 Still the best for beginners |
| Review Date: September 21, 2005 |
| Reviewer: Steven Mason, California |
| I have tried a lot of audio methods, and Pimsleur is still the best by far. It is more expensive than most other audio methods, but it really works and it is enjoyable. Perhaps if you learn a language with family and friends and share the material, you can share the cost and practice with others! Or after you have completed the lessons, sell them (if you are generous, donate them to your library). Pimsleur really helps with proper pronunciation and uses a technique that makes what you learn stick in your brain - not any gimmicky memory tricks. Pimsleur covers a lot of basic material, but it does not overload the beginner with vocabulary or grammar - a case of less being more. However, I do wish Pimsleur included a print version of the audio material. At the end of 90 lessons (French I,II, and III), you will not speak at an intermediate level - no audio method can do that - but you will speak easily and well at a beginner level. Doing Pimsleur first, before taking a formal foreign language class, is the best way to go. I can't recommend Pimsleur highly enough. |
By far the best
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| Review Date: August 14, 2005 |
| Reviewer: Sator, Sydney, Australia |
Pimsleur are absolutely the best.
I have brought the complete sets of three volumes for both French and Russian. I recommend them with glowing enthusiasm to many friends and work colleagues. In fact I would say I rave about them - something I seldom do.
I am a fluent speaker of English, German and Japanese. I have taught languages myself and have additionally studied French and Latin in the past. I am something of an amateur linguistic with a life-long love of languages. When I speak German (I studied it at university for a year) poeple's jaws drop because I sound like a native speaker. I love reading Goethe in German and also read technical journal articles on molecular biology, but I really wish I'd discovered Pimsleur earlier. Over the decades I have been exposed to countless different linguistic approaches to learning languages, but none have impressed me as much as that of Pimsleur. I have even ordered CD courses in German from Amazon.de from companies such as Langenscheidt. The language CDs available in German are far superior to the vaste majority of the courses you can get in the English language, but still only Pimsleur teaches language in the same way that I intuitively learned to learn languages on my own over the years. I am so happy that someone has gone out and 'bottled' the secret techniques of good language learners so that people everywhere can discover how much fun learning languages can be.
If you buy cheaper alternatives to Pimsleur you are short changing yourself severely. Costly though you may think they are, enrolling in a course or getting private tuition will cost you as much or probably far more. Being a fluent speaker of a language and being a good teacher are also quite different things, so you may yet end up with teacher who is fluent at a language but poor at teaching it. With Pimsleur you are guaranteed a meticulously structured approach to learning in which you can have complete confidence. Also many of us lead busy lives and may have trouble making it to classes. With Pimsleur CDs and an MP3 player you can learn while you drive, while waiting in long queues or while going around the supermarket. Half an hour here and there soon adds up.
Needless to say my Russian friends are floored when I speak Russian. They say I speak with virtually no accent. With time I think I will expand my knowledge to the point that people think I am a native speaker. I did that with German and I have every reason to believe that I will do it with Russian. I plan to one day read Dostoevsky in Russian. As for the French course I brought that for my partner. I also quickly did as many CDs as I could before our trip to France and again people were pleasantly surprised at the quality of my French. Before another trip to Geneva I went through some more lessons and people in shops would stop to compliment my French.
Lastly my minor list of criticisms:
1. Although the intuitive natural learning techniques of Pimsleur should be the basis of learning languages, I am still a great believer in studying old fashioned grammar (I did Latin!). For every language you can find yourself a ready nice grammatical text. I wish Pimsleur would sell a text book companion to their recordings that makes learning grammar as fun as their recordings.
2. The recorded sound quality on my Russian CDs was washy. The words sometimes sounded unclear. The French CDs so far have been much better though still less than perfect - but surely for this price I can't believe this is an issue.
3. Lack of full printed transcripts of all of the recordings. Maybe they can provide this on a CD-ROM if printing it is too expensive. |
Merci mille fois pour Pimsleur!
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| Review Date: May 8, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Words can be music, Pennsylvania, USA |
I am just finishing French II, and am still quite pleased with this course (see review of French I). I am gaining facility in comprehension as well as ability to understand and speak more quickly. An example - several years ago I bought an Agatha Christie mystery in French and laboriously read the beginning, but had great difficulty in actually enjoying the mystery, due to having to decode so many idioms. I tried it again today - and actually enjoyed it, since the sentence structure and the connecting words were much more immediately comprehensible, after working with this course.
The accompanying reading lesson books are useful too. They are not the same as the oral material, but they serve as a nice review. They are small, light, and easy to take with you for a quick last-minute review.
A note on price - audiochips are cheaper than CDs and more efficient. The cost through Pimsleur Direct on the web is $400 for all three levels. Well worth it to me! |
The best way I know of to learn French
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| Review Date: November 22, 2008 |
| Reviewer: PT Cruiser, CA USA |
Have you had the same history of learning a language in the past as I've had? You buy a set of CD's or tapes, listen to the first one or two and find that you can't quite hear the pronunciation of a simple word or phrase. That word builds on other words and phrases and before long you find you don't understand what you thought it meant and the CD's or tapes end up thrown in a drawer never to see the light of day again. Over the years I've accumulated a drawer full of these.
I first met this Pimsleur language courses on a business trip years ago when I needed something interesting to listen to an a 2 hour drive. I bought the "teaser" first 8 lessons of Pimsleur French. These lessons were different than any other language CD I had listened to in the past. The words were completely clear, repeated several times by male and female voices, and there was never a question of what you were hearing or what it meant. Unlike some other language courses, Pimsleur doesn't just teach you phrases, it teaches you what each of the words in the phrase mean and rearranges them in several different contexts. I ended up buying the whole first course and then went on the buy the second and third. French II and III follow right along after French I with the same voices and method.
The lessons start with the most commonly spoken phrases and subjects, like greeting someone, asking for directions, telling time, and talking about everyday subjects. The voices are very clear, you never have a question about what was said. And one lesson builds on the previous, adding more phrases and using words from the last lessons combined with new words. These lessons have you participating in conversations right from the start. It forces you to think about the way you put words together to form a sentence. You aren't just parroting back phrases with mysterious words. You're actually thinking in the language, even in the early lessons.
I've always had this fantasy about learning a some French and then just waking up one morning, suddenly speaking and understanding all, as if by magic. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way and you do have to apply yourself to learn, but for me, Pimsleur is the most painless way to learn a language. It doesn't feel like a chore.
The way I went about learning French I, II and III is to take the CD's along whenever I get into the car. The lessons are a little under half an hour each, and even a trip to the store is at least 10 minutes each way, so I get through the better part of a lesson. I can't tell you the number of times I've sat in the driveway after returning home to finish a lesson.
I try to get through one lesson every day or two. Some are more difficult and take several repetitions, some are easy and I can comprehend in a couple listens. What has worked for me is to count the number of errors I make and go on to the next lesson when I make 10 or fewer errors in a lesson. One lesson builds on the next and there is lots of repetition so this has worked very well for me. I also listen on my iPod often when I'm doing some mindless task. It makes the work go faster and I feel like I'm accomplishing two things at once.
Some people have complained about the lack of visuals with Pimsleur. There are a few words that they go over for pronunciation in a little booklet at the end of the lesson, but most of it is audio. I always thought I was a visual learner, but I found that I learn just fine with the audio. And I can find more time to listen than I can to sit down with a book. Of course, I wanted to also read French in order to practice my language skills. After several lessons I bought the Oxford French Mini dictionary that you can find on amazon. It's tiny enough to keep on the side when you're reading a book or magazine, and has over 100,000 words. I looked up a few French newspapers online and practiced reading those. Amazon also carries magazine subscriptions to a couple French magazines and a newspaper which come out weekly. My subscription to Paris Match was interesting enough to keep me reading, sometimes a couple hours per day. And amazon.fr is a whole new world in French. (And to my delight, after logging in there, my "1 click" magically works just like it does here!)
The other complaint I sometimes read about Pimsleur is that it's expensive. For me, I figure you get what you pay for. That drawer full of discarded language tapes and CD's that I couldn't use probably added up over time to a lot more than a Pimsleur course. The Pimsleur courses are fun to use and you actually learn something. The French courses gave me the ability to converse with people when we went to France on everyday type things and even more importantly it gave me enough knowledge of the language to build on it. I highly recommend it. |
Continues where French I left off
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| Review Date: September 20, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Axiom of Choice, |
This review assumes that you have already purchased and completed Pimsleur French I. French II is simply a continuation of the same structure as French I. Vocabulary and grammatical structures are introduced in the same fashion, but with a higher volume of words and constructions per unit.
These courses are quite simply the best way to get to intermediate level spoken French rapidly. Once you have mastered all three levels give the Foreign Service Institute courses a go to proceed further. |
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