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Pimsleur with other forms of learning | ||
Tags: Pimsleur | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5073 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 9 of 13 03 January 2012 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Some of the frequent complaints directed at Pimsleur are that it "doesn't teach enough vocabulary". "The pauses are annoying". The dialogues are too "oriented toward the traveling businessman". The program uses "too much English". I agree that the dialogues are weighted heavily towards the business traveler. Perhaps Simon & Schuster think that is where their market is- business people. Yes, it doesn't teach a lot of vocabulary and the course does use more English than it should in the later part of the course. That being said, I think it is a great supplement to whatever else one is doing to learn a language.
The pauses are part of the "graduated interval recall" system and help to put pressure on you to recall and produce what you have learned. Pimsleur may only teach 900 or so words but you will know those 900 or so words well if you use the system as intended. One thing I like about it is that it is audio based. I would never use Pimsleur alone to learn a language but would highly recommend it as a supplement within a multi-track approach to language learning. That is, provided that it can be had for a cheap price or free from the library. The program could be much better but it is what it is. It is my opinion that no course will take you to proficiency, despite the advertising to the contrary. I think people should realize that first and foremost when choosing any course. If you do Pimsleur you are still going to have to learn grammar, speak, read, write and use the language in order to progress, but it can help you along the way. Edited by iguanamon on 03 January 2012 at 3:31pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5822 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 13 03 January 2012 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No they're not. The graduated intervals are the intervals between recurrence of tested language points. The pauses are simply part of the tradition of recorded language courses, a tradition that pre-dates the introduction of the cassette tape and its pause button. My objection to the pauses is that they don't appear to be proportional to the difficulty of the language under test, only the length of the desired response, and some of the prompts are intrinsically more difficult than others. If you adhere to the "move on if you can do 80%" guideline, then you'll never manage the difficult bits. If you repeat until you can do the difficult bits, you're going to get bored... 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5822 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 13 04 January 2012 at 11:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
There's nothing "mysterious" about the claim, and it actually makes a lot of sense. It is perhaps an exaggeration, but I wouldn't call it false. The point (and several other courses are built on this principle) is that the more stuff you have half-learned in your head, the longer it takes you to recall the thing you're looking for. Problems of recall lead to frustration, and hamper learning. If the other material you're trying to learn from overloads you with vocabulary, then it will in all probability interfere with your recall of the target words and phrases for the Pimsleur course (and you must have noticed that many courses give you a heck of a lot of words for each phrase or grammar point taught -- "I'd like a" will come with at least tea, coffee, orange juice, wine (white and red), beer, water).
Agreed -- completely. Pimsleur gives sounds, but it never categorises them -- ie. it doesn't teach phonemes. If I don't know that two sounds are the same phoneme, I won't learn them as one phoneme. If I don't know that two sounds are different phonemes, I will learn them as the same phoneme. You can teach phonemes purely aurally, but Pimsleur doesn't do that, so a transcript is essential for many languages.
I'm not so sure. If you're not aware of the phonemes at the time you encounter them, surely you're already starting to learn them wrong? I was having this problem with MT Polish, and what I ended up doing was looking up every newly-introduced word in a dictionary before continuing, in order to learn it correctly. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6361 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 12 of 13 04 January 2012 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That has not been my experience.
There is a possibility of getting something wrong the first time you hear it, but there is enough repetition in the program so that it is not an issue. There are more disadvantages than advantages from pre-learning imo. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Opensecret Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4503 days ago 20 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Russian, Mandarin | Message 13 of 13 20 January 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I use other things with Pimsleur all the time, but when you first start any language, I think it's better to keep the book closed and focus entirely on the spoken language. Once you can hear and speak the sounds, then study the written language to learn how sound and script relate. The Mandarin word for study, 学, is spelled 'xué' in pinyin, but if you see it before you hear it, you're almost sure to form an incorrect idea about how it's pronounced, and you may not recognize it when you hear it because it won't sound like what you expect. Even native speakers of a language sometimes mispronounce a word because they're going by how it looks on a page rather than how people say it.
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