My Honest Review of Assimil Spanish

If you’re looking to learn a new language, especially if you plan on doing it on

your own, one of the best ways to get started is with a self-study book. There
are a lot of them out their but one of the biggest names you’ll hear out there is
Assimil, a French company started by Alphonse Chérel in 1929. They offer a
wide range of languages, though most of their titles are only published in French
with a fraction available in English.
In this review I’m going to talk about my personal experience with the 1987
version of the “Assimil Spanish with Ease”. The Spanish taught is standard
European and some of the expressions you’ll find will not make sense to people
from Latin America but Spanish is Spanish and this won’t be much of a problem
in all honesty.
The course is set up as follows:
The book has 109 lessons. The intention is to do one lesson per day which
would give you a 16 week course. The first 6 lessons of every week have
parallel texts, Spanish on the left English and the right, and foot notes that give
useful information on vocabulary, grammar and cultural references. There are
also two short exercises at the end of each lesson, but I never did them. Every
seventh lesson is a review of the content encountered in the previous six
lessons. Each lesson except the review lessons is accompanied by an audio of
the Spanish, usually a dialogue followed by a series of sentences intended to
be used in exercises. The speed is a lot slower than normal speech which is
intended to make it easier for the learner to understand but gets extremely
annoying once you reach higher levels and want something a bit more natural.
When I used it I focused mostly on shadowing, where you listen to the speaker
and repeat their words as closely as you can. I would listen to the audio to
understand, then go through the footnotes and parallel texts to understand
everything I missed. Once I was confident I knew what was going on I would
shadow the text, first listening and reading, then just listening until I could speak
at the same rate as the speakers and understand 80-100% of the lesson.
How I used it
While using the book I had my own personal learning strategy which I’ll share
with you.
1. Listen to the audio without reading
2. Listen to the audio while reading
3. Read all the notes and look up all the words, phrases and structures I don’t
understand so I can get the full meaning of the dialogue
4. Listen again without reading
5. Listen again while reading
6. Shadow while reading
7. Shadow without reading
(Shadowing is a technique where you repeat what the speaer says as closely
as possible)
8. Listen to the audio and transcribe it
This last step helps keep what I’ve learned in my memory.
Now let’s look at what I liked and disliked about this book after having gone
through all of it.
The Good Parts
1. NO English
My number one favourite thing about this book is that there is absolutely
no English on the audios. It’s purely in the target language. Nothing
makes my ears bleed more than an annoying ‘instructor’ telling you in
their best receptionist’s voice that you will now listen to section X of
lesson Y then do exercise Z.
The audio is also really clear, words properly enunciated, no
background noise, it’s great for shadowing; all in all great for beginners.
2. A lot of content
Language learning is all about input. You need to ingest A LOT of
content to learn the vocabulary and develop the comprehension skills to
understand a language and Assimil definitely gets you there.
3. Wide range of topics
you’ll encounter dialogues about the country side, city, beach vacations,
poetry, the market etc. It gives you a lot of exposure to more than just
introductions and tourist phrases that many other books focus on so it
can be a welcome change from another book you may be working with.
4. Absolute best approach to grammar
Grammar in this course is literally a footnote. It’s an afterthought and the
author makes no attempt to bog you down with lengthy explanations or
tedious grammar exercises that will not help-
The Bad Parts
1. NOT colloquial
Despite what Assimil might tell you the language of these books is
certainly not every day. It’s standard and neutral so you won’t sound like
Macbeth but it’s definitely not colloquial; the style is stiff and the
dialogue formal. I’ve shown this book to native speakers and they find
some of it hard to follow and full of big words.
2. Dry, sometimes bizarre content.
The content can get pretty boring at times. It does not spark joy. A lot of
the contexts are not the sort of ordinary conversations that a beginner
would normally encounter and some of them are just wack. The lessons
dealing with the character Baldomero are a perfect example of this.
Really weird story full of useless vocab that just begs the question “Why
is this even in here?” I think the irony was lost on the author when he
spoke of “his extraordinary faculty of boredom”
3. Pacing
The progression of the lessons is inconsistent. The book does not
slowly build you up to more advanced topics and structures in a
meaningful way. One lesson will jump to a level much higher than the
one before it and several lessons further down the line have a level
much lower than the ones around it for no apparent reason. I found that
at one point it became too difficult to follow and I had to leave the book
for a couple weeks and come back.
4. Lack of cultural references
They do briefly touch on the autonomous regions and mention a few
major cities but I didn’t learn all that much about Spain. Maybe this was
intentional but I think more effort could have been made.
5. Audio is too slow
In the beginning it’s nice because you can actually follow what they’re
saying but this speed never changes. It gets really annoying as you
progress and also leaves you high and dry as you don’t get exposure to
native like speech you would actually hear in real life.
Final Thoughts
After having gone through all 109 lessons several times I must say that this
book is one of the main reasons I speak Spanish today. Despite its flaws it does
outshine a lot of other materials out there because of its approach.
Don’t use this book if you’re an absolute beginner. The speed picks up quickly
after the first week and you won’t be able to follow. Get a little bit of exposure
from some other beginner course and then add Assimil to your regimen. Take
it with a grain of salt as well. You don’t have to learn everything last thing in the
book especially when considering some of the really weird vocab in it.

I personally like Assimil and this book gets my approval.