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Response to past Pimsleur discussions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| mcjon77 Senior Member United States Joined 6614 days ago 193 posts - 248 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), French | Message 73 of 148 26 July 2007 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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One of the biggest criticisms of the Pimsleur course is the lack of content in the course. Relative to all of the other courses out there, Pimsleur certainly is lacking in content.
However, what I found with Pimsleur, as opposed to other courses I had used before, was that the content it did teach was learned quicker and more thoroughly than other programs I had experienced. This is just my experience and those of some of my friends. My personal experience with Pimsleur has been that the comprehensive courses get one to a level of proficency in the language that will allow them to go to a country speaking the target laguage and handle basic transactions as welll as hold simple conversations with ease. I found myself looking in my pocket dictionary a few times for words I did not know, but that is to be expected with the limited vocabulary. Jon 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Charles Heinle Language Program Publisher Newbie United States pimsleurdirect.com Joined 6348 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* | Message 74 of 148 26 July 2007 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Gentlemen of the Forum, a spirit of fair play has taken hold of the discussion in connection with the Pimsleur Programs, which I must say I appreciate very much. As a result of this I will provide some insights into the marketing of the Program. I was astonished that so many individuals understood so little about the distribution of goods through the retail-wholesale marketing system in our society.
The fact is that the retail or list price of any product (even language programs, including Pimsleur) must include the costs to reach the ultimate purchaser. Some members of the forum apparently did not realize that transition through the distribution system caused certain costs, which under our system are paid for by the consumer. Simon & Schuster is a major publishing company, and they pay for all the costs of developing and producing the Pimsleur Programs. They fix a List Price which includes all of the costs, including creation of the Program as well as the costs of distribution (warehousing, transportation, sales to the retail marketing system) and royalties until the Program ultimately reaches the customer. What this means is that the List Price of the Program (in the case of a CD Level I Comprehensive Program -- $345.00), is intended to cover the costs created as the course makes its way either to a wholesaler to a retailer, to reach the consumer in some retail store, web-site retailer, or other retail seller. This retail operation has purchased the Program at a standard discount through the S&S Sales Department, at a very substantial discount from the List Price. This means that in the standard distribution the publisher never sees the full List Price, since the retailer and/or the wholesaler have to take their “cut” to pay their expenses and make a small profit. In short, the costs of the retail distribution chain have taken their normal share of the List Price, for the program to reach the customer. S&S sells primarily to bookstores and through distributors. (Only in the past months have there been any direct to customer sales through the SimonSays website.) So there really is no question about the publisher taking advantage and “stealing” the consumer’s money. And the retailers are free to decide how much margin they can manage to live on. On Amazon, that Level I program sells for $217.35, not the suggested $345.00. Customers are free to shop the various sites for a “best buy” (which may or may not include Customer Service). The matter then rests upon whether the consumer is satisfied with the performance of the Program. This is where “a money-back guarantee” enters into the picture -- and the consumer is free to act in accordance with the results he experiences by doing the Program in accordance with the directions on the cover. I rest my case on the matter of publishers making a “killing” on so-called “high retail prices.” More on the matters of content and methodology of Pimsleur Programs in the next few days. Charles 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6541 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 75 of 148 26 July 2007 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"We have experimented with our model using the Pimsleur Japanese I (for English speakers) course, which comprises 30 half-hour lessons, 1823 different examples, and about 350 words."
This part of the paper is interesting to me. I can understand the 350 words part(mnemonics can have you reaching 350 words in a couple days, but that isn't really important now). The 1823 different examples comes out to 1 example every 30 seconds. How many different examples are needed to say read a newspaper with a dictionary? Basically, how many examples are needed to cover the entire verb system? A question not related to the research paper: How does the Pimsleur comprehensive program handle the problem of people not understanding their native language? If one can get a handle of the verb system, and internalizes the declensions, then isn't the rest just idioms and vocabulary? If the verb system is the most important part of a language, then how can he or she study a foreign language without knowing his or hers' native language's verb system? If the Pimsleur company released a program dealing with English grammar for people with the intent on studying a foreign language, then I think the learning of foreign languages down the road won't be as superficial. edited for my fuzzy math Edited by Kugel on 26 July 2007 at 3:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 76 of 148 26 July 2007 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Pimsleur doesn't use a lot of explicit grammatical instruction. People know how to -use- their native language's verb system, even if they have no idea of explicit grammatical terms. Teaching English grammar -might- be of some use when studying a related language, though frankly, I'm not convinced of this. For unrelated languages, like Japanese, I'd say that it's a good way to obscure what's going on. Comparing sentences and saying "sentence A means (something) in a language you speak, while similar sentence B with this change means (something else)" is much more digestible than explicit grammar instruction. How much verbs decline also varies drastically between languages, though this is perhaps a tangential point. For an overview of grammar of a new language for laypeople, Michael Thomas is the best I know of, and it's -extremely- non-technical. Notably, it focuses on more than the declensions of verbs; pronoun use is a major issue in many languages. For quick active use of basics by beginners, Pimsleur is quite good - and I think part of that is that it doesn't -waste time- on too much explicit grammatical instruction. I credit having done about 10 lessons of the Japanese version with how well I managed to get around in Japan; other tools, like grammars, helped and were interesting, but I wouldn't have managed to pull much of anything together without it at that point in my life. I largely remember what I learned from it, which is more than I can say for some things I've tried. It taught some basic structures, so, with the help of a phrasebook I had with me, which had some useful information such as the names of various types of trains, I could ask which kind of train I was on (which I actually needed to do, and managed, using only Japanese). For what it's worth, I read grammars for fun, and they're informative, but they don't teach you how to do anything with a language; at most, they help with comprehension and getting an idea of structure. At least, that's my experience; perhaps other people can use them more effectively than I can. I find them useful to clarify points after I've studied for a while, or to get an idea of how things work; but for everyday survival talk, they're not the right tool. I'd be curious to hear how Pimsleur's approach relates to Krashen's acquisition vs learning. By the way, what do you mean by 'superficial'? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6541 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 77 of 148 26 July 2007 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
By superficial I mean not knowing anything profound. It's hard to say if people really know their own language. I certainly don't. Only recently have I tried to be a more careful speaker. I'm going through Charles Elster's Verbal Advantage(the audio and book), and I'm finding many problems in my speech. How many times do you see '10 items or less' at the checkout? How many people know the tenses of lie and lay? These are peccadilloes, and what I'm stressing is learning the verb system. Learning grammar by osmosis is a sure way to become part of the verbally disadvantaged masses. Edited by Kugel on 26 July 2007 at 3:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 78 of 148 26 July 2007 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'd say that every native speaker of average intelligence knows their own language. However, it basically comes down to a debate on prescriptivism, I suppose. I don't consider "10 items or less" to be more or less correct than "10 items or fewer", or other such variants. In my opinion, too much of prescriptive English grammar is based on Latin rules which don't apply to English, but that's another rant. Many others are historical relics, which are, quite simply, dead in modern English. However, even if prescriptive perfection is your goal, I think that having a basic working knowledge of the major points of the language is a necessary prerequisite. I've seen no evidence that this is most efficiently done via a grammar as the primary tool. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mcjon77 Senior Member United States Joined 6614 days ago 193 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), French | Message 79 of 148 26 July 2007 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
While I would agree that learning grammar ONLY via osmosis/implicit learning may lead to deficiencies, based on my experience and observation, such methods work better for the INITIAL learning of grammar than the more explicit means, as far as utility is concerned. I've met many people that learned grammar rules of a second language by explicit means only. All to often, they are the same people that take 5 minutes to formulate one sentence in a conversation. The sentance may be grammatically perfect, however the time taken to formulate such a simple sentence did more damage to the flow and mutual understanding of the conversation than any small error the same person would have made had they just spoken based on their implicit knowledge of grammar rules. This is not to say that one should not undertake the explicit study of grammar. Rather that this should be done AFTER a modicum of implicit competence with the target language's grammar has been acheived. In these cases grammar study will seem less like a disjointed memorization of random rules and more like an explicit description of concepts which one already knows. In effect, rather than relying on the explicit rules to create every sentence, one uses them as a backup resource to utilize when one's implicit knowledge is insufficient for the task. Jon Edited by mcjon77 on 26 July 2007 at 4:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6541 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 80 of 148 26 July 2007 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I suppose it makes sense to not use grammatical terms in some areas of language learning.
All this talk about Pimsleur brings me to the suggestion of analyzing a 30 lesson course in detail on this forum. I remember a forum member posting the transcripts, which was for German I, so at least half the effort is completed. I don't own a copy of German Pimsleur I so unfortunately I can't study it in detail. However, I own Hebrew I, which has 30 lessons, and I think I might go through it again. Only this time I will analyze it thoroughly. Of course I will count up the number of different examples and words. I will try again to see if there are any patterns relating to GIR. Also, knowing how much the verb system being covered in volume 1 would be beneficial. Edited by Kugel on 26 July 2007 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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