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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,
by 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 agoPimsleur 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).