Usually I like to talk about things I recommend for studying. Here I’ll talk about things you shouldn’t touch with a 3-meter-pole.
If you’re serious about learning a language – I mean efficiently learning a language for its utility – Don’t buy the following products.
Pimsleur
Don’t buy any form of it. Don’t search the internet for transcripts of it. Don’t check it out from your local library. Just stay away from it.
Why?
- It’s slow
- It’s expensive
- It throws you right into output when you should be bombarding yourself with input
- Seriously, it’s really slow
Michel Thomas
At first I thought Pimsleur was bad, and then I heard the Speak Mandarin Chinese for Beginners materials by Harold Goodman based on the Michel Thomas method. Don’t waste your time or your money on it!
Why?
- It’s not nearly as fun as watching sap dry on a tree trunk
- If it’s possible to induce neural-synaptic paralysis through aural input, this is a potential candidate
- You’ll speak Chinese just like a Brooklyn native! (Seriously, terrible accents going on in the recording)
The secret to learning a language is…
…that there are no secrets. You’re not going to be cast as an extra for 300 2: Let There Be Abs! by attaching electrodes to yourself while you lounge around your house in your unmentionables. It’s no different with learning a language – You’ve got to get out there and flex your mind muscle.
So, if you’re taking on Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Swahili, Klingon, or whatever – You’ve got to dive into the language like Bastian off the high dive in Never Ending Story II: The Next Chapter. Surround yourself with complete sentences. Dig at them. Imbibe them. Get drunk off your second language. Become a language-holic. Join a support group for language-addicts which is conducted in your target language. Just don’t buy Pimsleur or Michel Thomas (via Harold Goodman).
(I repeat – This is advice for serious language learners. If you’re not serious about internalizing your target language, buy whatever makes you feel happy!)
No related posts.
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Ok ok I got the idea :p out there are a lot of systems but actually only few of the them work. As you said you must to dive into the language there is not shortcut.
I’m very skeptic when it comes to language learning products, as well as those claimed automagical abs builders. Having taken quite a toll learning languages and weightlifting too, I know that nothing’s easy, unless you’re lucky.
That said, it really amazes me that some people I have met manage to speak Japanese better than me regardless of how much time they have been studying (I’ve been studying for quite a while now). Sometimes I do wonder if it was me or the way they learned.
It’s really important to flex the muscle, practice with everyone you can, anytime, etc., and take your time to study at home, though it can be hard.
Also with Chinese, I have no problem at all speaking but when it comes to reading/writing I suck at it, mainly because I prefer speaking over reading, and now it’s the same with Japanese. So hard to balance everything…
Your posts are very motivational, Alex, your sarcasm is great too ^^ keep on writing!
I’m going to disagree with you on Pimsleur. It helped me nail down the basic patterns when I first came to Japan. I definitely recommend the CDs.
I suppose we do have iKnow these days to help with listening too, but it was the best thing outside of a very patient personal tutor that we had available, IMHO.
@Hao: If you have trouble with hanzi, I suggest Heisig! I’m going through Remembering Simplified Hanzi myself right now, and it’s going smooth so far. Like, too smooth. The toilet in my house has the standard Japanese two-mode flusher that reads like this:
小
大
So I see those two characters and combine them in my head and think “tip”! (尖)
There are bad materials to study from out there, but there are also efficient ways to study, so it’s not completely about how much time you sink into the language, but how well you manage your studies and materials.
@Claytonian: I guess you could consider Pimsleur to be an intro to the language, but I went through the first few lessons in Hebrew (about 10 of them, which is 1/3 of a course) and I was adept at what they were teaching, but I suddenly realized how slow it was. I had gone through 5 hours of materials, and knew like 20 words. (I’m probably exaggerating on the low number, but I don’t have time to look up the actual amount of terms). Like you said, we have iKnow/smart.fm now, so people new to either Japanese or Mandarin don’t really need Pimsleur for even an intro to the language. On top of that, we have Anki where you can import smart.fm materials, so you don’t even need smart.fm anymore! Just import a bunch of sentences into Anki and load them onto a CD and you’ve got some pretty good listening practice for the cost of a blank CD.
I didn’t “buy” Pimsleur but I did try using it a while back. Didn’t enjoy the experience
Last time I got “drunk off a language” I ended up in some chicks house with no pants and recollection on how I got there.
グードー タイムス
：D
Oh, have you exported audio from iKnow?
I haven’t yet myself as it’ll mess with my hanzi deck statistics, but the plugin is here:
http://ichi2.net/anki/wiki/Plugins#Importsmart.fmsentences
Pimsleur is but 15 hours for 1 level, if you are slow and dimwitted like me it is 30 hours because you have to do lessons an average of twice.
Meanwhile when I was prepping for JLPT 2 I popped in 3,000 cards in Supermemo and used ~2 hours/day to chow those suckers down in 30 days 6 months in advance of the test. That’s 60 hours. Yeah — okay right there you could say at day 30 I was ahead of Pimsleur. Fast forward 6 months I was STILL doing 1 hour a day just maintenance, that’s like in the neighborhood of (2 hours/day the 2nd month too) 240 hours just to supposedly “keep” 3,000 crappy words in my brain.
Needless to say I got ticked off at some point and just quit the reps. I did Pimsleur German for a few lessons 4 years ago and it is still in my brain somewhere, but show me a medium-sized Supermemo collection I worked with just 30 hours 4 years ago and a lot of those suckers are permanently lost as if I’d never before seen them in my life.
So I think what I’m saying is that anyone who says Pimsleur is a large investment of time… is doing some weird calculations. Everything in language learning takes a lot of time, and doing 3 levels of Pimsleur (the most they have for any language) is really a trivial amount of time on the road to acquisition and hopeful fluency. Time used up, in my mind, is the LAST thing in the world to criticize it for.
@Justin:
You’re making an invalid comparison. It could be that you’re a better aural learner, so audio sticks with you, which is why you found more utility in Pimsleur than in isolated vocabulary as text in an SRS. In that case, replace Pimsleur with another audio source that has much less English and more in your target language, and you’ll be able to find materials much more efficient than Pimsleur. (On top of that, it could also be that German has more of an immediate impact on you than Japanese)
I recommend attacking both skills at the same time with the resources I mentioned above – Run through your reps at home with full sentences imported from smart.fm, and load all of the audio onto a CD and listen to it on the go in nothing but the target language.
@Alex: Actually I always thought of myself as visual, and so at first considered Pimsleur as water torture in that regard. The thing about Pimsleur is it is really good at forcing a person (at least me) to keep paying attention, I day dream less than 10% of the time during a 30 minute lesson. With real sources of pure Japanese audio, I end up in the twilight zone in 2 minutes and never come back now matter how I try to improve my willpower and concentration.
Basically in my many years of language study so far, everything I have done has been heavily visually biased, in part because it is the only productive thing since with audio I will just start day dreaming almost immediately. This has a really bad effect with all my languages my listening comprehension is wayyyyyy below my reading and really unreasonably low to the point of being embarrassing for the years I’ve put in. Thus, the fact that Pimsleur is the only thing I know of so good that it can actually ‘force’ someone as liable to daydream while hearing audio as me to actually pay attention for a full 30 mins makes it nothing short of amazing in my books.
I’ve seen smart.fm references in other posts, so thanks for the idea, but I don’t know if there would be any sentences of a level to be of any use in adding? Previously I was working on typing in sentences from the Kanji in Context books when I realized that if I know every word in any sentence in that book, I can 100% understand the sentence. Thus I consider the sentences worthless and quit that project. You see, the problem I am having is that while reading an actual book, I often know all the words or look up the missing ones but then still totally misunderstand the meaning when I look at a parallel translation to English to check my understanding. Sentences that stand in isolation seem to always be easy to understand just knowing the vocab, while ones in books are the ones that kill me. I’m not sure how to remedy this, if there is a specific way, except to keep working through books and comparing the translation until I’m making better guesses. I didn’t have this problem at all learning to read Chinese, so that’s partly why I’m baffled about it.
Well, Justin, all I can say is that should try real Japanese audio/video/writing that interests you. Of course you’re going to start daydreaming if you’re bored, and you’re going to pay attention to something if you start understanding information right away, given to you by Pimsleur.
I’m not here to try and start a flame war. But honestly, if you want to be speaking and understanding real Japanese, then its a must to experience Native-created materials for Natives, as a Native would.
All I can say to help you in books, is to look at a whole section as a sentence and break it down. From what I’ve come to understand, Japanese is a minimalist language, and repeated words are 95% not said again, unless to convey an understanding or misunderstanding, just like in our language.