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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

Pimsleur really is a fantastic method. I'm surprised it has dropped into relative obscurity.

For those who don't know, the Pimsleur language tapes involved learning a bunch of phrases and repeating them back to the tape. This would build into full conversations using the phrases, along with dropping out particular words like changing "eat" into "drink". There was essentially no written component.

The lessons also had an element of spaced repetition: Phrases from lesson 1 would pop up again in lesson 3, and then again in lesson 7 just to check you hadn't forgotten them.

Paul Pimsleur marveled at the invention of the tape recorder, saying that now students would be able to record and practice samples of real language while on the go. Nowadays everyone has a 'tape recorder' and then some in their pocket, but most methods seem to ignore audio completely, or let it take second place to written language.

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Language Transfer [1] is a little bit like that, (all audio, and you are meant to talk back and just listen, speak and think, not write anything down), but it’s more of a conversational style where the teacher is explaining things to a student and you are supposed to pause to answer before the student does. Actually saying it does make a difference!

I haven’t got all the way through a course yet (need to get back but I’ll have to go back to an earlier point because it’s been a few months) but I feel like I made ten times the process as I did trying to do a course Duolingo for the same language.

It does the same kind of thing with the repetition. “Now remember how we’d say [word]” and it really does stick better than just seeing the word and a picture.

And it’s all available free too (but you can support on Patreon if you want).

1: https://www.languagetransfer.org/

I have gone through several courses with passive listening and learned so much. Would highly recommend.

Sounds like the Michael Thomas method

> Nowadays everyone has a 'tape recorder' and then some in their pocket, but most methods seem to ignore audio completely, or let it take second place to written language.

Admittedly, there is a cost involved for voice talent. But it is well worth it, in my opinion. I started using Duolingo to learn Hungarian. The course is in beta. It began with pre-recorded clips, which were very helpful to understand the tone. Later, the course switched exclusively to text-to-speech. It is so much harder to understand than a real person's voice, and so much nuance is left out.

Unfortunately, Pimsleur is rather expensive. A set of CDs at full price is over $200, and most have three levels to buy.

It's cheaper online: $20 per month, and it'll take you about a month to do the equivalent of a set of tapes/CDs at one per day. (I assume it's the same or equivalent lessons.)

I've learned several languages to the "tourist" level via Pimsleur, but mostly borrowed from the library. Duolingo is a good complement to it for building vocabulary.

Pimsleur is great. A lot of their courses are on Audible too, so with a subscription you can buy them slowly over a number of months. That is what I started to do.

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