Patterned response drills : These drills ask you a question and you have answer everytime with the same pattern. For example, if they ask you Ya sirvieron? you answer Están sirviendo ahora mismo, to Ya se despidieron? you answer Se están despidiendo ahora mismo, an so on. After a while you have understood the pattern, but the point here is not to check you understood but rather to build an automatism in your brain.

Situational drills : You have to remember that the drills described above have been developped by the military, and they inherited something from them. Actually, Dr Pimsleur thought he could improve tem by connecting them to a real life situation in the mind of the learners. So he made tapes where you are told things like "You are seating in a bus in St Petersbourg next to a young womand. How do you start conversation?" so as to make you find out by yourself how to say things that you will have to say in real life. They also have you make painless  inferences of syntaxic patterns like "In italian, you already know how to say he eats - mangia - and I eat -  mangio. So if we say parla for he speakes, how do you say I speak?" and so on.