Pimsleur Language Programs products are among the best-selling audio language courses available. `Organic learning’ seeks to approximate the conditions in which ordinary language-learning takes place. The process is almost entirely aural, supplemented only minimally-or at the student’s discretion, not at all-by reference to reading lessons after each half-hour lesson.
Clearly, Dr. Pimsleur and his disciples—I use the word advisedly, as a glance at promotional and instructional materials will demonstrate—have done their pedagogical homework. Utilizing the spectacular power of the brain for on-the-hoof language analysis and replication, the Pimsleur Language Programs lure their listeners into meaning-rich dialogues, providing only the information required for one to respond. The closest thing to a grammatical concept that a student hears is a brief warning that `this is the form used with feminine words’. Yet with a little effort, the student intuits her way to the correct and timely use of all that grammar describes.
This is an extremely productive approach at the level of basic conversational skills that is the bread and butter of Pimsleur’s products. The course writers have found just the level at which to challenge the student without counterproductive frustration. One is encouraged to achieve 80% control of a unit before moving on. Many students will accomplish this in most units on the first try. Yet the approach in these three volumes is never simplistic, reducing the urge to be somewhere else or engaged in a more advanced section to the vanishing point.
Pimsleur Language Programs has populated websites with two highly sellable language-learning concepts: the `principle of anticipation’ and `graduated interval recall’. The former refers to the interval during which the student is challenged to retrieve information to which he has been exposed, occasionally take some small step in the processing of it, and then utilize that information in a response. PLP has refined just the right intervals to facilitate prompt but unhurried responses.
`Graduated interval recall’ refers to the time lag between the initial learning of a language component and its subsequent reintroduction in a new conversation. Here, too, the Pimsleur method shows its debt to years of practice and research. By my lights, they do this perfectly.
Regionally and socially, PLP’s German course(s) aim at an `educated’ dialect that will prepare the student to be conversant throughout Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Regrettably, Simon & Schuster Audio tampered with a winning recipe and with predictable results. The voices in the recording of volume III are amateurish and the audio quality disastrous, a shocking departure from the evident quality of volumes I and II. This may seem a trifle, until one counts up the 15 hours minimum that one spends with each of these recorded albums. Attractive voices and good audio, especially for commuters like this one, are elements that matter. A Simon & Schuster Pimsleur Language network spokesman stated that a resolution is forthcoming.
German I, II, and III are available in cassette tape and CD versions, packaged attractively and with sufficient ruggedness to survive both winter and summer Midwestern temperatures in my car.
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