oregum Wrote:Pimsleur in Summary:
-slow, useless dialogue (not native speed)
-no understanding of grammar (in any sense ie. passive or whatever)
-no understating of real spoken Japanese
-no ability beyond lesson scripts
-waste of time!

I disagree.

I'm under no illusion that Pimsleur is going to teach me to speak Japanese. I do, however, find it invaluable for learning vocab and grammar points via Pimsleur's SRS system. Grammar *is* explained, and because the audio is repeated so much everything is really is drilled into your head.

I don't see how learning 500-1000 Japanese words with basically no effort (I listen to 1 episode per morning on my way to work) could be considered a waste of time? Bare in mind I'm still doing RtK and not learning vocab any other way; if you were doing sentence mining maybe it would be useless..?

p.s. I quite enjoyed listening to all the japanesepod101 beginner lessons with Peter. Actually they're quite fun and funny and I learnt tons about Japanese culture; also they give you lots of casual vocab and phrases, unlike Pimsleur. However, to actually remember anything you learnt, you need to listen to each one 3-5 times, and I found them (and Peter) too annoying...ho hum...

I wonder if there is anything in Pimsleur1/2 that I don't know. Sometimes basic material throws in random higher level material or at least something obscure. One example is 相席 that I learned from that horrible BBC learn Japanese show staring a random goofy blonde foreigner, or 団地 which I got from Learn Japanese with Yan (or whatever it's called).

I don't want to waste time actually listening to 100 hours of boring conversations though. Someone type it all up and analyze it with mecab

@aphasiac

I am speaking from personal experience about Pimsleur. I listened to it everyday on my train commute. I also practiced out-loud. At first I was really self conscious about talking to myself on a train, but I got over it. Basically, even now (2 years later) I can repeat the scripted answers.

But, like I said, once I got to Japan I realized how useless Pimsleur is in practice. (I lived in Tokyo for 1 year) From day one, I went out and tried to talk to people. Sure I could ask directions to the bank, but I couldn't understand the answers. I tried everything I learned, but it was all useless. I couldn't understand a damn thing, nor could I say anything but scripted questions.

I was sure that I was learning tons of useful things, I was sure I knew some Japanese, I was sure of myself. By week two in Tokyo I was devastated.

Good luck with Pimsleur

Corodon Wrote:While the PDFs are unfortunately encoded in a way that prevents copy and paste, the same info is in the Premium Learning Center (paywalled part of the web site), and cut and paste works fine from there.

There's a link to an OCR program somewhere on this site. I've used it a couple times. It's fast and fairly accurate.

Learning to ask where the toilet is and learning to parse the reply are two entirely different skills. Pimsleur will help you with the first, but won't help you very much with the second. Put another way, it's decent for basic production and pronunciation, but not so much with recognition (beyond basic recognition at a JLPT4 level.)

In order to develop an ear for the language, you need to put in the hours with real native material, not canned stuff, and I don't think there's a shortcut for that. Naturally, everyone will argue about which "stuff" is best to listen to. I'd say listen to everything you can across a variety of genres. (This is if you don't live in Japan or don't have Japanese friends to torment into helping you.)

But for just working on your pronunciation in the car, Pimsleur isn't bad. It's dull, but it's not bad.

With Pimsleur, you have to speak out loud in a clear voice. It doesn't do you any good to mumble or whisper it, or just listen to it. I get better results that way. Listening to it is just plain painful otherwise. If you want to work on your ear, listen to something else by all means. The vocabulary is beyond basic, and the sentence structures are rudimentary at best.

When I want to listen to stuff to work on my ear, I listen to podcasts, web radio, or dramas. Anything I can get my hands on, so long as it's in Japanese. Or I just watch whatever's on TV Japan.

Edit: of course I got my copy of Pimsleur from the local library. I wouldn't recommend shelling out $$$ for it. It's not worth it.

Is there a way to crawl with downthemall? The only way I saw to do it was to run the plugin on every page. If you want all the dialogs that is something like 300 pages.

Using jpod101 without the audio? Facepalm.

vosmiura Wrote:Using jpod101 without the audio? Facepalm.

A reflection on jpod101, not kittycate44...

kittycate44 Wrote:I've done 150 beginner lesson PDF's in the last 2 days so it's really fast!!! (prob would count as a whole normal lesson). I think it builds a really good +1 method, as long as you do them in order, because they explain like EVERYTHING.

150 in 2 days? how much are you learning? all the vocab and grammar?

I would love someone forever if they uploaded the transcripts + podcasts for the intermediate and upper intermediate somewhere for me to download

I'll probably eventually try to use downthemall or something, but if someone did that for me (and others that would want it) I would be really grateful.

It's not pirating because I could legally get them myself for free

Hi,
I had the basic membership for 6 months and as other people mentioned it wasn't that helpful with most of the dialogue in English.There is always the possibility to cut out all the Japanese parts but I think it would be too much of a hassle. If by any chance anyone has the Japanese parts I would be really glad if he could share them.

Apart from that it was mentioned that it is possible to get the dialogue with the premium account (1 month should be enough)... does this work with the podcast or do I really have to crawl through all the pages? And what is the content of the dialogue... normal, slow and translated as in the lessons?

The dialog can be downloaded through the premium podcast. However, they only have the dialog tracks on newer seasons. For the first seasons including Intermediate you still need to cut them yourself.

vosmiura Wrote:The dialog can be downloaded through the premium podcast. However, they only have the dialog tracks on newer seasons. For the first seasons including Intermediate you still need to cut them yourself.

Thats unfortunate as the intermediate would be the most interesting ones.. Nevertheless, there seems to be dialogue files for lower and upper Intermediate.