znXXad6fvh8.txt

Speaker 1:          00:00          All right, so I'm looking at the pimsleur website right now. Uh, this is the, this is the page for pimsleur French, and this looks really good. I think I'm going to buy this. So let's check the price.

Speaker 2:          00:10          Uh,

Speaker 1:          00:11          what's that? Well, here's the price in pesos. I wonder how much it is in dollars.

Speaker 2:          00:16          Uh,

Speaker 1:          00:18          wait, that's dollars.

Speaker 1:          00:27          Hello folks, this is Paul. How you doing today? I've decided to make this video to give you a review about a language program called pimsleur. Pimsleur. French is the one I wanted to focus on. I've done some other pimsleur courses. I've done the, I did one level of Arabic right now I'm using tagalog. Uh, I did one level of Hebrew wants, but the one that I've gone through the most is French. I've did four levels of French. There are five levels now that I've done four of them, so I thought I'm in the best position to keep that one in mind and focus on that one. Uh, so pimsleur, right there are five levels. It's quite good. Um, I like it but I think it's quite expensive and that seems to be one of the common complaints is just the price, like it's a, it's a good quality program to learn the basic skills of a language, but it's just really expensive.

Speaker 1:          01:16          So if you buy a cds like levels one to five would be like 150 cds because there's 30 CCS per level. If you bought them all on cd, that would be, I think about $1,200 us. So quite a lot of money, right? You can get them in digital format and MP for about $550, I believe it was the price. So less than half price for digital format. So you can get that discount and I don't recommend buying the CDS. Why would you buy the cds in 2015 when you can just get the MP three downloads for less than half the price. So I'll do that. Or if you're a friend or someone happens to have the cds, maybe you can borrow them if you feel ethically okay with that. And if you're not worried about Simon and Schuster coming to hunt you down and borrow them, I don't know, find a way, but it's good, but it's expensive.

Speaker 1:          02:08          That's kind of the main thing I wanted to start with. But let's talk about what's good. I'll give you my kind of sandwich format. I'll give you the good than the imperfect and then kind of wind up with the good and maybe a suggestion on how to use it. So, um, the good things first, one good thing is just that it's an all audio program and it really gets you familiar with the phonology of the language and the sounds of the language. And I'm big on that. I really think it's important at the beginning when you learn a language to really get down the phonology. I think that's what I'm, that's what helps you sync in that language is what is really getting the phonology down. That's kind of the access to the inner core of the language, the culture of the language. Pimsleur helps you do that because you're, you're immersed in the sounds right from the beginning and you're not relying on the visual input.

Speaker 1:          02:54          You're kind of forced to listen to the sounds and make sense of them audibly without having that visual input of reading. So it's really good for that. Uh, so that's one thing and it does it in a way that also drills the sentence structure. So you're not just like listening and repeating to sounds or phrases or sentences. It's actually building up piece by piece. Uh, it's, it's, it's really structured in a way that helps you to build progressively more difficult sentences as you go. Another good thing about pimsleur is that it uses something called graduated intervals, which is one of the features that it's famous for. I guess a graduated intervals means that you learn some language, like a vocabulary or phrase or a structure. Then you review it soon after, after a short interval of time, but then the next time you review it, the interval of time gets a little longer and then the next time you review it, there's a little bit longer between the reviews.

Speaker 1:          03:48          So the amount of time between each, uh, each review, each time you are asked to recall that language gets greater and greater. So that's good for, for basically I'm internalizing it into your longterm memory. The more times that you review that, that language, the less frequently you have to review it. That's basically the point. If you're familiar with Hunky flashcards, they use something, a similar system to that where I'm the spaced repetition software. If you get the card right, then the next time you see it is after a greater interval. If you get the card wrong or you are not confident about it, then you see it after a shorter interval. That's something similar to graduated intervals. Another good thing is that it gets you just to repeat things a lot, like you're repeating the same structures in the same boat, a basic vocabulary over and over and over, and when you're first learning a language, it's important to do that.

Speaker 1:          04:42          To repeat things over a lot, to get some automaticity to get things internalized to the point where you can say them without really thinking, especially for structures like basic sentence structures. That's good because you get those structures that come out automatically and then you can substitute vocabulary and make new sentences that you've never made before. So, uh, it, it drills a lot of that kind of thing. It gets you repeating a lot, but it does it in a way that always seems like you're learning something new. Okay. So onto some of the things that are imperfect or things that I need, I think needs to be supplemented or whatever. Um, I don't think that the audio only is always sufficient. There are always some times in a pimsleur course where I can't clearly hear what the speaker is saying on the CDS. Uh, I think everyone perceives sounds a little bit differently and there are sounds that you might be able to perceive for easily that I hear them and I can't quite hear what they're saying.

Speaker 1:          05:38          I just don't know what letters those would come out to if written down or I just, I can't imagine what the word is. I can't really perceive the sounds. Uh, and in those kind of situations they don't really. They don't know which sounds I'm not perceiving. So they don't clarify it, so I can't really stick to the pimsleur philosophy of only listened to the CD, only use the audio in that kind of situation. So I break their rules and I reached for my dictionary and look up a word that sounds like what they're saying or I'll pause it and I'll try to find, find out what the word is. Um, but I, I need to use some kind of visual input. Um, having the visual input in that kind of situation is really helpful because if you can't perceive the sound once you see it, then you can perceive it because you'll be connecting that mysterious sound with something visual.

Speaker 1:          06:25          Right? Uh, so I, I don't buy the whole audio only thing, 100 percent. I think it's really good to have a focus on audio, especially in the beginning in that solves a lot of the problems of traditional learning using just books without a lot of audio or like a book with just one CD or whatever. Um, but I think it's still good to have some visual input. So I think it's good to do this, to do pimsleur in conjunction with other more visual materials. Another thing is that you just never quite learn as much as you think you're going to learn. Uh, I think partly that's because people look at the size of the course, like, Whoa, 150 cds for five levels, or even just like the first two levels. Wow, that's 60 cds. If I finished 60 cds of French, I'm gonna have to be fluent, right?

Speaker 1:          07:11          That's 60 whole cds of French. I'm going to have to be really, really good after that. Or they look at the price and they say, wow, okay, it's a thousand dollars for five levels. Uh, I, that must make me fluent that better make me fluent. So I'm spending a lot of money on that. But it doesn't really work like that. It gives you a good basis, a good basic understanding and a good basic anchoring in speaking, listening, and interactive skills. It gives you a good basis to build on. But it's not gonna make you fluent. So basically I think pimsleur is really good. The only problem I have with it is the price, I just think it's too expensive. Uh, I know a lot of work goes into it and they can charge whatever they want, but just a lot of people can't really afford to buy all the levels.

Speaker 1:          07:56          So that's the, that's what it is. It's the price, but it's good. It's good quality. I think it's good for building up your, your listening and your speaking and your oral communication skills without relying on the visual too much. So that solves some of those problems of traditional learning we had with just focusing on written materials too much, focusing on the visual input too much and not being able to translate that into conversations. Pimsleur is kind of one of the ways you can solve that problem. Um, but I don't think pimsleur alone is enough. I think you need to supplement it with visual input. Um, even at the same time while you're doing pimsleur, pimsleur advises you against that. I don't believe that I, uh, I think you should, you should supplement with visual materials. Use a textbook, um, you know, read a authentic materials, try to use as much visual input as you can.

Speaker 1:          08:51          Use other sources, not just the audio, right in a top of that, the audio on the pimsleur cds is controlled, right? It's controlled practice. It's, there's a lot of repeating, there's a lot of, um, uh, there's a lot of just question and answer type of a type of structure. So it's, it's really limited in what you hear and what you're expected to produce. So you need to have experienced from the beginning in uncontrolled situations, free practice, right? Uh, that means talk with native speakers in a context that's not really laid out, that where you're just conversing and trying to communicate and figuring out how to say things. And you can do that by getting a teacher, like a tutor on Italki through skype. You can take lessons or if someone in your town speaks that language and they can tutor you or help you out, you can get a language partner and do a language exchange, something like that.

Speaker 1:          09:44          And then use that as your opportunity to practice communicating. And then when there's a communication breakdown or there's like a language barrier that can help you get through that, but telling you, oh, in this situation we say this and whatever. So you learn how to deal with those unexpected natural situations that come up in real conversations that you won't get on the pimsleur cds. So you need to supplement, you need the visual input and you also need that free practice. Um, and if you do the, all those things in conjunction with the Pimsleur, then you're going to come up with a really strong base and when you're done the courses, you'll be ready to get into some simple conversations and then build more and more on top of that. So pimsleur is good. The price, I don't know what to say about it, but try to get your hands on them, use them, but supplement. It's not the only thing to use, but it's good.

Speaker 3:          10:34          Wow.