each story, you have maybe one sentence explaining how you do the negative form, or what the plural or singular are or something like that. It’s very, very little. But, in the stories, you have questions and answers, people are talking all the time. So in fact you are in contact with a lot of grammar without being stuck in a lot of theoretical explanations. I moved to Berlin maybe eight or nine years ago, without knowing any German at all. So I started to try all the apps and books and everything. Language learning is a topic that is very interesting, because everybody has an opinion on it. We all went through this difficult process when we were in high school and everybody is very happy to complain about it and to talk about it. You have a lot of people online making videos, a lot of polyglots—people who are able to speak a lot of languages—explaining how they did it. “People who are absolute beginners will need audio” I think many methods are very boring and difficult, and others are pretty exciting. I’m a digital consultant, and I was initially working on a concept for an app. But there’s a lot of competition, so I wanted to do something a bit different, more niche, maybe working on the content. Online, I found a dictionary of cognates. A cognate is a transparent word, it’s the same in two languages. It was very impressive; I found a dictionary of 20,000 words that are the same in English and Spanish. I realized that in French it would be pretty much the same: there are a huge number of French words that are the same as in English. It doesn’t make any sense not to take those words into account when you learn a new language, because it’s a way to acquire way more words much more quickly—and to practise more as well. So I started writing very short sentences. In the beginning, I only had one page. Then two pages. I was testing it on English speakers. Then I thought, ‘maybe I can do short stories.’ I spent maybe five years on this, so maybe it’s a bit too much. But now I’m happy: I published it three months ago, in early November. The more methods and tools you have, the better it is. Assimil is an amazing method. You will have a bit more grammar stuff and explanations related to that. Also, it doesn’t use those transparent words. In my book, in 100 stories you get to learn the 500 most frequent French words plus 1200 transparent words. So, in three months, you learn 1600 words. That’s the idea, to just speed up learning. If they can already read a bit in French, they’re going to be able to use the book. But you might laugh a bit when you hear their pronunciation. I think that is a big problem with French and English, there is a big difference between the way they’re written and the way they’re pronounced. That’s why English is difficult for French people. When I was a teenager, I used to read books in English and then you start to invent your own pronunciation. I had to watch a lot of movies to kill those weird and fake pronunciations. People who are absolute beginners will need audio. My objective is, maybe in two or three months, to do an audio version because when you learn languages, it’s super important, especially at the beginning."