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Response to past Pimsleur discussions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6541 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 105 of 148 01 August 2007 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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On average, Pimsleur courses' cost comes to roughly $12 per hour. I think the course is very similar to a live tutor, an extremely slow one; and tutors for certain languages are typically 15-20 per hour. Some tutors probably are a waste, but I think one could find a decent one for the same cost of a Pimsleur program, which I assessed at 180 per volume. Can a student learn more from a real tutor for 35 hours compared to a fake one from Pimsleur for 45 hours? I'm thinking yes.
It is in my opinion that Pimsleur loses on the cost factor. I hope that this thread doesn't spend most of the time discussing money, as I think there are more abstruse matters on some of our minds'. Everyone already knows that Pimsleur is overpriced, relatively speaking. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7014 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 106 of 148 01 August 2007 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Re-reading my post, I see I could have expressed myself better. I meant only to say that a people are willing to pay for quality if the free version of what is available is inferior. This is perhaps not really applicable to the case of language courses because the FSIs are both "free" and "quality". However, the fact that some people (such as myself) prefer to pay for Assiml courses instead of using the free FSI courses clearly indicates something. Maybe "quality" here should be replaced by "appropriate learning method". The second point, about being Devil's Advocate, was rather a bit of a thought experiment. Many people harp on Pimsleur because of it's price and its extravagant claims. For this experiment, assume that FSI is still a high quality course, but only available with a $1000+ price tag. Pimsleur on the other hand is available as a free download. My claim is that most people on this forum would hesitate to recommend FSI to all and sundry given it's extremely high price tag, especially when Pimsleur is available for free and Assimil continues to be cheap (<$100 range). What is FSI was $2000? $10000? Would it stlil be worth it? Put another way, at what point does being free make up for the deficiencies in a program? Coming from the Free Software world, I've encountered this trade-off a number of times. With regards to language courses, is Pimsleur so bad that even with a $0 price tag it doesn't have enough to recommend it? Given the time it takes to actually learn a language, a 45-hour commitment is really nothing. That's less time than it would take to watch all the online French In Action videos twice, and I bed you'd learn more French with Pimsleur. (Yes, I know there's more to FiA than just the video courses, but for the moment, in this thought experiment, they're not free. If the entire course was free, I think people would probably opt for it over the FSI French course, free or otherwise.) Luckily for us, though, FSI is a good program (although admittedly not for everyone), _and_ it's available at no cost. This is very similar to the situation with Linux: high quality, no cost, but not everybody. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6694 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 107 of 148 02 August 2007 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't think people would hesitate to recommend FSI just due to price if it was around $1000-$2000, and Pimsleur was free. Quality is a very important factor. Even if FSI was expensive, I still think people would recommend it due to its numerous drills, and intensive speaking exercises. If it was $10,000 then I think it would be a different story. I think that many people would argue that a $1000 FSI course is better than a $1000 Pimsleur course if FSI wasn't in public domain. Edited by LilleOSC on 02 August 2007 at 11:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| manny Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6361 days ago 248 posts - 240 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Tagalog Studies: French, German | Message 108 of 148 02 August 2007 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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For accuracy's sake, shouldn't we be quoting $500-600 from <www.pimsleuraudio.com>. I assume it is the same product.
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| august Bilingual Triglot Newbie United States Joined 6327 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, German*, Modern Hebrew | Message 109 of 148 02 August 2007 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Hi Kugel, I noticed your list of words covered in Pimsleur’s Hebrew. Which edition are you using? I have the 2nd Edition (2001) and I came up with a count more than twice as long as yours. (I suspect you speak Hebrew and you did say you did the course as a “review,” so you may simply have missed some of the more obvious items. However, as a naïve learner, they were very much new to me. I kept a running word list as I did the units.) Also, in my actual list, I counted both forms of pronouns and verbs as separate items, since this was a new concept/structure for me, counted yes/no, here/there separately, etc. What I came up with was a separate “Word” list. Listing each item separately as I did, your list of 20 items came to 30 on my list. And to that I added: 1. know (m & f)) 2. I (m & f) 3. a little 4. Ah! 5. See you. 6. How are you? (m & f) 7. Good-bye 8. Thanks/thank you. 9. fine/well 10. and 11. Where?/Where is? 12. Rabin 13. Isaiah (I’m not sure about counting names, but they were new to me and I learned the Hebrew pronunciation.) 14. please 15. Hertzel 16. now 17. at your place (m & f) 18. at my place (m & f) 19. me too 20. When? 21. Later. (more late) Personally, I don’t think I could have handled any more vocabulary in the half-hour lessons. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| burntgorilla Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6447 days ago 202 posts - 206 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Danish | Message 110 of 148 02 August 2007 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't think I could justify spending any large sum of money on a language course. £50 ($100) would be about my limit, and it would have to be pretty damn good to warrant that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| therumsgone Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6540 days ago 93 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 111 of 148 02 August 2007 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Although I do think people have brought up some valid complaints about Pimsleur, I wanted to share some of my thoughts about the program. First off, it is not comprehensive and should not be marketed as such. Three levels of Pimsleur takes you to a very basic level. That said, additional supplements allow you to take the structures you've learned in Pimsleur and make different sentences. Since the structure becomes so ingrained, novel sentence generation is easier.
I also don't think the importance of accent should be underestimated. With Pimsleur, you learn quite a bit about the prosody of the language and the way it should be spoken. This is especially important for languages where less resources are available, because pronunciation keys can only get you so far. When talking about cost, keep in mind that you can check Pimsleur audio out from you local library for free (and you can decrease your environmental footprint!). This is what I did with Italian (which I am working on now) and the first level of French. I also just worked out the price for a college language course (at my school) and found that it costs about $1200 a quarter. That's about $3600 for a year of language instruction (at 4 hours a week for 30 weeks that's 120 hours of instruction). I speak from experience when I say that Pimsleur gets you talking much better than a college language course. I'm saying this because I personally have found Pimsleur to be helpful in studying languages. It's not the only thing I use (Michel Thomas is just as instrumental as Pimsleur), and I wouldn't expect it to work as well on its own. It doesn't make you "fluent" in a language, but it does get you speaking it. I cannot generalize for others, but I personally think the program is very good. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6362 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 112 of 148 02 August 2007 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
My thoughts exactly - as stated on the previous page. The idea that I would suddenly begin recommending a $1000 FSI program over a free Pimsleur (or Assimil, or Michel Thomas, or Learn in Your Car, or...etc) program is not one I concur with. As stated earlier, I don't believe any language course in existence is worth $1000 or any sum of money close to this. That money would be far better spent on other things in life. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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