IronMike wrote:... What I'm looking for is an index to Pimsleur. Basically, I want to know which level and which lesson I can start listening to if I want to cover a particular topic...
Perhaps the quickest and surest way of tracking down the elusive index, should one exist, would be to
submit the question to the editorial staff of Pimsleur.
In the meantime, while I have never come across such an index, having either completed, or played around with, the complete Pimsleur programmes for Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Portuguese, I would have to agree that
the lessons follow a definite pattern, they are
not exactly identical mind you, but they are
very, very similar.
Creating a more-or-less reliable index from the audio recordings, without access to a transcript, or even a glossary, would represent a sizeable amount of work. Such a project* would involve listening (attentively) to about 75 hours of at least one series and the taking of notes plus the spot-checking against another series where one would notice some slight differences in the timing of the introduction of some features of the L2's structure and/or vocabulary, but not much else. I suspect that the best results to be gained in such a project would require the implication of someone who has already used the Pimsleur series for a couple of languages and who has since achieved the CEFR B2 area with those languages. However, such a candidate might experience difficulties finding the motivation to complete the project because returning to lower level materials can be very taxing for many students and because the goal itself might appear to be unworthy of the effort involved. Finally, it is not clear whether or not the publisher would consider the unauthorised creation of a "pattern, index, model, or road map" of its language courses to be a violation of their copyright.
Re: such a project*: I have recounted, a number of times in this forum, my experiences in creating a complete written transcript of the Pimsleur German I, II, III series; not just the German utterances, but all of the English ones as well. The effort of listening (very attentively) to all of the audio recordings, of backtracking, of taking notes, of typing, of checking, of correcting, et cetera, was absolutely gruelling! I would never take on the project of creating an "index" from scratch! By the way, should anyone think of asking me for a copy of the transcript that I prepared, please do not bother, I
deleted it years ago. Putting aside the issues of copyright, which are considerable, please allow me to assure the reader that a full transcript of a Pimsleur programme is of absolutely no use to the student.