Pimsleur: The Most Underrated Language Product

I've been wanting to write a post about Pimsleur for so long. My review of Assimil has been my most popular post so far and apparently a lot of people liked it, but there's also another language learning product that I must do justice, and that's Pimsleur.



Assimil is a charismatic language learning product, mainly because the lessons are relaxing, funny and short; so, I guess that's why people like it at first sight. But with Pimsleur... that's not the case at all.

So, that's why I feel even more obligated to talk about Pimsleur than anything else. In all honesty, Pimsleur has been one of the most helpful and amazing language learning products that I've tried, but apparently, a lot of people hate it or quickly disregard it by saying that it's too boring or too repetitive.

A little bit of history:



The Pimsleur Method was created by linguist Paul Pimsleur. Originally, Mr. Pimsleur started his career as a french teacher and his area of expertise was teaching french phonetics and phonemes. He later moved on into doing Second Language Acquisition research, his main interest was to investigate how was it that kids were able to speak a language without actually knowing its structure explicitly. After investigating children and adults alike, he started to develop the Pimsleur Language Learning System based upon the results that he had got. The Pimsleur Language Learning System would become The Pimsleur Method that we know today.

The Pimsleur Method is based on the concept of spaced repetition combined with the exposition of the structure of  the language via interactive dialogue.

However, there are two important things that you must understand about the Pimsleur Method:

1. Paul Pimsleur died of a heart attack in 1971 while still working and perfecting the Pimsleur Method.


2. The Pimsleur Method WAS NOT originally designed to be used as an auto-didactic course, it was designed to be used in a classroom.

Despite of this, a lot of the effectiveness of the original method was able to live on to the audio program that we know nowadays.

Pimsleur's main objective is to teach you, or better yet, to install the structure of the language into your mind. Pimsleur's secondary objective is to teach you the correct phonemes and pronunciation of the language.

That's pretty much all that Pimsleur sets out to do and it succeeds beautifully.

The main two critiques that I've heard about Pimsleur (coming from a lot of language enthusiast but also renowned polyglots) are:

• There's not a lot of vocabulary, there's not a lot of content, the content is irrelevant.


• It's boring and repetitive.

It’s in the first point where I feel that most people actually misunderstand Pimsleur. Pimsleur is not really designed to teach you vocabulary or a lot of fancy words, Pimsleur is designed to teach you the structure of the language and install it in your brain, so when you need to speak it, you can access to the structure quickly and use it correctly.



Teaching a lot of vocabulary is not its aim, Pimsleur teaches you basic vocabulary but, most importantly, it teaches and makes you aware of the structure of the language little by little, so when you learn new vocabulary, you can use it correctly with the structure that you’ve learned. So, for all the people who say that “there’s not a lot of content” “the content is irrelevant” or “the situations are fake” , you’re missing the point of the approach.

The actual words that they use don’t really matter, what matters, is the way that they say them and how you absorb that structure.

This makes Pimsleur one of the most valuable and unique language products out there, there are a lot of products focused on teaching you vocabulary but there aren’t a lot of products designed to teach you the structure of the language in such a subconscious and relaxed way without all the exhausting drills that you would get on a grammar book as a beginner.

The other aspect where Pimsleur shines is in the teaching of pronunciation and acquisition of phonemes. Pimsleur is the best method that I know for teaching you pronunciation, far better than Rosetta Stone or any other Computer Assisted Software. As I already mentioned, Paul Pimsleur was a specialist in teaching french phonemes and phonetics, so, he knew a thing or two about teaching you correct pronunciation, and the way that the Pimsleur method does this is really unique, effective and simple.

Concerning the second point, yeah, Pimsleur might seem boring, but believe me, it’s worth it, 100%. You just have to be patient with it. It might seem boring but as you keep moving forward, you'll realize that you will formulate the structure of the language correctly without thinking too much about it, allowing you to speak more quickly and fluently. It's exactly the same as practicing the scales on your guitar, they might seem boring and even stressful but they are going to help you in incredible ways and they're going to make you a far better player.



Pimsleur provides you the perfect speaking training because you have to respond correctly and quickly, just as you would do in a real life situation, it puts you on the spot and that's exactly what you need when you're developing your speaking abilities.

Concerning whether or not its repetitive… well of course it is! It’s based on a theory called “spaced repetition.” Besides, when you’re a beginner, learning a new skill, correct repetition is exactly what you need.

There's also another important thing: You need to complete all the three levels in order to get Pimsleur's full results. A lot of people only try the first level and then give up and criticize Pimsleur without even getting the full experience. Don't be one of them, if you're going to try Pimsleur, make sure to get the three levels.

But then again, I believe that exaggerated  ads have harm the product instead of helping it.



Clearly, the ad company that made this video didn't even understand the Pimsleur Method.

To make myself clear, I'm not an affiliate of Pimsleur nor I'm receiving any money for writing this post, I just wanted to talk about this language product because it has help me so much and I see that a lot of people underrate it when in reality it's one the best and most effective language products out there.

There's also another language product similar to Pimsleur and that is The Michel Thomas Method.



I would like to talk about it, unfortunately I've never tried it so I can't really review it. I would like to make a full comparison between the two of them, that would be cool, because these methods are unique and quite brilliant.

That would be all for now and thanks for reading :)