Pimsleur Spanish

I have usually seen language proficiency broken down into four distinct categories: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Pimsleur Spanish is designed almost exclusively to cultivate speaking skills, although limited listening and reading skills come about mostly as a side-effect.

At the beginning of each lesson, a conversation is played twice for the student to use in cultivating listening comprehension skills.

The pace of speech in Pimsleur is more slow and deliberate than the student will encounter in most real world Spanish conversation. This is easily put to good use in developing solid pronunciation skills. But in all honesty, listening comprehension skills will ultimately have to be cultivated using other means.

In every meaningful sense, Pimsleur is audio-only. The student listens and verbally responds to the half-hour lessons as though conversing with a one-on-one tutor. Pimsleur seems best used to practice conversation skills.

Several people have borrowed some of the first lessons from me after I began to show progress, and I noticed that students who only listen and (inexplicably) just won't talk back to the lessons fail to make any progress, then quit entirely. So, if you simply will not talk back to an imaginary tutor, I'll go ahead and say save your money and time.

I've seen differing points of view on the WWW regarding how best to make use of the Pimsleur lessons. My basic contribution to the discussion is that one should, to the extent reasonably possible, work through one lesson per day without interruption, listening and responding to the lessons as directed.

I seem to recall some official suggestion from Pimsleur that one not proceed at a rate greater than one lesson per day, but that one proceed to the next lesson as soon as one feels one has about 80% of the material in a lesson correct. In my experience, working through a typical lesson three times is usually about right. I've tried tackling the material at slower paces, and feel that this actually hindered the process.

At some point in learning Spanish, most adult self-learners seem to take at least one protracted break from the process. Life gets in the way, motivation ebbs, or whatever, but it happens. At one point, I felt that the past perfect tense was melting my brain a bit several lessons into Pimsleur Spanish II, and I decided to take a break. I'd planned on taking a break of a day or two, but it turned into months.

When I picked the material back up, I wasn't able to just pick back up where I left off, but I found a good solution. I played part of a lesson from about where I left off, but found I wasn't quite up to it. So I picked one several lessons back, but still wasn't up to it. Skipping backward several more lessons, I landed on one with which I was completely comfortable, and just resumed from that point.

Over the next few weeks, I was able to pick up a lot of momentum and confidence working through lessons that were already somewhat familiar from several months back. When I made it to the lessons that had beaten me before, my renewed confidence and motivation carried me right through. I have proceeded at a rate of almost a lesson per day since then.

Oh, Pimsleur's retail price intimidates some, to say the least. I shop with great care and have had no real trouble finding the various sets of lessons for under $150 per set of lessons on CD in mint or near mint condition.