Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

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PolyglotMaya
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Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby PolyglotMaya » Sun Dec 27, 2015 8:22 pm

I have a sincere question for people who use Pimsleur and/or Rosetta Stone as beginners (the former seems somewhat common on this forum and HTAL).

Why?

What value do you get out of it?

IME, both programs are very expensive and offer little in the way of actually learning. (Although the cost factor can be mitigated if you can get it from a public library.) Pimsleur has a sort of advantage in that it gets you listening and trying to repeat the sounds, which I think is somewhat valuable. But the audio samples are so slow and so unnatural - nobody actually talks like that. I feel like leaving the TV/radio on in your target language, or recording a friend (who speaks that language) saying some phrases would work better.

But the fact that a fair number of people use Pimsleur in particular probably suggests that they get something out of it, so I'm curious to hear your opinions.

Please note that I'm not trying to be rude and I'm not looking down on people who like/use these programs. People learn differently, and just because a program does nothing for me doesn't mean it won't work for others. I've just been thinking a lot lately about langauge acquisition and why some things work (or don't), so I'm curious to hear anything positive anyone might have to say/offer about these programs :)

Thanks!
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby tomgosse » Sun Dec 27, 2015 10:23 pm

I have used both programs at different times. Today, if I had to pick one over the other, I would pick Pimsleur. The main reason being that as an audio only program you can copy the mp3 files to a smart phone or other portable device and take them with you. They do start a bit slow but that's a plus in my opinion. The one problem that I had with the French edition that the first CD kept going over how to ask some if they want a drink. « Voulez-vous boire quelque chose » ? Around lesson fifteen in French I there is a major jump in complexity and how fast the instructor speaks. I thought that dialog and concepts being used were now being introduced too fast. As far as cost go, in the United States you can borrow it from your public library.

I found Rosetta Stone too user friendly. The format of picking one answer out of four choices was designed to keep leading you to the correct answer too easily. I thought it was designed to give you a false sense of accomplishment. Also, the photos used in most of the languages are the same. In the French version the photos of the policemen were taken in and around Maryland, USA. I couldn't figure out why, for the price they asked for the program, they couldn't license a picture of a gendarme. You cannot borrow it from a library, and as I understand it, cannot transfer the license if you want to sell it or give it away.

So, if you are going to pick one over the other, I suggest going with Pimsleur. I would also pick up a basic grammar text book for the language you are learning. Listen to news or other spoken words on the radio or the internet.

Duolingo is a good free alternative to Rosetta Stone. I'm sure other people will have other opinions.
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby Speakeasy » Sun Dec 27, 2015 11:34 pm

I assume by your opening statement that you are not seeking advice on whether or not you should purchase the Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone programmes or how best you should use them.

While I could provide a spirited defense in favour of the Pimsleur method, despite its oft-reported failings and high price, I will not do so, no more than I will underscore the weaknesses of the Rosetta Stone programme. As an alternative, I would prefer to focus on the assertion that they “offer little in the way of actual learning”, a statement that could, conceivably, be applied to any programme, depending on one's own criteria. I prefer to turn the question around ...

That is, could you please explain what learning-learning experiences you have had to date? What were your goals and what means did you adopt to achieve them? What constitutes for you, a viable self-study language-learning programme that merits your support, how does it "offer (a geat deal) in the way of actual learning", and why do you believe that your preferred approach is more advantageous to those you mentioned or to any others for that matter?
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby iguanamon » Mon Dec 28, 2015 12:31 am

Welcome to the forum, PolyglotMaya! Neither RS nor Pimsleur live up to their cover hype or promises. RS is a marketing creation with little of substance that can't be gotten from a variety of web based solutions like duolinguo and memrise. RS is overpriced and over marketed with too much flash and not enough substance.

I have used Pimsleur as a part of a multi-track approach including a text based course with audio, native-speakers and comprehensible native-material. Used in this way, I feel that it benefited me. On its own, I wouldn't have gotten much out of it. People knock it because it only teaches around 900 words or so, but the number of words isn't the point, and I would never recommend that a learner rely on the course as their main resource.

As a part of a more comprehensive approach, I liked that it helped me greatly with pronunciation and thinking in the language by answering within the pauses provided. This helps to generate "automaticity" in a language at the beginning stage for me. I also gained synergy by doing the course alongside my more thorough DLI courses and comprehensible native materials.

Pimsleur's faults are many: The high cost (always try to get it free from a library or used); an over-focus on business travel language; too much English in the early lessons and not a quick enough transition to TL prompts; sexist "pick-up" language; etc. So why would I defend it? Because it helped me to do what I said it did- pronunciation and automaticity. Also, being audio based, it can be used almost anywhere. As a part of a more full approach and at a free/low price, I feel it is well worth a learner's time. It was worth my time for Portuguese and Haitian Creole.

I wrote a more full review post after finishing the one level, 30 lesson, Haitian Creole course. I wrote about it on my old log at HTLAL. Scroll down to the fifth post.
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby PolyglotMaya » Wed Dec 30, 2015 4:05 pm

Thank you so much for that detailed reply, igauanamon :) I found it helpful and informative.

Speakeasy, you’ve raised some great questions. Thank you – and I’m sorry for not replying sooner. I’ve been travelling and have been wanting to wait until I had/have the time to give you a proper response.

That is, could you please explain what learning-learning experiences you have had to date? What were your goals and what means did you adopt to achieve them?


I began learning French and Spanish at school, so the “resources” (books) I used for both languages at first were school textbooks. I live in the province of Ontario, in Canada, and the French curriculum here is quite bad. Even if I remembered the names of the textbooks we used, I wouldn’t be able to recommend any of them.

I became good at French mostly through a combination of private tutoring and self-study. One of my earlier tutors focused a lot on conversational French and taught me a lot of expressions, while the other one focused on drilling verb conjugations. Both had their place and both helped me, but I feel that the bulk of my learning really came from creating an immersion environment for myself. Reading and listening to the news, memorizing pop songs, conversing with native speakers and having them correct me, etc. Exposure to real French taught me so many things – patterns (both in terms of syntax and phonetics), words, etc that I’ve been able to incorporate into my French without always having to consciously analyze grammar.

My goal was to reach native-fluency, or as close to that as possible. Although I hesitate to say that my French is at a native-level, I am happy with the progress I made. I’ve been mistaken for a native speaker, my reading level is close to my reading level in English, I’ve taken university courses (and written exams) in French, and so on.

Likewise, I feel that immersion/exposure is the biggest thing that’s helped my Spanish and Japanese, even though I’m worse at those 2 languages than I am at French (the bulk of my current work is on improving the latter two languages). That’s not to say that formal study, via things like texts or repeating audio (a la Pimsleur) don’t or can’t have their place. They do. But I also think that raw exposure to our L2/L3/whatever, right from the beginning, is underrated.

Basically, I think that the best way to learn is a combination of exposure/immersion (right from the start) and what I like to call the “conscious” stuff, e.g. explicit grammar instruction. But I think that the latter should have more of a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) role – helping us understand what we’re seeing/hearing in our immersive environment, rather than getting us to memorize elaborate rules that often come with a list of exceptions anyway. I think that the human brain learns better through concrete examples, which an immersive environment is (often) better equipped to provide.

Also, for the record, the only time I’ve used Pimsleur was when I flirted with Cantonese very briefly. I borrowed it from the library and had a Chinese friend listen to it as well – she literally burst out laughing and said “no one talks like that!” I returned it to the library and stopped studying Cantonese shortly after that, though not because of Pimsleur. If I were to go back to learning Cantonese, I would study characters via mnemonics/Heisig while listening to as much Cantonese as possible and copying things I heard (songs, movie lines, etc).


What constitutes for you, a viable self-study language-learning programme that merits your support, how does it "offer (a geat deal) in the way of actual learning", and why do you believe that your preferred approach is more advantageous to those you mentioned or to any others for that matter?


As I mentioned above, no language-learning program is as good as an immersive environment.
That said, here are a few examples of materials I’ve found to be decent/helpful:
“Japanese verbs” by Tim Matheson: http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Verbs-Sa ... 938236923/

This was an online resource when I first discovered it. The book is surprisingly thin (and was something like ~$15 when I bought it in paperback), but you learn so much. It’s a detailed resource that explains what all of the different verb endings mean/do in Japanese sentences, which is a huge part of the language.

(Unfortunately, it doesn’t come with an audio component, but Japanese pronunciation is so simple and straight-forward that that’s not a huge loss, especially if you’re listening to spoken Japanese elsewhere.)

I also really liked the “Teach Yourself Thai” course kit (with CDs) when I was learning a bit of Thai for a while. I bought the whole thing for either $20 or $40 (can’t remember now). The CDs had a woman reading all of the sentences both slowly (so that you could keep up, as a beginner) and at regular speed, so that you could hear what normal Thai sounds like.

“Teach Yourself Thai” had somewhat boring conversations, but both resources taught you a lot – hundreds of words and a ton of grammar – for not that much money. When I compare resources like that to potentially paying hundreds of dollars for the relatively small amount of words and grammar you learn from Pimsleur…

Anyway, I hope that this response has been helpful (I feel like I've rambled a bit).
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby PolyglotMaya » Wed Dec 30, 2015 4:20 pm

iguanamon wrote:I have used Pimsleur as a part of a multi-track approach including a text based course with audio, native-speakers and comprehensible native-material. Used in this way, I feel that it benefited me. On its own, I wouldn't have gotten much out of it. People knock it because it only teaches around 900 words or so, but the number of words isn't the point, and I would never recommend that a learner rely on the course as their main resource.

As a part of a more comprehensive approach, I liked that it helped me greatly with pronunciation and thinking in the language by answering within the pauses provided. This helps to generate "automaticity" in a language at the beginning stage for me. I also gained synergy by doing the course alongside my more thorough DLI courses and comprehensible native materials.


I just wanted to thank you again for this, iguanamon - especially the part about answering in the language and "automaticity." I hadn't thought much about that, but now that you've pointed out it out, I imagine that it could be a wonderful aid in helping one's language skills go from passive understanding to a more active level.
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby James29 » Wed Dec 30, 2015 4:26 pm

There is a forum member that goes by Randomreview and he has answered this question about Pimsleur in a very compelling way. I wish I could quote him. His point is that Pimsleur does not teach a ton of vocabulary and it does not teach a ton of grammar, but, what it does do is make you learn certain very useful parts of the language perfectly and with automatic perfect recall with a good accent. It makes you extremely competent with the basics.

My experience with Pimsleur was wonderful. I value it because it is a "dummy-proof" way to get started with learning a language and builds a great habit. It maximizes the odds of the brand new language learner continuing with studying the language instead of quitting after trying to understand native materials or more difficult programs.
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby Speakeasy » Thu Dec 31, 2015 12:58 am

Welcome to the Forum
PolyglotMaya, thank you for the comprehensive self-introduction, I am quite impressed!

Pimsleur
I have used the Pimsleur method for all of the languages that interest me and I find myself supporting both the positive and negative comments concerning it. Nonetheless, despite its oft-reported disadvantages, were I to embark on the study of another language, I would most definitely include it in my initial study programme. As to your friend’s comment -- “no one talks like that” -- I received a somewhat similar comment from a Polish-born friend of mine when I showed her the Pimsleur Polish programme. I am under the impression that the publisher works from a standard “language template” and that all of the courses are simple translations of the template -- conceived in English -- into the target language. Given the relative closeness of English to the Germanic and Romance languages, this procedure causes no particular problems. However, as one moves further afield, it is possible that the “template method” strains under the weight of the profound linguistic differences between English and many other languages.

Rosetta Stone
In my experience, most authors and publishers of self-study language-learning materials genuinely take their customers’ interests to heart, they are competent in what they do, and they deploy significant resources in the conception, production, delivery, and support of their materials. However, exceptions to the general rule are known to exist.

Alternative Language-Learning Materials
I was wondering, was your initial post above merely meant to evoke support for your position on the Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone programmes or, given the additional information on your language-learning experiences and goals, are you really looking for advice concerning alternative language learning materials for the languages that interest you? Are you familiar with the “more-or-less standard” materials that enjoy popular support on this forum such as Assimil, Cortina, Living Language Ultimate, Linguaphone, Méthode 90, as well as the FSI and DLI materials and their free-to-the-public availability? Do you wish this discussion thread to evolve in this sense?
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby PolyglotMaya » Thu Dec 31, 2015 10:39 pm

Thanks for the kind words :) I'm glad to be here.

I'm not really looking for texts or resources myself. I was just wondering how other people used Pimsleur and what they got out of it.
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Re: Sincere question about Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone

Postby outcast » Fri Jan 01, 2016 12:47 am

I have a side question (have never used Pimsleur):

Would anyone recommend it to reactivate a language? I was thinking I could borrow the French or German series when I first start my recovery of those languages, solely for pronunciation purposes though I'm sure I will notice I had forgotten a few basic words too. My overall vocabulary in those languages is far greater than the series offers, and my grammar understanding pretty complete. So it would mainly be for pronunciation (mine has rusted from all the effort practicing Chinese sounds and cadence), and maybe phrases. Since the content should be quite easy for me, I would use it as some sort of "blaster": that is, just spend a few days pretty much listening and repeating as much as I can, so as to be done with them quickly and then move on entirely.

Would that seem useful or is there some other audio out there that would be better suited for a very much "non-beginner"?
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