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Pimsluer Spanish Advice. On lesson 29 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Kunji Newbie United States Joined 4073 days ago 19 posts - 24 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 13 17 November 2013 at 6:08am | IP Logged |
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I listen to Pimsluer once on the way to work and once on the way home. When i first
started I only needed to listen to each lesson once. the first week I was having no issue completing 2 lessons a day so after the first week I was about half way finished with level 1. Then it started to get a little harder. I started listing to each lesson twice. The same lesson on the way to work and on the way home. This worked well until I got to lesson 27. When I hit lesson 27 it introduced past tense, the conversations at the beginning become a lot harder to understand, and more of the English instructions turned into Spanish. Spending so much time on 1 lesson is not good because I am spending days not practicing what I have already learned. I am just listening to the same thing over and over. For 27,28,and 29 I have had to spend 2-3 days listing to each lesson 5 or 6 times before moving on. I am about to start level 30. I am at the point I need to make a decision about level 2. 1. Do the lessons get easier once I get over this hump or do the lessons keep getting harder and harder? Will I need to spend weeks on a single lesson as I progress? 2. How well should I understand the dialog at the beginning of each lesson? Should I not move on until I can follow the conversation or it is more important to get 80% of the resonances correct and not worry about the dialog at the beginning? I find them increasingly difficultly to understand. Before level 27 I never had an issue with this. 3. Do the Spanish instructions during the lessons become easier once you get the hang of it, of do they get harder? I have heard the complaint there is too much English. I am having a hard time when they start replacing English instruction with Spanish during the lessons. Edited by Kunji on 17 November 2013 at 6:12am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4921 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 2 of 13 17 November 2013 at 6:28am | IP Logged |
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I would push on until the last lesson, and then start with something new (depending on
your needs: Assimil, Living Language, or FSI). I find that Pimsleur is great up to a point, and then I need some time with a more structured course. After a bit, I find that I'm ready for the next level of Pimsleur. I don't think Pimsleur ever gets hard, per se; it's more that the system alone isn't enough to get you to the higher levels. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| James29 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5407 days ago 1265 posts - 2113 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 3 of 13 17 November 2013 at 11:51am | IP Logged |
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Try this: instead of simply re-doing a lesson the very next time, go back a few lessons and re-do a few before the one you "failed". For example... if you are cruising along and doing fine with the lessons until you get to lesson 27 and you "fail" lesson 27 move back to lesson 24 the next time and go from there. Lesson 24 will seem easy and so will 25 and 26... then when you get back to 27 it should seem much much easier (I think this is partly because much of 27 is built on the previous lessons). This is what I did and it works great... I think it often actually saves time too because you won't get "stuck" on a lesson like you are describing. It is also a lot less annoying. It is a good way to review.
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| Kunji Newbie United States Joined 4073 days ago 19 posts - 24 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 13 17 November 2013 at 9:31pm | IP Logged |
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Hi James, that is a good idea. I will try to fall back a few lessons.
Hi kanewai, Assimil does not have a Latin American Spanish version. I do really like the idea and think it might be the best way to learn if you are new. Their course material I have seen looks poorly put together, unorganized, crammed together with lesson dialog broken up into multiple pages. Just a bad unprofessional presentation. If they don't care enough to put a page break after each lesson before starting a new one so it is better organized I can't imagine they cared much about the content. Edited by Kunji on 17 November 2013 at 9:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4084 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 13 17 November 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Kunji,
I believe that you are experiencing the effects of least three problems. First, although I am a great fan of the Pimsleur method, I find that their approach to language "structure" (the word grammar seems to be subject to the greatest of all possible taboos) creates needless problems that many other language methods address head on by simply explaining it. My advice would be that you familiarize yourself with a basic grammar such as McGraw-Hill's "Spanish Verbs and Essentials Grammar". You should not try to master all of the verb tenses at this stage; rather, simply develop a general appreciation of the structure of the language and the verb tenses that you're working with. Second, as to review, you will probably noticed that the initial dialogues and material in Pimsleur a review of the previous lesson. When I experience the hurdle that you have described, my approach has been to drop back about 10 lessons and review the first 12 minutes of every lesson up to the one that I am having difficulties with. Third, in language-learning, all of us will each a "plateau", or saturation point, from which further advancement seems difficult, if not impossible. Some of us even experience a feeling of having "regressed" which can be quite discouraging. This phenomenon is present irrespective of the study method, including full immersion in a foreign country. Reviewing material that you thought you had assimilated should help somewhat. However, I would NOT advise taking a break as this will only enhance the feeling of hopelessness. Good luck! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4286 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 6 of 13 18 November 2013 at 1:29am | IP Logged |
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I also ran into similar difficulty with French at a similar part. And for me the solution was starting Michel Thomas French at that point, and after that I never had to do any Pimsleur lesson more than 2 times.
I'm also a big fan of going back and re-doing some earlier lessons for pimsleur when it starts getting difficult. Even if you know all the content, repeating them makes them more automatic and you'll be able to better handle the new material. I've done this for Pimsleur Language courses I've taken that don't have a Michel Thomas course, and got through them just fine on their own. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4205 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 7 of 13 18 November 2013 at 5:32am | IP Logged |
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I found a similar thing in German. My solution was to use the pause button whenever anything particularly difficult came up. I'm currently half way through Pimsleur 3, and at the end of that, I might go back to Pimsleur 2 in the hope that I can then complete it without pausing at all. Obviously that might be impossible in the car unless you've got controls on the steering wheel.
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| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4084 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 13 22 November 2013 at 4:29am | IP Logged |
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Hello again, Kunji :
I replied earlier, but neglected to respond to your specific questions. My additional comments are: Do the lessons ... keep getting harder? Will I need to spend weeks on a single lesson as I progress? Very briefly, to the first question: "yes, but perhaps not in the way you think they do" and to the second question: "definitely not". Like most other well-designed self-study language courses, the Pimsleur Method has achieved a fairly good balance between the lessons; thus, they do not "increase in difficulty". However, the lessons are obviously cumulative and you must assimilate the material before you can move forward (you cannot do Calculus without having a good understanding of Algebra and both require a lot of work). As you have undoubtedly noticed, each new lesson introduces, on average, only about 10 new words, all of which are really quite common. So then, generally speaking, vocabulary acquisition does not represent much of a problem. Also, since each successive lesson contains an ample review of the previous lesson's material, retaining the new vocabulary should not present much of a problem. However, you must be able to apply this vocabulary in sentences that make sense and this could represent an obstacle. In my initial reply above, I suggested that you familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of Spanish grammar, including verb conjugations, to which I would now add pronouns and pronoun-preposition combinations, as these are problematic in Pimsleur Spanish. This advice stems from my own experience with the Pimsleur Method where I found that, when it comes to grammar, the "80% rule" contains a hidden source of "increasing difficulty". While this might be something of an exaggeration, might I suggest that, if you retain only 80% of the grammar lessons (all of which are introduced rather obliquely in Pimsleur) then you could find yourself working with a cumulative 80% x 80% = 64% level of understanding of the structure of the language and that, if this continues, you will eventually "hit the wall" and that your experience with Pimsleur will, indeed, be one of "increasing difficulty", irrespective of your ability to retain the vocabulary? To your second question above, I found that, with languages that are closely related to English, doing a given lesson twice, and sometimes three times, along with occasional "sweeping" (see below) has permitted me to cover the 30 lessons of any Pimlseur Comprehensive programme within 4 to 6 weeks. How well should I understand the dialog at the beginning of each lesson? In my experience, the initial dialogs are drawn from the review material in the final 10 to 12 minutes of the previous lesson, along with a few bits and pieces from other lessons. So, if you finish a given lesson, and are quite comfortable with it, then you should be able to understand the subsequent initial dialog immediately. In fact, you should be able to respond immediately to the first 10 minutes of the subsequent lesson's exercise material, as all of it is a review. If not, then you have not assimilated the previous lesson. Do the Spanish instructions during the lessons become easier once you get the hang of it, or do they get harder? It seems to me that the Spanish instructions are often, but not always, "just a little ahead of" the lesson material. I suspect that Pimsleur includes them to help the user become accustomed to the language's syntax. Also, to me, these instructions seem to be delivered at a somewhat faster speed than the lesson material. Do they get harder? Only somewhat so. I find that they are quite "formulistic" and that they do not increase either in frequency or in difficulty right up to and through the Comprehensive IV level. You may have noticed that, to a large extent, you can actually ignore the Spanish instructions and simply concentrate on the material at hand without impeding your learning. Too much English, they say? Do you like the Pimsleur Method? If so, then don't be concerned about someone else's critique. My Review Procedure (Brute Force) To me, the Pimsleur Method seems like one long, uninterrupted conversation that, while it circles back on itself, still maintains a forward momentum. Reviewing the material, which is quite repetitive, without redoing every single lesson, presents a significant challenge. I have developed the following "head butt" review procedure. I have found that it helps me consolidate the material. Let’s assume that I have "hit the wall" on lesson 27. Since the first 10 minutes of a given lesson are a review of the previous lesson, I "sweep" the previous lessons, forwards and backwards, as follows: • I redo the first 10 minutes of the previous 10 lessons in INCreasing order as 17, 18, 19, ..., 26. The initial lessons should be very easy, whereas the final ones should reveal the point at which my "failure to assimilate" is occurring. I often take a short break at the midpoint of this sweep, but I ensure that I conduct the full review within a 2 to 3 hour period. I'm done for the day. • I redo the first 10 minutes of the previous 10 lessons in DECreasing order as: 26, 25, 24, ..., 17. Same short break. I often feel that the lower lessons are now ridiculously easy. I'm done for the day. • I redo the first 10 minutes of the previous 4 lessons in INCreasing order as 23, 24, 25, 26. I take a short break and then I redo lesson 26 fully. I'm done for the day. • I tackle lesson 27 and repeat it, as necessary, to a point where I am "quite" comfortable with the material. Also, I ensure that I understand the grammatical issues that are at play up to this point. Edited by Speakeasy on 22 November 2013 at 5:03am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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