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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5444 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes  Speaks: Swedish* | Message 41 of 104 06 November 2009 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's OK with me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5934 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 42 of 104 07 November 2009 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Mainstream Multiple Intelligence Theory disagrees with you. Pimsleur should be about as effective for visual learners as for anyone else. Multiple Intelligence doesn't only talk about materials or sources of information when it discusses learning styles, but what you do with it. A "visual learner" would naturally visualise a situation, given a description of it. One of the core principles of the Pimsleur program over earlier audiolingual techniques was the inclusion of a coherent situation that could be easily visualised. Prompts like "The hotel is over there" were explicitly designed to conjure up an image in the learner's mind. As for "poor audio ability", I disagree again. Pimsleur is bad for anyone with average audio ability. How so? The human brain is very good at approximating, particularly with sounds. Over the course of our lives, we learn to match unusual spoken sounds to the nearest known equivalent. This is how we understand people with different accents from our own. While you might argue that there's accents in English that you don't understand, there is still a wide variety of accents that you are familiar with. I tried the Pimsleur Hindi. I stopped halfway through the first lesson. Why? Because I heard a "D" sound, and it sounded to me like an English D. I already knew a bit of Hindi, so I knew that there are 4 D sounds in Hindi, and that none of them exists in English (excluding Indian English, of course). I therefore wasn't able to reproduce the word and was aware that any future exposure to words with one of the other 3 Ds was going to lead to me confusing them. This would be less of a problem for a language with fewer sounds, but it is very difficult for the average person to discover new phonemes just by listening.
Yes it is. Live is for living; for feeling alive. Learning is one of the most stimulating activities I know. I feel alive when I am riding my bike down a busy street and I feel just as alive when new ideas start opening up to me. Learning is constant discovery. Pimsleur is boring because the discovery of new stuff is too diluted by clumsy repetition.
In other words, it's too slow. Slow = boring.
One of the things that I do like about the Pimsleur methodology is that it does teach grammar. It doesn't really make you guess or infer most of the language -- it makes it clear what needs to be changed and prompts you to change it. It does this fairly subtly, but it's fully directed learning nonetheless. "Learning grammar" does not merely mean "memorising rules and tables". 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Urban_Sasquatch Newbie United States Joined 5424 days ago 11 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 43 of 104 07 November 2009 at 1:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know about "mainstream" but I recall visualizing Multiple Intelligences when I was a pretty young child (I'm 42 now), long before it was ever anything resembling a mainstream notion. I recall how limited and fallacious that whole IQ deal seemed to me based on something as simple as an antisocial academic incapable of coping with others versus an uneducated lout who knew how to dress-to-impress and schmooze people to the tune of success. It seemed to me that certain people have different forms of intelligence, some of them not really quantifiable by any verifiable means. When the Multiple Intelligences theory was first presented that was what it was based upon. I was about 15 when the first guy presented his argument to the measure of IQ and I thought "Wow, it seemed so obvious to me as a child, how could they NOT have thought of this before?" I'm plenty sure lots of people HAD, but "IQ" was what we KNEW, et cetera, ad nauseum for the whys and wherefores of human psychology en masse. These days we've "learned a lot about multiple intelligence theory" -- operative word: Theory, operative concept: What we "know" today changes tomorrow. Multiple Intelligences does not negate the notion of intelligences in varying strengths, especially with weird stuff such as linguistics, and that leaves a LOT of room for not only play, but discovery. When I first joined the Air Farce (not a typo) and knew that after Basic Training I was to be sent to DLI, I knew nothing about linguistics or language learning, only knew that I could mimic sounds well. I also only knew that the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) was the hardest test I'd ever taken -- yet I was the ONLY person to pass it in a room of about sixty people, all of whom made me feel stupid by declaring how easy it was as we left the testing area. I scored nearly perfect. During Basic, I was sent one day to a room filled with other DLI-bound folks and we were given an experimental test, in its developmental stages. Put simply, the test force-fed us bits and pieces of actual languages, all chopped up, for about 1.5-2 hours and then sent us to lunch. When we returned, we were tested on retention. I scored a 98 and 99 percentile in Arabic and Mandarin (respectively) yet only a 53 in Russian, barely qualifying. I was a stupid kid who'd never really been out in the world, so when I should have picked one of those two for my future I instead chose Russian because the pretty girl next to me did so and I hadn't seen a woman in weeks. Yes, clearly stupid on my part. I struggled with Russian daily, despite being able to mimic the sounds like no other in my class. It was like beaded water on glass, just sliding away, leaving minutes traces which indicate a water-trail. Somewhere in the 9th or 10th month something clicked and it began to stick but by then I was nearing graduation -- near the bottom of my class (unlike the other 250 who totally washed out). DLI teaches, but the military doesn't properly use or support, and my language worsened over time through a lack of practice. During a later tour in Italy I had a friend who spoke fluent French and who was a wonderful Russian linguist -- yet for reasons we never quite fathomed, Italian would just slide away from him. He could learn several new phrases easily, but a week later they had nearly vanished. Meanwhile, Italian was no problem at all for me. That simply doesn't make sense, especially with the French background. I'm positive that test in Basic was designed based on observation of that same phenomenon, but likely didn't achieve a lot of data because I asked and later generations of linguist never heard of such a test. Multiple Intelligences does not necessarily discount any notion of "multiple learnings", I'd suggest. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6832 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 44 of 104 07 November 2009 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I've finished all three volumes in three languages - German, Mandarin and Russian, and also German Plus. At the same time I've studied Mandarin and Russian at the university. While I feel that I two years ago had learned more "active" Mandarin via pimsleur than in class, this wasn't at all the case with Russian. As for Mandarin, I've learned a lot of grammar, sentence patterns and much more thanks to my, well, "real" studies. On the whole, I enjoyed studying with Pimsleur, but I was totally aware that I wouldn't reach "fluency" with that method alone. Doing Pimsleur before other courses can be good if they are more "advanced" (but if you go straight to an advanced course after Pimsleur, I imagine it's a huge gap). It is not "necessary" if all of your courses start on a basic level. It's not a bad thing to study several courses at the same time ("in tandem"), and that may in fact help, since they provide another view of the same grammar, supplemental vocabulary and more. If I were you (and liked the first ten lessons), I'd probably have a look at 10-20 if I could get them for a low price. I would also check out other material (for the above reasons). Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 07 November 2009 at 4:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5444 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 45 of 104 07 November 2009 at 7:42pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I can relate to this. My memory is generally good but Russian words just don't stick, at least not when I make an effort to memorize them. Now Russian is the only language where I have even tried to make wordlists, but that was a complete washout. I would write down twenty or fifty words or something, and manage to learn them to some extent after an hour of hard labour. But then the next day, not only didn't I not remember them when prompted in Swedish or English, even hearing the Russian word would ring no bell whatsoever, gone without the slightest trace! So I stopped trying to memorize words, learned them through reading instead, using the patented method of not looking a word up unless you've read it three times and still don't understand it from the context. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tpark Tetraglot Pro Member Canada Joined 6969 days ago 118 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, German, Dutch, French Personal Language Map | Message 46 of 104 08 November 2009 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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With Pimsleur, you will be able to survive on your diet of red wine and rib steaks. It's not enough for fluency, but I think it's still useful.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5444 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 47 of 104 08 November 2009 at 10:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Perhaps, but since most poeple have limited amounts of free time, it makes sense to compare different courses and choose the more efficient one! I think Pimsleur has its merits, but it's excruciatingly slow on the whole, which drives at least me mad when I try to use it... Edited by Gusutafu on 08 November 2009 at 1:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Urban_Sasquatch Newbie United States Joined 5424 days ago 11 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 48 of 104 08 November 2009 at 1:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I haven't tried, nor even looked at Assimil, Gusutafu (I like the name, by the way, reminds me of living in Japan and pressing my remote control and saying "kuricku" instead of "click"), but I know that Pimsleur holds the merit I've already mentioned for myself, being perfectly suited to my commute.
Where I may (or may not) differ from others' use of the course is that in having already learned a couple of foreign languages, I have ideas about how to make the best use of my learning experience. For example, already knowing some Spanish vocabulary I actively substitute words for those initially learned via Pimsleur. I not only repeat the Pimsleur exercises as spoken on the cd, once the lesson is finished I'll go back and substitute other vocab in order to reinforce new grammar points. If a particular portion of a lesson strikes me vividly or imparts genuinely new material (as in something I hadn't learned via previous language studies or something specific to Spanish) I'll actually PAUSE the cd and make those same sort of substitution/repetitions to hammer that new point home. I think about and strive to improve my vocabulary <I>actively</I> at various other times during the day via a book wherein vocab is organized by topic and subject matter. When I repeat the day's lesson the following morning, I can now rattle off several new words in place of the one given on the audio. And that works for me. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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