Pimsleur Means Business

The Pimleur method has been around for 60 years.  You listen to a thirty minute lesson narrated in English, in which you hear and repeat new vocabulary in your target language, and then remember the words at successively longer intervals and figure out ways to combine the words into sentences.  More than any other method, Pimsleur gets you speaking from memory (not simply parroting what you just heard), and it is remarkably effective.  After the thirty minutes your brain will be tired, and (if you're like me) you'll find random Mandarin phrases echoing around in your head for a while.  It's like the muscle burn after a good workout.  

  

Pimsleur is targeted for mature, business-minded people.  You won't find vocabulary to help you flirt or talk slang at the disco.  Their Mandarin course consists of 5 levels with 30 lessons each, for a total of 150 lessons or 75 hours of training.  Each lesson will teach you an average of 10 new words or phrases.  

Some approaches break vocabulary into categories (food, clothing, body parts, numbers, colors, location, etc.) and teach you one category at a time.  This method doesn't work, because our brains are poor at memorizing lists.  Pimsleur doesn't make this mistake.  It teaches you words from multiple categories in each lesson.  You'll be speaking sentences (not just words) starting from lesson one.     

It's important to understand that even after completing all 150 lessons, you will just be an intermediate in Mandarin.  To continue your journey towards complete fluency, you'll need to utilize other methods.  Nevertheless, Pimsleur is an excellent tool to take you from an absolute beginner to an intermediate.  

But there are a few downsides:

• Pimsleur is expensive.  $15 a month for just the audio, or $20 a month for audio with doodads.  (More on those in a minute.)  You could also purchase the course outright - but that's even more expensive.  
• Pimsleur requires a 30 minute block of time for each lesson.  It's not something you can do in your spare moments.  Many lessons take me closer to an hour, because although they leave spaces in the recording for you to say your answers, I'm not fast enough.  So I pause the recording, say my answer, and then re-start the recording.  I also take time to flip through the flash cards at the end of each session.  
• The Pimsleur app is slow and occasionally has playback glitches.  Not a biggie, just slightly annoying.
• The doodads they've added to their Premium ($20 a month) version are cheesy, almost Pac-Man era.  The "beep" when you use the flashcards and other word recall "games" is unpleasantly shrill.  The flashcards feature does not track your progress in learning the flashcard (and thus is not SRS).  I still use the flashcards app because this is the best way to see the pinyin and Chinese characters for the new vocabulary from the lesson.  I also use the "Speak Easy" tool because it helps me understand the conversation at the beginning of each audio lesson.  Despite the cheesiness, I do recommend you pay the extra $5 a month and use the flashcards, Speak Easy, and reading lessons.

   

• Pimsleur requires such immense concentration (a good thing) that I can't do anything else (wash dishes, drive, etc.) while doing a lesson.  I have to sit still and focus - and thus, often struggle to stay awake!     

Curious to know more about what tools I recommend using?