AllSubNoDub wrote:If you plan on continuing to go through Pimsleur, I would recommend not going beyond Unit 3 (the first three units are typically modeled after Dr. Paul Pimsleur's original French course, but I believe he died before he could make more advanced levels - Units 4 and 5, made after his death, just lose their effectiveness). Pimsleur will give you confidence, automaticity with a very limited vocabulary which you can later grow, and a very good accent assuming you have any kind of ear for it.
Mixing Pimsleur with dialogues is probably ok, but I would recommend not mixing Pimsleur with other audio training courses requiring production, such as Michel Thomas, since it kind of works against some of the Pimsleur method. I would highly recommend MT Spanish after Pimsleur though, for rounding out what you've learned in Pimsleur (introductory and advanced is probably good enough, but you can do the others like vocab one if you want, it doesn't take long). This will get you used to more advanced grammar as he goes through the full conjugation system, (except maybe vosotros, don't remember, and not voseo which you won't need now anyway). I've heard good things about language transfer, but haven't used it. I think it's free though (?) so that might be a good MT substitute.
Normally, I'd recommend Assimil here, but I too had the issue where my head wanted to explode from switching between LA Spanish and Castilian Spanish. If this doesn't affect you, go with Assimil.
Now to your real question. FSI Spanish is probably the best FSI course (and best free course) ever made. It's intense though, going from Pimsleur to FSI is like going from 6th grade to college. My recommendation would probably be to listen to the dialogues now to get used to faster speech until you finish the other courses, then dive in more deeply. The dialogues are great to use with blind shadowing. Did I mention it's free?
Alternatively, there are some pretty good YT channels such as "Spanish Around", "Easy Spanish", "Why not Spanish?", etc. that have transcripts available. You'll probably start to get loads of recommendations for others once you watch a couple.
Also, you probably won't be able to find it, but the Latin American Linguaphone course (2nd generation I believe, in the brown briefcase) was one of the best courses I've ever used in any language. I can't explain why, I just really loved it. Might be able to get it on inter-library loan.
Thanks for the insight on Pimsleur. It definitely requires a fast response to get the full answer out before the narrator speaks the answer. At first I was pausing quite a bit, but I'm getting faster and my responses are becoming more automatic. I can see the value in the course. I'm using Audible for Pimsleur, and I see that MT is there as well.
Improving my understanding of verb conjugation is a priority. I was making good progress with the mini stories on Lingq, but after the present tense, I started getting confused as I felt they were throwing out too many tenses for me to internalize as quickly as I was moving along. So I ended up putting Lingq on hold with the idea to return once I understood Spanish conjugation better. The PMP books are helping, and perhaps switching to MT later, as you suggested, might be beneficial.
I've read a number of posts here prior to signing up, and it seems there are many here on the forum that like Assimil. I took a look at their online version and it didn't look like it was to my taste. The older book version with audio would probably suite me better, but there are so many other resources out there. At this time I think I'm going to use other materials.
I've looked at the FSI material. Not yet! Time will tell.