Customer Reviews

German (Pimsleur Instant Conversation)

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It's true that this set is repetetive -- that's the point. It's not boring, however. I'm halfway through the set. Since I had studied a bit of vocabulary beforehand, I find myself wishing occasionally for a faster pace, or less "white space" for practice. Still, it might be wise to err on the side of making sure a day's worth of material can really be retained. The method is quite sound: the student is coached through listening to and repeating the ingredients of simple and then more developed conversations, with frequent tangents on how to recombine those building blocks in more complex and varied ways, so each word becomes "live" for one's neural connections.

These 8 CDs include far less vocabulary than many other introductory sets -- after a week, I can have comfortable conversations about a few limited themes, but with this set the student can internalize the syntax and pronunciation *very well* for that initial vocabulary, without having to do any written notes at all. Vocabulary from earlier lessons is sprinkled through later lessons, to keep all the vocabulary live and fluent. A couple of times, I did want to see spelling for a word, and looked it up in a dictionary.

Having spent time in graduate school with many bright people who studied English as a second language as adults, I'm inclined to agree with the Pimsleur warning that memorizing words based mostly on written cues before getting a solid grounding in pronunciation and intonation leads to a permanent handicap. I'll dive back into my heady grammar text and hundreds of vocabulary cards *after* training my ears and core intuitions with Pimsleur I and II.

I think the repetition used for these tapes is a good thing. It helps us learn the words and phrases better. The thing I don't like, from a teacher's point of view, is that there are only two drinks used in the examples...up to lesson 8 so far, anyway, ... and they could have chosen different drinks for each tape, helping us learn more words. It's not that hard to learn the two they used being they are almost the same as in English.