The last time someone mentioned Pimsleur to me, it was a dude I randomly met on Skype who said he was gonna learn Japanese with JUST Pimsleur and skip out on the whole writing process. Fortunately for him, I’ve met a couple of people who are better at speaking then reading so if not for those people, I would have gone off my rockers and trolled him like crazy.

In short, its not something I would recommend.

I haven’t looked into Pimsleur a ton because at the moment it’s just “that thing that ads think I will be interested in.” Have you guys seen those “Language Professors HATE HIM” ads too or is it just me?

Before I found TextFugu, I looked into Pimsleur. Here are some things to know:

Paul Pimsleur was a man who did research on language learning and he developed some good ideas.

“The Pimsleur Approach” (which is heavily advertised as mentioned above already) uses Pimsleur’s ideas but their business practice is somewhat predatory (low introductory price, but they start charging you a lot monthly unless you cancel and return the product).

Simon & Schuster also have a Pimsleur learning system and their business practice is much better.

All that being said, if you are interested in “output” style learning, you should look into your local library system. I live in Seattle and the Seattle Public Library offers online language learning tools for free. Specifically Mango (which I have tried and like) and LiveMocha (which I have not tried). Mango uses spaced repetition (like Pimsleur) to develop basic conversational skill.

I’m sure if you wanted to ‘try’ pimsleur, there are sites you will find a torrent of it..

If you wanted to go down the audio book route, I would look at michel Thomas method.. Again, available to “try” in places..

Basically I have tested both full courses and neither were really that strong.. I would recommend vocab vocab vocab from an srs like anki or iknow.. That will get you further than these rip off courses.. If you see it advertised a lot.. Thats where your money is going. Not into a new and better product..

Hashi, I would recommend private browsing and dont track me.. You won’t get served annoying, algorithm driven ad’s that tell you to hate people ha!

@ andrew

Rosetta Stone like eh?

I’ve tried out the first few audio lessons. I enjoy them if I have a long car ride ahead of me. I used to drive 30 minutes to work everyday so audio lessons were great. I was mainly listening to JapanesePod101 however. Pimsleur seems very robotic and to the point where as JapaenesePod101 is more like a conversation in a podcast type setting. There are a lot of unscripted parts and laughter throughout JapanesePod101 which you definitely won’t see much of on Pimsleur. I would definitely say JapanesePod101 is more entertaining. I however never listened to them to seriously learn anything. I listened to them more for entertainment and for a bit of practice. So if you are listening them to really learn something, you may learn better with Pimsleur as they get to the point and have less chit chatting. I mainly use Textfugu for learning new stuff and occasionally read through a chapter in my Genki textbook.

I’m using Pimsleur.  That is how I got started into Japanese.  It was for fun at first and then it has gotten serious.  I’m at Pimsleur Japanese II Lesson 27.  I listen to it while driving to work.  It has 3 levels and each level has 30 lessons.  Each lesson is 30 minutes in length.

It was hard at first because I don’t know the grammar yet.  I learned the grammar after reading  Tae Kim’s free Japanese grammar online.  From then on listening to Pimsleur and understanding it got easier.  It is really good if you want to learn conversational Japanese.

Then I signed up for Textfugu to learn the Kanji.  I also found an online language partner.  She lives in Japan.  I found the website from Tae Kim’s website.  Hope that helps.  Cheers.

• This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by  James.