0 The Pimsleur Approach - the No Book Approach To Learning A Language

Do you associate learning a foreign language with boring textbooks and confusing teachers? How many people have not even tried to learn a second language because of these experiences? Too much theory and very little conversation. The Pimsleur Program is totally an audio course. Each lesson is about half an hour. You listen to a conversation, then with well timed prompts, you learn new words, and slowly you start creating your own expressions. By the end of the unit, you are comfortably using the conversation you heard at the beginning.

In fact, even the basic Pimsluer Program will have you talking straight after hearing the first vignette. Can a system without textbooks actually work? The Pimsleur Method centres on teaching functional mastery, understanding and speaking right from the beginning. The program has many benefits. Pimsleur moulded his method after the way people discover language. You do not hand a text to a toddler as he or she starts formulating words. As children we all learnt to talk by listening and repeating what we heard in our life's situation. This is the same premiss behind the Pimsleur Method.

The narrator keeps varying the context while strategically repeating words and phrases. Learning occurs naturally. The thirty-minute segments contain lessons that are easily digested. Pimsleur is brilliantly designed to lock the learning into your memory. Learning this way is simply a pleasure. The average student is much more likely to go home singing a popular song than reciting a line from a book. The sequential story line of each lesson becomes a memorable event.

By following the system each day, less then a month is all it takes for a student to gain the confidence to participate in a basic conversation. Can this actually be achieved? If you were living in a foreign country, it might not be entirely out of the question. Working with audio lessons is a bit more difficult. You certainly have to concentrate. The systems strength is that it is designed for beginners. The Pimsleur approach doesn't assume you have any previous experience at speaking a foreign language. Professionals transferring overseas would likely benefit from this approach.

Will you be ready to compose One Hundred Years of Solitude or other foreign language classics after ten days of lessons? Of course not, but you will be able to start conversing and get your feet wet, which is a big feather in the cap of the Pimsleur Approach. It puts students on the road to learning the language immediately. Afterwards, for students wishing to get into deeper subject matter and use more involved sentence structures, there are the advanced segments of the Pimsleur Approach. As a result, it is hard to think of a better means to initiate from scratch with a new language.

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