Me, also being a language language, myself, have gone through many several programs (most of them requiring minimum cost) to acquire at least a little bit of a language.
Today, I want to talk about The Pimsleur Approach.
I first started with The Pimsleur Approach for Spanish. It is an audio set that comes with 3 levels each with 30 units each. Each unit is 30 minutes long.
I only recommend this to adults who are trying to learn a language in a very fast pace.
I will start off with the good things about Pimsleur. It teaches social language (language you use for interactions in the restaurant, in the streets, meet/greet, etc.). This is perfect for those who just wants to travel and just know how to get around. Because it emphasis audio learning, it really drills you down the pronunciation of the language; you really do end up sounding more native because it forces you to practice speaking. The things they teach are based on what discussions you might encounter while abroad; it wouldn't teach you words you wouldn't really encounter. For example, it would teach you words such as "water", "bathroom", "excuse me", "thank you", etc. but not "grass", "dog", "hop", etc. They teach you phrases and sentences at a time for you to start having an intro conversation without teaching you much grammar! Very cool approach as grammar is a bit time consuming if you really want to dig deep into it. If you do, that would be learning the language very in depth and that is what Pimsleur cannot help you with (oops! a little spill to the cons!)
Now the cons. Pimsleur only
assumes the phrases you'll need while abroad. It will teach you what to say and how to say it, but if you still want to learn a phrase
you want to use, Pimsleur might not teach you. Because it emphasis audio learning, reading and writing comes 2nd in their approach. I believe learning a language is learning all four domains (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) at the same time. What gets me the most is that Pimsleur pretends you are a male who is traveling to a different part of the world and trying to pick up a lady. In order to pick up a lady, you need to learn how to have a simple conversation with her using your close-to-native-like-accent target language to have a chat. To me, that is a very biased approach and a biased target audience. Another thing that is a little upsetting is that Pimsleur teaches based on translation. They will tell you to say something in English, and you would have you respond in the target language. In a way, you might not have time to think what each word literally means, but you associate yourself producing a certain "noise" (target language) to the English that was previously spoken. Good and bad. Good because you might not have time to translate yourself.
All in all, there are pros in cons in everything. It will work for language acquisition, but it might not work for everyone. Again, I only recommend this to adults who wants to learn a language quickly. I also personally think that if you really do carefully understand the audio, you might be able to start combining phrases (making your own sentences) without having going through much grammar lessons! It doesn't always work though, FYI.
