Has anyone here used pimsleur? if so, did they like it? also, if i have a small background in japanese would you recommend skipping some in the beginning? or should i just start from the beginning to make sure i dont miss anything? i suppose extra pronunciation practice cant hurt..

thanks!

In my experience, Pimsleur is useless except for a complete beginner. Think of each Pimsleur (1,2) set as one semester of non intensive study at a college.

I don't know what you level is, but try listening to the last chapter and seeing how much you don't understand (assuming you have access to it before buying).

Another thing to note is how stilted and unnatural all of the conversations are, even at the end.

thanks Jarvik7.

Jarvik7 Wrote:In my experience, Pimsleur is useless except for a complete beginner. Think of each Pimsleur (1,2) set as one semester of non intensive study at a college.

I have taken a summer of intensive immersion, that covers about a years worth of information. so, you would say it would be a waste of time?

and yes, i am currently obtaining a way to listen to the last chapter

the only reason that i considered it is that right now i dont really have much speaking practice.. i have tried starting to watch japanese movies with only japanese subtitles, which is going alright, in addition i am trying to study some for next year's japanese classes, work my way through RTK1, and trying to start the AJATT sentences method. also, i have some japanese friends so i talk to them on facebook, but they dont live near me, so right now, i basically am never speaking japanese.

any reccomendations for speaking practice? also, any contrasting opinions about pimsleur? Jarvik7's comment somewhat surprised me as I have mostly seen rave reviews of the program (then again, i think that they were all written given the idea that you would be starting from scratch)

I finished all of Pimsleur 1, 2, and 3. I would strongly advise against just listening to the last lesson of any Pimsleur course as a way to judge its effectiveness. Words and grammar are not taught from easiest to hardest in the traditional sense. Some of what is taught might make you sound a bit highfalutin or even old fashioned but its no reason to let it stop you. All in all I think it is a great course for a beginner. That bit about being able to hold a job in the country after all 90 Units is BS though. I think if you do it you will come out with a strong intuitive grasp of basic grammar and a slightly above average starting vocabulary. You will get a decent amount of pronunciation and listening practice too. All this with a very low effort level (30 minutes a day) required.

EDIT: And if your not a beginner it can still help with pronunciation and speaking, you will just be able to go through it a bit faster. I had a college semester of Japanese under my belt when i did it and it really filled in a lot of cracks.

dilandau23 Wrote:EDIT: And if your not a beginner it can still help with pronunciation and speaking, you will just be able to go through it a bit faster. I had a college semester of Japanese under my belt when i did it and it really filled in a lot of cracks.

anyone else recommend this? i basically know nakama1 well, and have some additional knowledge that i have just picked up here and there... my plan would be to just start and do as many lessons as i can stand until i start having trouble with the recall..

I'm not familiar with the Nakama textbooks, but I went through Pimsleur 1-3 in about a month and a half before going to Japan, and it has proven quite useful. All in all it doesn't cover that much material, but all the material it covers is extremely useful, I think. Things like what track the X-bound train is on are very useful on an everyday basis, and weren't covered in my text (JSL up through book 2). Furthermore, I've found that I was able to deal with stuff I covered in Pimsleur at an almost fluent level of proficiency immediately upon arrival in Japan.

On the other hand, if you don't have an immediate need for everyday useful Japanese, I can't speak to how useful it would be. The grammar isn't gone into in too much depth, basically skimming along and picking off the most useful constructions. I did the course almost entirely in the car, which would have been wasted time otherwise, so I didn't care all that much how useful it was going to be. That also made the pacing easy - I had about 45 minutes of commuting time each day, which was about 1.5 lessons, a solid pace at my level of proficiency.

I suppose it does depend on the level you are at, but I found pimsleur to be of a massive help to me when I first started out in Japanese, the course helped my pronunciation dramatically. Well worth a go anyway.

I think Pimsleur is a fantastic help even for advanced beginners, and something of practical usage can still be gained even for beginner intermediate. That said, only beginners should use them for serious study, and I would only use them as a filler from about intermediate beginner, as I did. I started using them to utilize the empty time on my daily bike ride to and from work. I finished 1 & 2 after a year and a half in Japan. I actually gleaned quite a bit from them including vocabulary, grammar reinforcement, and practice with set phrases I which are common but that I don't use often.

Note: I used a burned copy from a friend. The course costs hundreds of dollars if bought from Pimsleur. I think only very beginners, or those needing a crash course (as the business people I feel it's mainly aimed towards) would find the price justafiable.

skylarth Wrote:i basically know nakama1 well

Hey, my summer class used the Nakama series as well! I really need to finish the second one, though...

Pimsleur, standalone, is pretty damn powerful, especially when you consider that it has a form of spaced repetition built into it. However, I don't have the patience to sit down and stare at a wall for half an hour and move at the speed of some random announcer. Sometimes it goes too fast for me, but usually it's too slow, and rather annoying. Consequently, I stopped around the middle of Pimsleur 1. I'm just not fond of audio course, in general, though: I can definitely see it being helpful for a lot of people.

The effort to sit through each Pimsleur lesson is what drives most people away from it, even though it's excellent. I therefore recommend doing it while riding your bike or exercising. I wouldn't reccommend it while driving though, they both require more concentration than you can give to either.

Another vote from Pimsleur for me. Pimsleur was my first exposure to spaced repetition, though I didn't know it at the time. I had Japanese for Busy People and got a few chapters in, but had incredible difficulty remembering a lot of the words. It felt like just beating my head into a brick wall. Then I started doing Pimsleur, and found that everything I was learning in it was sticking really well. I ended up doing all 3 Japanese levels and it gave me a lot of confidence. The textbooks became a lot easier after that.

It's ridiculously expensive and I can't advocate buying it, but if you can get a hold of it cheaply or borrow it from the library, I agree with dingomick: I'd recommend it to anyone up to the advanced beginner stage.

Resolve: very similar to my first exposure to Japanese. I went from looking a Japanese for Busy People 1 while listening to pimsleur at the same time. I thank pimsleur for my '聞きやすい' pronunciation (as i have been told) to this day.

edit: the way it breaks down words into it's smallest pieces and gets you to repeat them over and over before you can say a full phase is the part that I think helped with pronunciation the most.

resolve Wrote:It's ridiculously expensive and I can't advocate buying it

thanks for the replies! everyone's comments have been very helpful!

I wouldn't have even begun learning Japanese if it wasn't for Pimsleur. I managed to get the 3 volumes for free off a friend and basically that was the initial reason for me learning Japanese. It is very good for pronounciation practice and contrary to what other people have said, I found it to be a highly enjoyable way of learning and since it was my first foray into Japanese using it was my most exponential point of learning. The structure of 30 mins a day was also very appealing, because you could just do that and you were basically assured to progress to a certain level. As I'm sure you aware after using it you'll be missing simple adjectives and nouns, but it deliberately misses them out to give you grammar familiarity. Would recommend using it at the library aswell if you do not know someone with it. I agree with it being very expensive, but so was Heisig before not too recently.

My local public library has a complete set. Working through the set before a trip to Japan *really* helped. A library is a great place to find educational materials, especially those too expensive to purchase.

I originally planned to listen to them on my iPod while commuting to work, but language tapes distracted too much from the more important driving activity. So I gave up on the commute idea and listened safely at home.

The conversations were all a little stilted and cheesy, but tolerable. Although I still remember there was one week where the conversation seemed to focus on asking a lady out for a drink, and I kept wondering "just what exactly are they trying to teach us?"

dingomick Wrote:The effort to sit through each Pimsleur lesson is what drives most people away from it, even though it's excellent. I therefore recommend doing it while riding your bike or exercising.

That's an absolutely wonderful idea! I can't believe I never thought that! I could definitely combine treadmills and whatnot with Pimsleur. Pity I don't have a DAP.

Megaqwerty Wrote:

dingomick Wrote:The effort to sit through each Pimsleur lesson is what drives most people away from it, even though it's excellent. I therefore recommend doing it while riding your bike or exercising.

That's an absolutely wonderful idea! I can't believe I never thought that! I could definitely combine treadmills and whatnot with Pimsleur. Pity I don't have a DAP.

Man, that's the ONLY way to bicycle commute or exercise! (^_^) I looked forward to biking to and from work every day knowing I was gaining almost an hour of study time, rather than just zoning out.

I'm training for a marathon right now, but I don't have a DAP small enough to jog with. It's killing me, especially since some of my runs are hours long. There's only so many times I can write the kana in my palm, and my self-quizzing is too predictable. I'd carry some flashcards, but they'd get soaked. Gotta buy a nano, and soon!

Utilizing those small chunks of time in your day is one of the most effective study habits I can recommend. 15mins on the train, 30mins riding your bike to school, 60mins jogging, heck even 5mins on the toilet are even more, er, productive than before.

dingomick Wrote:

Megaqwerty Wrote:

dingomick Wrote:The effort to sit through each Pimsleur lesson is what drives most people away from it, even though it's excellent. I therefore recommend doing it while riding your bike or exercising.

That's an absolutely wonderful idea! I can't believe I never thought that! I could definitely combine treadmills and whatnot with Pimsleur. Pity I don't have a DAP.

Man, that's the ONLY way to bicycle commute or exercise! (^_^) I looked forward to biking to and from work every day knowing I was gaining almost an hour of study time, rather than just zoning out.

I'm completely with you here. Now that I'm done with Pimsleur, I use my daily commute to listen to lessons from Japanesepod101.com. When I'm done with that, I'm not sure what I'll do (it'll be a while yet, I'm less than halfway through the beginner lessons), but hopefully I'll be good enough to get something out of an all-Japanese newscast or something similar.

A little tip for anybody who is doing Pimsleur. I found that about halfway through Pimsleur II, the lessons got very fast and sometimes I wanted to sit back and let things settle for a bit. So I found a great way to perfect each lesson, even if it was very tricky. The method is,

1) Do the lesson a first time, straight from start to finish without a break.
2) the second and third time, do the lesson using the pause button. When you don't know how to say it immediately, sit back and think about it slowly and clearly.
3) Then do the lesson for a fourth time. This time, without the pause. You'll find your responses come very quickly and clear in your mind. Then the lesson is perfected.

This means it takes about a year to do all 90 lessons. The foundation is the most important part, so this is a well spent year. If your foundations are weak, your building will topple quickly.

How long did it take other people to complete the course? I can't imagine you would gain much from flying through doing a lesson each day. 80-90 perecent should be mastered before you move on to the next lesson. But what the individual sees as "mastered" differs from person to person.

I did all lessons with the pause button at hand. I wasn't always correct, but I achieved more than 80% correctness for each lesson on the first go, and thus never had to repeat. I sometimes did two lessons a day (I was preparing to go to Japan) and thus it didn't take me that long to finish the course. The only delay was due to laziness - leaving the sessions for a week or more when I was busy, etc.

If you have little time then always using the pause button would be good. But I do think that you need to go through the lesson without the pause button to say you have fully mastered it. A fast response time is very important in conversation and this gives you perfect training for that right from the start. The number of times i've sat with some Japanese people at dinner etc, understood almost everything but said nothing is very frustrating. this is just because my response time wasn't/isn't well trained enough. The people at the table end of thinking that I can't speak a word of Japanese. This is pretty common though I imagine. Pimsleur can speed up your response time right from the first lesson.

kyotokanji Wrote:How long did it take other people to complete the course? I can't imagine you would gain much from flying through doing a lesson each day. 80-90 perecent should be mastered before you move on to the next lesson. But what the individual sees as "mastered" differs from person to person.

I used it one lesson a day and never thought of it as flying through. The Pimsleur lessons used spaced repetition so repeating the lesson 4 times before moving onto the next (I think this is what you are saying, correct me if I'm wrong) sounds like overkill. If you already knew the majority of what was being taught in the tapes and was using Pimsleur purely for pronounciation and listening practice I could see why you might be more likely to approach it this way.

However, your system commits you to taking a year or so to get it complete. A better way would be to go through it, 1 a day as it was designed and then just go through the whole thing again after you'd finished to practice further and this way you wouldn't be tied to a year, for example you might find after doing it twice (6 months) everything felt fine. Each successive lesson practices things from the last anyhow and certain things in Vol I are not mentioned in Vol III so the longer you take to get through the easier it will be to forget the phrases unique to Vol I.

I found after using the program once I could hold basic conversations with my Japanese friend at uni and speak to Japanese tourists I met. However the lack of verbs, adjectives and informal conversation on the program means you have to supplement with other audio/video programs (I used Basic Japanese I & II videos and still use Japanese Pod 101).

I don't live in Japan so I can't say how well I would fair in a proper Japanese speaking environment (i.e many people speaking at the same time *fast/naturally* about different things as you would at a restaurant, probably with). So I guess don't feel an immense pressure to be perfect and don't have such a difficult speaking environment when I do speak.

The speakers on the Pimsleur tape speak a lot slower than the Japanese speak when speaking to each other, but about the same speed they generally use when speaking considerately to foreigners (i.e. myself).

In music, it's better to know a few scales and basic melodies well than lots poorly. The same is true with languages. the more times that single pattern is drilled into you brain the more it will become a part of your mind like your native language. So spending a year on the fundemtals is nothing at all for me. Once those basics are deep in your mind, the rest will come so quickly and smoothly. Pimsleur burns the groove into your mind where the language will sit forever.

One problem is Pimsleur is that it doesn't realise that non-Americans will be using it too. Saying "Yes, i'm an American" over a 100 times is a bit annoying. They should introduce different nationalities from the start and tell you to answer for your own nationality.

kyotokanji Wrote:One problem is Pimsleur is that it doesn't realise that non-Americans will be using it too. Saying "Yes, i'm an American" over a 100 times is a bit annoying. They should introduce different nationalities from the start and tell you to answer for your own nationality.

This is true enough, but you don't have to say exactly what the tape tells you to all the time.. just answer　「アメリカ人ですか」　with　「アメリカ人じゃないです」(even though I think pimsleur uses the unnecessarily polite 「じゃありません」 for that bit). You could also just check how to say your own country in the dictionary and say that instead.

I've done Pimsleur I and II, and am about a third of the way into III. I usually go through about 1.5 lessons (the current one and half of the next) each day when exercising. I bought a little hand-click counter that I use to count up the wrong answers as I'm going through a lesson, and repeat any lesson that I made more than about 10 mistakes in. It takes 1-2 attempts for most lessons.

I like it, personally, though it is definitely awfully pricey. I found a place that sells it for about half of list, and I donate it to the library and write it off when finished, so the net cost to me is only about 1/3 of list... still, that's on order of $100 per volume.

Caveat: It's not enough all by itself. It's not a be-all and end-all of learning Japanese. You won't get a whole lot of vocabulary. You won't get a broad coverage of grammar. You'll get a lot of repetition of basic phrases, sample questions and answers -- some very basic "survival Japanese."

You will get hours of practice speaking, and hours of practice listening. For those of us who are learning on our own time, and don't have a classroom environment where there's speaking/listening to Japanese, that is pretty valuable.

A while back, I ended up sitting beside a Japanese gentleman (who didn't speak any English) on a short flight, and spent the hour talking to him, with varying degrees of success. That conversation was far more valuable than several Pimsleur lessons. However, the Pimsleur lessons did prepare me at least to an extent to be able to reply to his questions, and converse a little bit -- without them, I'm sure I'd have struggled much more to talk to him. If opportunities like that were common, Pimsleur wouldn't be necessary... but since (for me at least) they're rare, Pimsleur is useful.