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.

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.

Last edited by dilandau23 (2007 September 02, 10:23 pm)

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 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.

Last edited by dingomick (2007 September 03, 1:12 am)

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.

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.

Last edited by yorkii (2007 September 03, 5:55 am)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.