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You are prompted to recall the spanish word or phrase by the narrator both in spanish, and sometime in english. They give you just enough of a pause before and after giving the answer in spanish. What I like most is the clarity of the voice, pronunciation, and the slow gradual exposure to the tenses and commonly used words. I have these lessons on a little inexpensive mp3 player. It worked great while driving on the highway. It is repetitive, tedious, but effective.
The only drawback, if it should be considered such, is that there is very little in the direction of a written component. Pimsleur's system, in my opinion, is the best I've encountered so far. Each lesson is 30 minutes, so if you have a 15 minute (or longer) commute to work and a CD player in your car, you can study Spanish as you drive. I've been studying foreign languages for many years. Consequently, I have a great many things in my collection. You WILL learn how to speak the language, but you may not figure out how to read/write it with Pimsleur.
But Pimsleur absolutely must be supplemented with written material so that literate adults can use their most powerful ally in education: literacy. Pimsleur's scripts had long since introduced the "have/had-'past'" forms of hacer--ha hablado-- before I realized these were two words, the first beginning with an "h". My friend, who does not speak any Spanish, teaches ESL, and one of his students was not really learning much English until he had her use the Pimsleur basic ESL. The audio method is great, friendly,organic, but not enuf by itself.
Pimselur really works, IMO, because, for one, it uses bi-lingual teaching. "It was like magic." said my friend. Would you like to learn Spanish from those who merely speak it, or from those who both write/read and speak it. I don't see that a serious learner should set up a contest between Pimsleur and other methods; use any and everything thing you can get. Absent a Spanish speaking pal, Pimsleur is all I have to keep me speaking, and I have become very attached to the two "native" speakers, the man, the woman, who have remained on board thru I and II.
The student jumped ahead of the other students in the class. And I realized this only after using another course that uses both written and spoken material, so I SAW the words in print, and this provided powerful reinforcement to the Pimsleur audio drills.
Bookchip version is better and easier to use, ( 3 bookchips compared to 52 cds) I bought bookchips and cds, send cds back. Buy Bookchip (Audiofy Bookchip) instead.
Anyway. Just a suggestion. -- my only suggestion is that you check your local library before forking out the cash. However, the price for these CDs is a bit high in my opinion. I then burned all 27 or so discs onto my computer into mp3s and listened to them on a portable device.
I did all three levels of Italian and have a excellent proficiency in the language (especially pronunciation). I think it's an exorbitant price and a ridiculous burden on a poor little consumer who's trying to become bilingual. Definitely use Pimsleur, it is great. Thus learning Italiano for free ;) If you're computer proficient and really cheap like me also try a file-sharing network like Limewire - many people share Pimsleur language audio tracks (or the whole program as one file) just like music. Other reviewers have already adequately listed the reasons for using the Pimsleur method.
Pimsleur could actually make more $ by lowering the price because many more people would then buy it. I live in a pretty big city and was able through circulation request to obtain all 3 levels on CD.
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