Of course, this “interactive” aspect makes focused listening way more useful than worthless passive listening. You genuinely feel disappointed if you don't come up with the phrase correctly and this encourages you to focus and try harder later. Having not used audio courses before, I had this simplified idea that they were just mindless listening and repeating (which unfortunately this mostly was), but this course also gave me a short time-frame to produce the phrase/word that actually sparked pressure to recall that I wasn't expecting. There were other advantages of this course overall which included: This system has the following advantages and disadvantages, in my opinion: Some advantages to this systemĪs I said above, I am not used to using a system like this so I actually found several advantages here that I was not expecting and that I will attempt to integrate into my own language learning method in some ways.
The vast majority of what is said to you will never be written down in any form, so this is really forcing you to get used to the spoken language and not being able to read it at any time.
#Pimsleur german for english speakers how to#
There may be some reading material for particular units, but even those are to be read while listening to the audio that gives instructions on how to proceed. The system is almost entirely audio based. The audio then gives you the answer so you can confirm you were right or learn it better for next time. There is then a pause for you to repeat the phrase, or to recall a previously learned one from memory. The audio presents words and phrases to you, with their translation, either said in isolation or in a suggested context (the audio tells you to “Imagine you are at a restaurant in central Budapest” for example). Obviously I can only base what I've gotten out of this course for the purposes of this post based on the 15 hour course. Hungarian only has a 15 hour course, but other languages go up to 45 hours. I went through the 30-lesson course over a month and feel I have a pretty good understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the system. The course being sold by Simon & Schuster comes in 30 half hour sessions, or in smaller units of 10 half hour sessions. It was developed based on research carried out by linguist Paul Pimsleur several decades ago. The Pimsleur language learning system is an audio based course that presents phrases in the target language first, and then in your mother tongue for you to translate into that language. I am presuming that it would have content similar to the Hungarian course in other languages like Pimsleur Spanish etc. I'm not affiliated with Pimsleur in any way (as I have my own ways of approaching language learning), so this isn't a sales pitch, as I will be very critical of it. This post is an honest and frank look at the course I completed and it is not some blog post about how Pimsleur is a scam, etc. But this was nothing more than a lazy excuse based on preferences – there is little evidence of it being true for most people.Īnother reason I wouldn't use this course is because it's very expensive ( just Level 1 for of any given language is US$150 for example), but the previous tenant of my flat in Budapest left quite a lot of Hungarian learning material, including Pimsleur's Hungarian, so it was time to try it out! (You can also get it in some libraries, and of course many people tell me they have used the pirated versions). I was under the impression that audio based learning wouldn't work for me, as I considered myself a “visual” learner. In the recent survey about the “best” courses, Pimsleur came out on top, both among the best and the worst.ĭespite almost a decade of learning languages, I have to admit that I had never tried the Pimsleur approach.
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