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Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but after you

by Ovid 14y ago

Pimsleur is awesome for pronunciation (I've had a Dutch speaker tell me I sounded Dutch when I explained, in Dutch, that I couldn't speak Dutch), but after you finish the initial work, you get a rather limited vocabulary of about 500 words or so. Instead, many recommend using a serious course like Assimil, Michel Thomas, or Barron's (basically revamped versions of the Foreign Service Courses) with Pimsleur to help you perfect your grammar and pronunciation. It's a great balance.

smackfu 14y ago
Yeah, I found Pimsleur great for the quickie intro courses. Only covers the basic tourist stuff, but pronounced correctly, and well memorized. I did Spanish, Italian, and French, and felt fairly confident in my limited vocabulary. But when I tried to use the real Spanish I course, I found I wasn't really learning the language, but instead memorizing whole sentence translations. At a certain point, they try to get you to make the logical leap to something you haven't heard before, and I just couldn't get it. And repeating the lessons just improved my memorization, instead of giving me a framework to work on. I think I need the grammar to be explicit, while Pimsleur tries to have you learn it implicitly.
- purplelobster 14y ago
  Pimsleur is also great for making you more comfortable speaking the language. You can memorize thousands of words and expressions, but you need to be comfortable with them and be able to speak with a somewhat conversational speed for it to be useful. I also feel that the implicit grammar learning works fine for me. I had to memorize German grammar in school, and although I can still repeat my "durch, fur, gegen, ohne, um" and "an, auf, in, hinter, neben, uber, unter, vor, zwischen", and I was very good at grammar at the time, that hasn't helped me at all. To this day I can't speak German even though I was probably the "top" student (read: the only one who was motivated enough to care).
TillE 14y ago
Michel Thomas is probably the best crash course for grammar, though he's a little quirky and not for everyone. You'll need to supplement it with other resources for vocabulary and phrases. But if you actually follow the instructions to pause the recording and think whenever prompted, it's a great place to start truly learning a language.

by Ovid 14y ago

smackfu 14y ago

Yeah, I found Pimsleur great for the quickie intro courses. Only covers the basic tourist stuff, but pronounced correctly, and well memorized. I did Spanish, Italian, and French, and felt fairly confident in my limited vocabulary. But when I tried to use the real Spanish I course, I found I wasn't really learning the language, but instead memorizing whole sentence translations. At a certain point, they try to get you to make the logical leap to something you haven't heard before, and I just couldn't get it. And repeating the lessons just improved my memorization, instead of giving me a framework to work on. I think I need the grammar to be explicit, while Pimsleur tries to have you learn it implicitly.

purplelobster 14y ago
Pimsleur is also great for making you more comfortable speaking the language. You can memorize thousands of words and expressions, but you need to be comfortable with them and be able to speak with a somewhat conversational speed for it to be useful. I also feel that the implicit grammar learning works fine for me. I had to memorize German grammar in school, and although I can still repeat my "durch, fur, gegen, ohne, um" and "an, auf, in, hinter, neben, uber, unter, vor, zwischen", and I was very good at grammar at the time, that hasn't helped me at all. To this day I can't speak German even though I was probably the "top" student (read: the only one who was motivated enough to care).

TillE 14y ago

Michel Thomas is probably the best crash course for grammar, though he's a little quirky and not for everyone. You'll need to supplement it with other resources for vocabulary and phrases. But if you actually follow the instructions to pause the recording and think whenever prompted, it's a great place to start truly learning a language.