Pimsleur Review | Completing the Spanish Series
I did it. I completed all five units of Pimsleur Spanish. Each unit consists of 30 lessons, and each lesson is roughly about 30 minutes. This means that five units comes out to 4500 minutes, or 75 hours, of language lessons. I feel so accomplished.
If you don’t know what Pimsleur is, it’s a set of audiobooks. These audiobooks are made up of 30 minute lessons, and these lessons have words and phrases that are repeated at “specific” intervals, like every lesson and then every other lesson, and then not for a while, until SURPRISE! I hope you remember that word and/or phrase!
This intermittent exposure moves what’s learned from your short-term memory into your long-term memory. Or at least that’s the idea. This is similar to Anki, which is a free app that can be used for any kind of learning, but is also this “graduated interval recall”. The difference is that in the Anki app, all of the content needs to be entered for it to be studied. Within the app, audio can be included, but then, for it to be more like Pimsleur, you’d need a native speaker to say the phrase that’s being entered.
Pimsleur won’t make you native-speaker fluent, but it does provide a strong basis for getting through lots of social settings comfortably. There are lessons for how to order a drink at a restaurant, or how to answer when someone asks why you’re in town, and then the later lessons get really tough when they start to bring past tense into the mix.
However, since Pimsleur is completely audio, aside from a few reading sections, grammar isn’t going to be explained in detail. An entire lesson is literally a few conversations that you’re learning to take part in. Meaning that any grammar that you do learn will be from context. This is good or bad, depending on why you’re learning a language right now. Grammar isn’t THAT important when it comes to communicating very basic, necessary ideas, like trying to get across that you’re thirsty, or asking for the bathroom, etc.
When I was in Thailand, one of the first words I learned was toilet. It didn’t matter that I didn’t yet know how to say, where is the toilet, please? Whoever I was talking to understood that I needed to be directed to one.
There are a couple of different options as far as accessing Pimsleur lessons:
Pimsleur Premium subscription is $19.95/month (for a single language). There’s a 7-day free trial, if you want to check it out.
On the website, there’s also the option to purchase groups of lessons.
However, the same could also be done through Audible.
Duolingo, Memrise, and other language learning apps are gamified, to an extent with point systems and a leader board, but Pimsleur doesn’t have this unless you consider *spending 30 minutes everyday to complete the lesson in order to complete the unit* a game! Which - surprise, surprise - I do. It’s just a level of achievement. A goal that I had in mind, set, and completed. Have I mentioned how proud I am of myself?
CNET has dubbed Pimsleur as the best “on the go” learning app. I usually think of “on the go” as travelling, in a car or commuting, but it can also be done folding laundry, pulling weeds, reading.
Okay, maybe not that last one, and I would highly recommend against listening to it at the gym, when you exercise, as it’s frustratingly easy to lose your rep count.
I found a forum with people recommending Michel Thomas, Assimil, FSI Basic, and Spanishpod101. So I have a bit of research to do before I share a review of my findings.
But honestly, I would highly recommend Pimsleur to any (at least) partial auditory learners who don't mind the non-gamification aspect of it. Do you like podcasts, or listen to audiobooks already? Long commute? Do chores around the house? Why not listen to Pimsleur for 30 minutes of that time? Pimsleur has not sponsored this video or article, though I wouldn’t mind if they did. This is just my honest opinion. If you’ve tried Pimsleur, let me know in the comments below what your experience was.
The only difficult part about listening to Pimsleur in public might be that you need to actually repeat these phrases after a native-speaker has said it. You need to say it. Out loud.
I really enjoyed my 75 hours of Spanish lessons. I’m not going to say it went by so quickly, because it’s recommended to only listen to one lesson per day. This means that it took 150 lessons at least 150 days to complete. Like if one were more consistent, they could probably do it in less than half of a year. It took me way longer than half a year. I started in June 2018, or at least that’s when I purchased the first course, and then just finished mid-September this year.
To be fair, I downloaded a bunch of other languages in that time too. Honestly, how can you pick just one?
It did take way longer than I thought it would. However, I’ve also been learning Spanish in other ways. I have had a Spanish tutor for about a year and a half now, I’ve got a Spanish grammar workbook, and a fiction book. The Spanish book I’ve been making my way SO slowly on. But now that I’ve finished Pimsleur, perhaps I can make some headway through it. I’m an avid reader so my queue is miles long, and when I have had to look up every other word because the tense is infinitive… suffice it to say that it’s been quite frustrating. I’ve made quite a bit of progress on my past tense conjugations, and will next focus my efforts in completing the verb workbook to see how that helps with the variety of verb conjugations, and so that I can review it and relay if it actually helped. Stay tuned!
I hope the list below helps you sort through the languages that Pimsleur provides!
5 units / 150 lessons
Chinese (Mandarin)
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Russian
Spanish (Latin American)
4 units / 120 lessons
Spanish (Spain-Castilian)
3 units / 90 lessons
Arabic (Eastern)
Arabic (Modern Standard)
Hebrew
Korean
2 units / 60 lessons
Dari Persian
Farsi Persian
Greek
Hindi
Norwegian
Pashto
Tagalog
1 unit / 30 lessons
Arabic (Egyptian)
Chinese (Cantonese)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
Haitian Creole
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Ojibwe
Polish
Portuguese (European)
Punjabi
Romanian
Swahili
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
10 lessons
Albanian
Armenian (Eastern)
Armenian (Western)
Irish
Lithuanian
Swiss German
Twi
“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.” – Chinese Proverb
In how many languages can you say toilet?
