I don't hate Pimsleur

[Xavier_Onassis]

I am getting annoyed constantly by the Pimsleur Language Institute's allegations that "Language professors HATE this man.

Paul Pimsleur was a language professor at Ohio State and UCLA and he died in 1976.

His courses involve listening to a 30 minute tape every day and occasionally repeating the phrases and responding to what is said. Any good language system will do this.

The ads suggest that one can learn a language in a much shorter time than in a traditional college environment, and this is true, if the learner is (a) highly motivated (b) unu7rdened by studying for other courses and (c) greatly self-motivated.

There is nothing wrong with the Pimsleur method, except that it is an illiterate method that eliminates the written language entirely. This is not so bad with Spanish or Finnish, Hungarian or other languages having close to phonetic spelling systems. It is pretty obvious that a Pimsleur course would not be advantageous to a person visiting Greece, Russia, China, Korea or a country with a different alphabet. The hapless student might not be able to even locate the bathroom.

The main objection that I have is that Pimsleur is marketing language courses the same way they market exercise devices and diet plans, to people who have been unsuccessful at the subject. To determine whether a Pimsleur program is useful to the customer, he would have to buy the damned thing, where it will most likely sit unopened for decades. I see lots of CD programs, computer programs cassette tape programs in yard sales here in Miami.

I tried a Pimsleur Russian cassette program about ten years ago and found it vastly inadequate. It was hard to pronounce (and there were no hints as to how to do this correctly) and most of the time, after I got past the greetings and such, I was only vaguely aware of what it was I was saying.

Pimsleur did not develop the Russian program, and I don't blame him for this.  His daughter and Simon & Shuster are the ones to blame here.

If you want to see what I mean, it will cost you.

Pimsleur is no magic bullet. If you hated language classes, you are likely to come to hate Pimsleur as well, and for the same reasons. He talks faster than you can understand. As will anyone in any language course.

[Plane]

  Are more expensive courses worth the diffrence?

[Xavier_Onassis]

The most expensive courses are the Rosetta Stone courses. They are quite useful at teaching vocabulary of a particular type: concrete nouns, basic verbs, perhaps some adverbs. Rosetta Stone is a huge collection of pictorial representations of things and actions and this is supplemented with a voiceover that pronounces the words in the target language. It is a clever idea, but in my opinion, overpriced. I have not tried it.

What you need to know is that because computers are constantly improving, with faster processors and bigger memories, computer language courses are rewritten every two years or so to keep up. When this happens, the earlier versions of the course are sold at a huge discount, typically $29.95 rather than $79.95. Rosetta Stone does not seem to go on sale.

Pimsleur was largely sound-based, with no graphics, few books and no speech recognition. perhaps this has changed.

These earlier versions are quite adequate. Keep in mind that languages do not change much over time. All that is different is a better system of voice recognition and perhaps snazzier graphics.

The key to learning a language is determination. Two hours per day, every day, and you will achieve something like useful fluency in six months. Piddling around is largely useless.

In a month, I sort of mastered memorizing the Russian alphabet. I need more motivation.