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 :)

Read More

One of the best language learning methods, Assimil: How to use it and review

I have finished one of the most helpful books that I have read so far in my entire life, "Assimil: Le Nouveau Francais Sans Peine". If you are already a veteran of the language learning field; the most probable thing is that you're already aware of this method, but if you're a new comer in this discipline, this is the right place for you and probably this is the right method for you.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="437"] The Assimil Series: Available in a lot of languages[/caption]

The Assimil Series is one of the greatest self-learning books that you could encounter, mainly because of its unique method that consists in an overall exposition of the language you're learning in short lessons which feature either short dialogues, short stories, jokes, or interesting text about the language or about the country in which that language is spoken.

I know that the books are expensive and everything, but... you know... cuf, cuf... you could get them...cuf, cuf...around, cuf, cuf, cuf.

So, almost every lesson of the book looks pretty much like this:



You have your text in L2 ( the language you're learning ) and right in the next page you have the overall translation of that complete text in L1 (your mother language). But the true powerful aspect about Assimil is the audio, the book also has the audio recordings of every single lesson in the book, and that's the most important aspect of this method.

I know what many of you are probably thinking, "so it's basically just a book with a bunch of little texts, jokes and dialogues, but it will not actually teach me the language".

That's where you're wrong, I'm studying French right now and when I started "Le Nouveau Francais Sans Peine" I was a little skeptical about this method, but to be honest, it looked way more interesting and with much more content than the grammar-focused conventional books that I was studying at the time. So I decided to give it a shot, and the results were  amazing, taking in consideration the initial expectations that I had for this method.

This method is amazing because it works in a really mysterious but effective way, and also, (if you use it properly) it will actually make you start speaking and writing the language, better yet, it will help you to express yourself in the language, whether you're making some grammatical mistakes or maybe you're not speaking the language at 100%, you are still able to express yourself and make people who only speak that language understand you even tought you don't speak it 100% correctly, and that really should be your first goal while you're learning a language, to be able to express yourself so that natives understand you even if you're not speaking in a perfect way, that's your first goal, and Assimil really helps you a lot to achieve it.

First of all, there are two things that I would like to talk about this method. Okay the first thing is that, although Assimil tells you in the first pages that this method is for absolute beginners, I still don't quite believe that, but that's just my opinion, maybe you pick up the German Assimil and you'll learn a lot from it and you'll find it great, but I think that before you get to start with the actual book, you first need to check out a little bit your target language.

What do I mean by that? Ok, just check out the basics of the language like:

• Common greetings


• The verb To Be in present


• The verb To Have in present


• Common descriptive articles like: tall, fat, thin, etc.


• How to ask questions.


• Numbers, Days and Months

And that's pretty much it , you know, really basic stuff. But now pay attention at the expression that I used "check out", that doesn't mean that you need to learn them or to memorize them completely. Not at all, just get to know the language, familiarize with it, this is not yet the time to learn the language, it's just the time to familiarize yourself with it a little bit and c'mon don't be lazy, you can check out those 6 things that I listed above in just one week or maybe a couple of days.

Why do I says this? Ok, I believe this deserves an explanation. The thing is that if you don't know zero about the language, when you open Assimil, you are going to be truly expose to the language. You're a going to see texts all written in the language and even if you see the translation next to it; it's highly probable that you will be a little overwhelm by the language and by this method and if you're impatient you'll probably end up saying "Oh the hell with this!, this is just too advance, I will never be able to learn these entire texts, I need something simpler" and you will throw the book away. Big mistake.

But if you have already check out the language, it's probable than in the first lessons you will be able to identify certain words or sentences, and you will say "Hey I know what this means" even tought you still don't understand the rest 90% of the text without the translation, that feeling of "huh I already knew that word" or "huh I already knew what that sentences meant" kinda gives you some sort of motivation to keep moving forward.

How to use Assimil:

Ok, now let's get into the real stuff, how to use this book? In the first pages, the book already kinda explains you how to use it, but it's not really specific about it, it tells what you have to do, but it doesn't tell you in which order you need to do it, or which learning part is the most important. So, if you are having troubles or questions about how to use this method, I will tell you the way that I used it, maybe you don't like it, maybe you want to do it your way, but I'm just recommending this way because that's how I feel that I got the most out of this method.

Okay, first, remember the part of the audio recordings that I said before?

[caption id="attachment_402" align="alignnone" width="254"] Yes, here we go again.[/caption]

Well we're going to begin with that. The first thing that you want to do, when you're already about to start lesson one is... CLOSE THE GODDAMN BOOK!
Listen to the audio recordings, don't read anything and just listen to lesson one over an over again. Okay I'm going to explain myself, the language learning process in divided into 4 parts: Listening, Reading, Speaking and Writing. Assimil will help you with all of them, but the most important skill that you have to develop in your early stages of learning is: Listening. Yes I know that I have already said this a thousand times in my previous posts, but "Listening" is the form that the language gets inside your mind, inside your brain, and once that happens, everything is going to be so much fluid.

How many times should I listen to the audio?

Well I think this depends in the language you're learning, for example if English is your L1 and you're trying to learn another Germanic-based language like: German, or Danish. Or if your L1 is Spanish and you're trying to learn: French or Italian. I think that mandatory you'll have to listen to it 10 times, and then, once you have already listen to it 10 times, listen to it more times until you kinda actually now what they're talking about. If they are languages from the same group of families you should be able to at least recognize one or two things about what they're saying, when you feel that you understand just a little bit of what they're talking about, okay that's enough and open the book.

But what about if you're learning a language completely different from any other language you know, I'd say that 20 times mandatory.

Ok, that's the first part, now open the book, put the audio of the lesson once again and read (in your mind) while you're listening to the audio, do this at least five times. Then stop the audio, read the translation and all the notes that the text has, and then play the audio once again and try to read it yourself out loud along with the audio, do that at least 5 times.

Now you're going to close the book and you're going to do one of the most important techniques in the early stages of language learning, this is going to help you a little more with your listening and your pronunciation: Shadowing.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="302"] That's right baby![/caption]

When you do shadowing you have to listen to the audio and you have to say everything that the audio it's saying, but now here's the trick, you will NOT pause the audio at any time. You have to follow everything that the guy is saying without stopping and with the best pronunciation possible. That's why it's called "Shadowing". At the beginning is going to be a little hard, but it's all matter of practice.

How much shadowing you should do?

Well, ideally 10 times but I'd say that you should stop, when you understand everything that it's said in the lesson and when you feel that your pronunciation it's similar or almost identical as the recordings.

How many lessons should I do?

One lesson per day is perfect

But what about writing?

Ok, yes I know the method that I described doesn't contain any actual writing developement, but stay calm dudes. Assimil is divided into 2 big parts or "waves", in the First Wave (1 - 49) you should do what I already described to you and in the Second Wave (50 - 99), after you have already done your usual routine, as Assimil explains to you, you have to go back to one of the earlier lessons and you have to pick up a notebook, read the translation of that lesson and translate that translation (xD) into the original language without reading the original language. So is that good writing practice for you?

When you finally finish Assimil you'll have developed a good listening ability, tons and tons of vocabulary, a fair amount of idiomatic expressions, and the ability of expressing yourself in various subjects.

Is not going to completely teach you the language, but is going to make that tedious early learning stage so much easier, productive, faster and effective.

Trust me, I have used it in my French, and recently I met a French teacher (from France) and she told me that she was amazed with my French, the vocabulary that I knew, my reading ability and the sentences that I was able to formulate while speaking, she didn't believe that I have only studied french for less than a year. I'm not trying to show off xD, I'm just trying to make you realize how effective this method could be, and you should definitely check it out, the books are available for a lot of languages: Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, you name it, they are extremely good and trust me they will help you a lot.

I hope that this post was helpful for you and thanks for reading :)

Read More

Nice Self-Learning Tool for Languages: LingQ (Review)

So the other day I was just checking out videos about languages in YouTube, and I found this guy.



His name is Steve Kaufman, and he is the founder of a Self-Learning Language Online community called LingQ, he also makes nice videos talking about language learning, if you are interested in this you can check out his channel.



I became really interested about this LingQ community so I decided to join in, is free so you don't have to worry about money, well if you want a premium account you have to pay, anyway, LingQ uses the Liberal Method that I already described in a previous post, so you know, it's a nice community for you to start learning a new language. The languages that they have available for their community are English, Japanese, Dutch, French, Russian, German, Italian, Chinese and Spanish and a few more.



Now I'm not being payed for talking about LingQ or anything, no, I just  found this website, I thought it was really interesting and I decided to share it with you.

What I really like about LingQ is that they have a lot of audio media for you to listen in your target language, always remember: Listen, is the most important part of learning any language and sometimes is really hard to find audio media for you to listen, yeah, you found books, you found magazines, but always remember, listening is the MOST important part, and if you don't have audible media, you're missing the most important part. The audio files in LingQ are easy to download, they're in mp3 format and you can be listening to them in your MP3P, LingQ actually encourages you to do this.

One thing that I didn't like, is the actual LingQ process of learning new words, it's a little tedious for me, to start selecting the words that I don't know, I'm the supporter of the idea that it's not really effective to learn new vocabulary without context that you can see right there. So I always prefer to read a lot, than memorize one for one the words that I don't know. Other thing that I didn't like is that there are just a few text translations of the text in the lesson, sometimes you have a sentence that you don't understand, you can check out the meaning of each word but sometimes that doesn't help because you still don't understand what it actually means within the text, so you try to check it out on the text translation and oh surprise, there's no text translation, and that's a little bit bothering, I don't know how it is in English but there are not too many translations in Spanish.

A useful tool is the Incomplete Text exercise or Cloze text exercise in the Vocabulary menu, that one is really helpful. A quick advice, if you have the free account, you can only choose 100 LingQ, that's your limit, if you reach it, you have to erase some.

Another advice about listening jejejeje: When you enter the Library you will find numerous podcast of your target language, when you enter to them, you'll find at the left the text of that podcast for you to read, and in the right you'll find the actual audio podcast for you to listen. My advice is: listen, do not read. Ignore the text and just hit play and listen, listen and listen. Do this like four times and then you read, and then you highlight the words that you don't know, LingQ will tell you the meaning and then you listen again a few more times.

There's also an Skype-way of having conversations with tutors of the target language in the target language that you're learning, I haven't try it yet, but when I do, I'll tell you about it. You can also send written works in the target language so people that know the language can check out your grammar and correct you if you made any mistakes.

So overall is a really nice Language community and you should definitively check it out.

http://www.lingq.com/

Read More

Language Learning

I will dedicate this category of the blog for language learning, I'm going to start a little experiment with a new language teaching method that I'm developing right now.



I make this method using the Assimil and Pimsleur philosophy and also combining the teaching philosophy of a few teachers that I had, my personal experiences  in learning languages and the philosophy of  a few polyglots that I know , loki2504 is one of them, you should definitely subscribe to him if you if you’re a language lover.



Another great youtuber in the area of languages is FluentCzech his videos are awesome  and incredibly useful



This is a webiste that I recommend alot for everyone trying to learn any language:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html

Read More

Learning Languges: Do I need to learn grammar?

When you start investigating  methods of how to teach languages, you will soon find out that, there are these two opposite methods, these two opposite methods that are always in conflict with one an other, which are those methods?, well there’s the method that wants to teach almost the entire language as if it was a really theoretical science with a bunch of rules and with a bunch of grammatical equations like physics or like chemistry. We will call this the Conservative method, and there’s this other method way more liberal, that say’s the hell with rules, the hell with grammar,  just listen to the language, you will eventually know how to speak it, you will eventually know how to read it and all the grammar that it has, you'll learn naturally because that’s  the way that you learned you mother language. Let’s call this the Liberal Method.

And, you know, these methods are right and wrong at the same time, what these two methods don’t realize is that they’re both complementary to each other. Learning the language just with a bunch of rules, with a lot of vocabulary without context, you know, learning it as a really strict science, is not effective, if you just learn the language theoretically you will fail at the moment that you start a conversation, because you don’t really know how people actually speak, you don’t know their common day expressions you don’t know the rhythm of a conversation , and besides of that, the Conservative Method is a truly boring method you will never learn to completely speak a language if you learn it as a science, you can apply this method in the really advance stages of your learning, but do not start with learning every single grammatical rule, there are important rules that you should know right from the beginning, but do not focus in the more advance rules at the beginning of your learning, focus on the simple ones.

And there’s this other method that says, screw grammar, you don’t need it, you don’t need it at the early stages just listen to the language, you will eventually know how to speak it, you will eventually know how to read it and all the grammar that it has, you'll learn naturally because that’s  the way that you learned your mother language.

Yeah is not as simple as that, you need grammar, simple grammar, the simplest grammar ever, but you need grammar,  once that you’re familiar with the really really basic grammar you can procede to the 4 stages which are: Listen, Speak, Read, Write.

Now the great objection that this method has against grammar is the following: You don’t need grammar, because when you were a little baby you naturally learn how to speak your mother language without grammar or without rules, just listen and speak, and that’s how you will learn any other language.

You know that is actually true, except for the final part, “and that’s how you will learn any other language” mmm not exactly, you learned you mother language that way, because you were in the adequate environment to learn it. Every person that you were in contact with, spoke that language, you were listening to that language all the time, you we’re in contact with that language 24/7, and that language was the only way to truly communicate with other people.

Now that I’ve said that, the Liberal Method might actually work if you, for example I’m learning French right now, and the Liberal Method might work for me if I go to France or to Belgium and I stay there for maybe 6 months or a year. I’m sure that if I do that, the Liberal Method will work, I’m going to be in contact with French all the time, I’ll be listening to francophone people all the time and I’ll eventually know how to speak it fluently, I’ll eventually know how to read it, and how to write it. But my point is that you need to be in an environment where you will be in contact with that language all the time.  And if you don’t have this environment you will not learn a language by this method, or maybe you will but it’ll take you decades or even more.

But there is something that it’s absolutely correct about this method, this method strongly encourages you to listen to the language. And that’s the most important thing that you have to do when you’re learning a new language, listen to that language.  You need to listen to that language a lot. Because a the end of the day, a language is an spoken way of communication, you can also write it, of course, but  what is the most common way of communication that you use in your daily life, spoken communication,  you speak with people, that’s the most common way to communicate, and what do you need to speak with people? Know how to speak their language , and how will you learn how to speak, their language?, you listen to that language!

So with that little rant that I just made, you’re probably wandering: okay, but, what’s your point? , which one of these methods is the correct method?

I think that the correct method is the combination of these two methods, why do I think that? Because that was the way that I learned English, with these two methods combine.

You see I listen to a lot of English, because all of the English speaking media  that was around my country: all the video games, all the music, all the films, all the TV, and I learn English grammar in school and that’s it. The grammar that I learn in school was grammar that I could’ve easily learned in just one year. It was simple grammar, but that simple grammar made me understand a lot of English. So your question is why do I need grammar? Because if you study the common grammar of the language, you’ll learn that language so much faster, you will understand it so much faster, you will save years of learning with the Liberal Method if you just stop for a second, and you know, check out the common grammar of that language, and if you apply this two methods together you will learn a language in a fast and effective way.



And for that reason, I created a Language Learning page on this blog, where I'm going to put useful stuff for learning languages and also, try to develop my own teaching/learning method.

Thanks for reading :)

Read More