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So you’re missing Pimsleur... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4690 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 9 of 30 25 February 2012 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Where does it get the audio from? Are you using an Anki deck with sound? I have hardly used Anki, because I usually do vocabulary in odd places (on the bog, while on a walk, etc), and prefer to do other things while at the computer. However, a good audio vocab course for French would be brilliant for me! I don't like vocabulearn, because most words don't seem to be repeated later, so you need to have perfect memory or something. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4690 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 10 of 30 25 February 2012 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Getting off topic here, but: are you kidding? Pimsleur is great for training your accent, and training your mouth muscles to get around phrases easily. In other words, it is for training fluency (properly defined). SRS is NOT a great point of Pimsleur because you only learn a comparatively small amount of vocabulary, given the time spent on it. Edited by Jeffers on 25 February 2012 at 2:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6220 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 11 of 30 25 February 2012 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Perhaps I'm just unusually untalented, but when I first went to Germany, people often couldn't understand when I said simple words due to my accent. And I had used (part of) Pimsleur German a few years before that. For Slavic languages, I've also found myself unable to hear things properly with Pimsleur, much less say them correctly - but I haven't tried in a few years. Edited by Volte on 25 February 2012 at 6:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4690 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 12 of 30 25 February 2012 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Notice I described it as "training". Using part of a training program a few years ago is not going to make you fit now. Whatever you did most recently before you first went to Germany would have had more impact on your accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6220 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 30 26 February 2012 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've used it right before going to Japan, and right before going to the Czech republic, if memory serves. My Japanese was "funny sounding", while my Czech was incomprehensible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4482 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 14 of 30 26 February 2012 at 5:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Newer generation voices can be pretty good. While the English voices I have (Dave, Steven) are a bit strange at times, the Japanese ones (Miaki, Show) are very good. Yes, I use ANKI with sound. When I encounter a word I don't know online, I import it via "Real-Time Import" plugin and Rikaisama for Firefox. When I need to import a word I don't know, I just look it up on Jiten.net and mouse-over it, so I can export it (Rikaisama). I have no idea if there are similar tools for French learners, but there seem to be some crafty people for Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4482 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 15 of 30 26 February 2012 at 5:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Pimsleur is good to get your feet wet. It trains basic phrases, shows you by example a few grammar points and makes you drill those vocab and structures. That alone doesn't even enable you to hold very basic conversations - it makes you speak phrases. No, not even that, it doesn't make you speak, because, if all you did was Pimsleur, you wouldn't understand the reply you get. Let's get real here. Pimsleur is very cool for beginners as first step, but it's got nothing (even remotely!) to do with such things as fluency. P.S.: Don't get me wrong, Pimsleur has its place: As a tool to teach you the very basic words plus some more in ways that make them unforgettable, and that makes it very valuable in my book (if you can get a copy on your library, or cheap on ebay). Edited by atama warui on 26 February 2012 at 6:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4690 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 16 of 30 26 February 2012 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think you're mixing up fluency with proficiency. Fluency is the ability to speak easily and smoothly, at whatever level of proficiency you are. Pimsleur doesn't teach a lot, which is why I wrote that it's lousy as SRS, but what you learn, you will be able to speak easily and without hesitation if you use it correctly. This is because it gets you used to responding quickly. It teaches to a pretty low level of proficiency (let's say A1 for the sake of this discussion). But it specifically works on your fluency at that level. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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