Pimsleur Spanish is arguably the best of all the various learn-Spanish programs when it comes to pronunciation. That’s what friends of mine who have used it extensively say. (I’ve used it a little but not enough to have an opinion on this from my own experience.)
It really trains your ear, and thus your tongue! This is because of the way the program works.
It’s an audio program, with many half-hour lessons. These lessons begin with simple vocabulary and sentence structure, gradually becoming more complex.
The topics are typically the sorts of things you would want to know as a tourist in a Spanish-speaking country. Each lesson draws on past ones in a well-designed way, so that you learn new things and review old material as well.
One thing I really enjoyed when I tried a Pimsleur lesson was the way they have you putting words together in the lesson. They will ask you questions, based on the vocabulary you have just learned, which make you think a moment and put together the words you know in a new way.
So all this helps you to get the words into memory. And since it is an audio program, that means the sounds of the words. There is one real advantage to learning this way. If you were learning vocabulary and how to read and write it all at the same time, you could easily have a tendency to pronounce the words as they look to you in English. But with the Pimsleur Spanish lessons, you only have the sounds so you are more likely to get them right over time.
The amount of repetition in Pimsleur Spanish is based on theories developed by Dr. Paul Pimsleur, as to how we learn languages. (That’s also how Pimsleur language programs got their names – from him – you sometimes see it spelled Pimsler Spanish, but that’s incorrect.)
Of course, you do have to speak out loud to get that desired pronunciation. If you try listening to the lessons and just “thinking” the Spanish pronunciation in your head, your mouth will not be learning what it needs. So listen to Pimsleur in your car, or while out for a walk, or while doing housework, and get that pronunciation down!
To give the Pimsleur Method a try, you can get an inexpensive CD with the first lessons. Then, if you like it, you can get more. Here is a starter program at Amazon:
