Some people like Pimsleur courses, others (including me) think they are boring. But the idea itself is very effective. This program uses the "graduated-interval recall" method published by Pimsleur in 1967. It's like audio flashcards that appear in a special pattern designed to help you remember. Pimsleur courses courses use several techniques (they say some are patented), but this particular 1967 idea is now in the public domain so this program can use it to help you learn your own choice of vocabulary or sentences.
![[Image: pimsleurmaker.jpg]](http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/6352/pimsleurmaker.jpg)
It will let you make your own version of spaced repetition audio similar to what Pimsleur does. The program lets you play audio snippets (either words or phrases, it doesn't matter) at about the intervals Pimsleur published in his paper "A Memory Schedule" of: 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, 2 years.
Of course using this program to make your own Pimsleur lessons is not as easy as just popping a Pimsleur CD into your player. The program does take some time to understand how to operate, especially for content entry. As your first step you need content. You'll need to decide what sentences you want to learn, and how many in each lesson. The latter point is worth emphasizing. If you've felt Pimsleur doesn't go fast enough now you can choose how many new items to introduce per lesson. You can come up with the sentences (or words) on your own, perhaps decide to use ones from an existing program such as KO2001, take them out of textbooks, etc. If you've found content that you've always wished was available in the Pimsleur instructional format of spaced repetition, now you can make it happen!
Next you need to get your sentences into sound files. The program has a text-to-speech synthesizer built in, but it doesn't sound that great. So you'll probably want to either find a friendly native speaker to record the sentences for you, record them yourself in your voice, or extract them from the other audio source if that is the base of your lessons.
At this point the program can play your lessons directly, or can create them in exportable format such as MP3 so that you can carry them around with you just like the ordinary Pimsleur programs.
This program gives only audio, so you concentrate on pronunciation (so you can listen during daily routines e.g. washing etc, since you don't need to look at the screen.)
You can add words to your collection at any time, and this program can manage collections of thousands of words. It can also help you rehearse longer texts such as poems.
If possible, prepare some audio prompts such as "say again" and "do you remember how to say". These can be real recordings or synthesized text.
It will let you make your own version of spaced repetition audio similar to what Pimsleur does. The program lets you play audio snippets (either words or phrases, it doesn't matter) at about the intervals Pimsleur published in his paper "A Memory Schedule" of: 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, 2 years.
Of course using this program to make your own Pimsleur lessons is not as easy as just popping a Pimsleur CD into your player. The program does take some time to understand how to operate, especially for content entry. As your first step you need content. You'll need to decide what sentences you want to learn, and how many in each lesson. The latter point is worth emphasizing. If you've felt Pimsleur doesn't go fast enough now you can choose how many new items to introduce per lesson. You can come up with the sentences (or words) on your own, perhaps decide to use ones from an existing program such as KO2001, take them out of textbooks, etc. If you've found content that you've always wished was available in the Pimsleur instructional format of spaced repetition, now you can make it happen!
Next you need to get your sentences into sound files. The program has a text-to-speech synthesizer built in, but it doesn't sound that great. So you'll probably want to either find a friendly native speaker to record the sentences for you, record them yourself in your voice, or extract them from the other audio source if that is the base of your lessons.
At this point the program can play your lessons directly, or can create them in exportable format such as MP3 so that you can carry them around with you just like the ordinary Pimsleur programs.
This program gives only audio, so you concentrate on pronunciation (so you can listen during daily routines e.g. washing etc, since you don't need to look at the screen.)
You can add words to your collection at any time, and this program can manage collections of thousands of words. It can also help you rehearse longer texts such as poems.
If possible, prepare some audio prompts such as "say again" and "do you remember how to say". These can be real recordings or synthesized text.
ome_audio_file.mp3]" it should be easy to extract just the "some_audio_file.mp3" part by allowing the user to remove the "[sound:" and the trailing "]" from that entire column. Then later the user could optionally specify the loacation of said audio files if needed. All data will be entered into an Excel-like grid control to allow the audio to add/remove/move/shuffle the data to suit individual needs. Naturally, the user can manually enter data using the same control. The program will utilize TTS should the user not have a "real" audio source to work with. TTS will also be used to create the silence (allowing the user to shadow or say the answer). Silence will be based on the length of the previous line multiplied by a user defined value with optional minumum length. The user should be able to preview all or part of a lesson from the grid interface. As far as output goes, the user can choose to either group the lesson into one or multiple audio files based on some number of minutes or some number of lines. The project will employ mp3wrap (for merging mp3 files), ffmpeg (for audio format conversion), BASS (for audio playback), and SAPI (for TTS).
