What Are They?

Pimsleur Spanish is an audio course, long available on cassettes and now on CDs. It is based on the Pimsleur Method, where you learn by listening and by speaking – not just repeating what’s on the CD  but also by having to create new sentences out of the vocabulary you’ve learned. You end up with a relatively small vocabulary but it is the most important words in the language to know for conversation. You tend to end up with good pronunciation as well.

Rosetta Stone Spanish is a multi-media program that you use on a computer. It is completely in Spanish – there is NO English. In fact, Rosetta Stone sells the same program to an English speaker that it sells to, say, a German speaker if both are learning Spanish. The method relies heavily on images to teach vocabulary, and it does use voice recognition software if you have a microphone, to help drill you on proper pronunciation.

Oldies but Goodies?

How have these two programs stood the test of time?

Pimsleur Spanish has stood up well. Dr. Paul Pimsleur’s "graduated interval recall" is widely used now, specially in flashcard programs. This is the idea that in order for a word or phrase to enter our long-term memory, we need to hear it again and again… and with longer intervals between the reviews over time.

One criticism of Pimsleur Spanish is that some of the expressions you learn are more old-fashioned and formal than Spanish as it is now spoken in Latin America.

Rosetta Stone Spanish teaches you the language much as a child would learn it, totally in Spanish. In the years since it first came out, research has shown that once we pass puberty, we learn foreign languages most effectively if we use our native tongue to analyze and understand. (One example of a program that does this very well is Fluenz Spanish, which you may not have heard of, as it is quite new.)

Despite that, people who are visual learners do tend to like Rosetta Stone.

Finding Out More

Both courses are rather expensive, but they provide you with many hours of learning. I am guessing that you might be able to find the Pimsleur Spanish on cassettes (since nobody wants those much any more) for a much lower price.

See my reviews of each for more information about them and for links to various places you can buy them:

Pimsleur Spanish review

Rosetta Stone Spanish Review

Pimsleur Spanish and Rosetta Stone Spanish: The Senior Citizens of Spanish Learning Programs is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

So what is the basis of this Pimsleur Method? If it’s available in so many languages, it must have proven itself. Why is it effective?

Dr. Paul Pimsleur described four essential principles for language learning. They are:

1. 1. Anticipation
   2. Graduated-interval recall
   3. Core vocabulary
   4. Organic Learning

I’ll explain each one a little.

[1] Anticipation: Using the lessons, you learn new vocabulary and then are asked to put it together in ways that you haven’t already heard on the CD. This is more like real-life conversation than the more passive approach you may remember from school, where students just repeat what the teachers say.

[2] Graduated-interval recall: As you learn a word or phrase, you can go increasing longer times before you will need to review it, in order to put it into your long-term memory. (I’ve also written about this process in my blog articles on using flashcards. I have found it very valuable myself.)

[3] Core vocabulary: The Spanish vocabulary you learn was carefully chosen to be the most essential words in the language. So even though you come out of a Pimsleur Method comprehensive course with around 500 words, they are the most important ones and you know them quite well.

[4] Organic learning: Dr. Pimsleur felt that most people learning another language want to be able to speak it and to understand what they hear. So he created audio courses, and called them organic learning. He felt that learning to read and write should come later.

For more about the this powerful method, see my Pimsleur Spanish review.

Pimsleur Spanish is Based on the 4 Concepts of the Pimsleur Method is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Five Good Things about Pimsleur Spanish

1. It is really good for helping you with pronunciation. Because it’s an audio program, you are listening all the time. This keeps you out of some bad habits that can be formed if you are also learning reading and writing, where you may look at a word and pronounce it as if it were in English.
2. What you know, you really know. Because you drill repeatedly – though in an enjoyable and even engaging way – you really get to know the basic building blocks of the language. And because the program engages you in dialogue, you have to put sentences together yourself that you haven’t just heard.
3. It provides a good foundation for further learning of Spanish in other ways. You may want to learn to read and write, you may want to study grammar, you may want to lie on a beach in Mexico and chat with the local people. Whatever your next steps, you have a great start.
4. Pimsleur Spanish easy to use. Since it is an audio program for learning Spanish, you can listen in your car or at other times.
5. The repetition built into the program really helps memory – and one of my friends repeatedly checked the programs out of his public library and listened to them again and again.

Five Bad Things about Pimsleur Spanish

1. It is expensive. Retail price adds up to over $1,000 for the three series of 30 lessons each. (But see below for Amazon’s deep discounts.)
2. You come out of it with a small vocabulary.
3. There is not much grammar.
4. There is virtually no reading and writing. It comes with a booklet but the method is not really about learning to read or write.
5. While the vocabulary is correct, it does not represent current Latin American usage. Some of the examples are rather formal and old fashioned.

So What About Pimsleur Spanish for You?

People seem to like it as PART of a way to learn Spanish, often as a beginning. Many of the people who have gone through Pimsleur Spanish feel very satisfied with it as a great basis. One person commented he wished he had done some extra vocabulary study at the same time.

Curious? You can find out more at Amazon.  Do note that the download is cheaper than the physical set.

Pimsleur Spanish: 5 Things People Like about this Audio Program and 5 They Don’t is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

It consists of three series of 30 lessons each : Spanish I, Spanish II, and Spanish III. Full retail price for all that would be over a thousand bucks. Sure, that’s hefty, but it’s less than flying to a language school someplace and taking lessons. And you can resell the CDs after you study them. There will be more money-saving tips below.

What’s So Great About Pimsleur Spanish?

In a nutshell, the half-hour audio lessons logically build up your vocabulary and your ability to speak with the words you do know. Vocabulary is not its strong suit, by the way. But if you can pronounce the words you learn with it, you will have a good accent from then on.

The Pimsleur Method is derived from principles of how people learn languages. Dr. Paul Pimsleur studied this before creating his programs, which now exist for many languages.

If I were about to learn a language I didn’t know – say I was going to learn Thai – I would start with Pimsleur myself. That would get me some basic constructions of the language and the pronunciation engrained in my memory, after the frequent reviews that are built into the program.

How to Get Pimsleur Spanish at a Good Price

Try your local public library. If it isn’t on the shelf, be sure and ask the librarian. (I am a librarian, and believe me, asking is often fruitful. We tend to know where the bodies are buried!) While you’re at it, if the library doesn’t have it, ask about inter-library loan, especially if you are not in much of a hurry.

Other ways of getting it inexpensively include getting lucky at a yard sale, borrowing it from someone, or even bartering for it.

Online, Amazon (the first Pimsleur program) and eBay (a list)  often have good prices.

So… IS Pimsleur Spanish Worth the Cost?

If you need to get up to speed in spoken Spanish within a few months, while leading a busy life, the Pimsleur Method is an excellent way to go. Pricey, but effective. Will it be worth it? That depends on your situation.

Pimsleur Spanish: Worth the Cost? is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Which one would be best for you? It depends on what you need at this time. In a nutshell, I think Rocket Spanish is better just before a vacation trip where you will be speaking Spanish, and either is a good start for longer term Spanish learning. Rocket is way less expensive.

I’ll describe them both, but first I would like to set the stage by saying that I have listened to many of the basic Rocket Spanish lessons and some of the Pimsleur ones. I have also had long conversations with two of my friends who used Pimsleur. I actually like both programs a lot, but see different uses for them.

What is Pimsleur Spanish?

Using an approach called the Pimsleur Method, this course is a set of CDs which are arranged in three sets of 30 half-hour lessons, so there are 90 lessons in all. They give you a good grounding in thinking in basic Spanish, and are said to be really good for pronunciation. They are short on vocabulary, but this is on purpose, as the words you learn, you know really well due to repetition. The vocabulary is based on what a traveler to a Spanish-speaking country would want to know, but it does use some more old-fashioned and more formal phrases than are current in Latin America today. Not incidentally, it is expensive.

What is Rocket Spanish?

Rocket Spanish is a downloadable course of MP3 files (also available as a physical product for people who would rather  not download). It is designed specifically for people planning to go to a Spanish-speaking country, who want to be able to converse there. It comes with more add-on material than Pimsleur, so you can see the lessons you have been studying and learn some basic grammar. The dialogues take place between Mauricio, a Chilean, and Amy, an American who speaks Spanish. There are 31 lessons, and there is a second series which I haven’t seen yet.

Which is for you?

If you are planning a trip sometime soon to a Spanish-speaking country, I think Rocket Spanish is likely to do a better job of preparing you for the trip. (Assuming, of course, that you make a habit of listening to it!) It also has the benefits of being immediately downloadable and way less expensive.

If your long-term goal is to learn to speak Spanish, Pimsleur is a strong contender. The methodology behind the programs was well worked out initially and has stood the test of time. But Rocket Spanish would be a good start too. So in this case, it could come down to budget and to personal taste.

Rocket Spanish offers a free course by email, with sample lessons you can try. You can sign up for it from the sidebar of any page of this site: it says 6 Day on the image of the course. You can learn a bit of basic Spanish just from this.

To find out more, these links take you to my reviews of each program, with links to the purchasing options:

Pimsleur review

review of Rocket Spanish

Basic Spanish Lessons on Audio: Pimsleur Spanish vs. Rocket Spanish is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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:

Pimsleur Spanish: Tops for Pronunciation is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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Two years ago my partner and I made the brave, crazy decision to move to Mexico.  We’d vacationed here several times and when friends of ours moved to Lake Chapala and bought a home, we decided we’d do it too.  Up until that point, whenever we visited Mexico, I would go to the public library, get out a “teach-yourself-Spanish” cassette and try to learn a few key phrases.  I knew how to say, “where is…?” and a few other basics, but not much more.  But now I was determined that I would get serious about studying Spanish.  We made the decision to move in February with a goal of moving by June, so that didn’t give me very long.

The first thing I did was borrow whatever audio-visual programs the library had in Spanish.  I quickly discovered that some of these were hopeless – one was a cassette that just rattled off long lists of words, hardly something you could remember or use.  One was a computer program and I found it very helpful for recognizing words and phrases but it was a very passive form of learning.  I could translate the phrases into English, but couldn’t form them myself in Spanish.

Then my friend sent me the 3 MP3 discs with approximately 60 lessons from Pimsleur.  Pimsleur is a Spanish conversation system that has you repeat words and phrases over and over again.  The lessons are approximately half-an-hour long, which according to their philosophy is about as much as anyone can take in.  Every lesson includes a recap of the previous lesson.  I believe there is a written book that goes with the course, but I didn’t have it, and I didn’t feel that I lost anything by not having it.

I found this course ideal for learning in the car on the way to and from work.  I would pop the CD into my CD player and then just follow the instructions, repeating phrases over and over again.  I think if I’d have tried this at home, I might have become distracted, but doing it while driving was perfect.  I listened to the same lessons many times so that I knew some of these phrases off by heart and I found that my brain would connect them with a location.  As I drove past the hospital, my brain would repeat, “yo me quedo, pero ellos no se quedaron.”

I worked my way through approximately 25 lessons before we got to Mexico.  Was this enough to get by on?  Not always.  When we crossed the border and went to our first taco stand to order lunch, I couldn’t understand a word being said to me.  (Who knew that in Mexico, they don’t ask what you want to drink – beber, they ask you what you want to have – tomar?)  But in general, people commented on how good my Spanish was, and also on my accent, (which sometimes made them think my Spanish was better than it was!) I joined a Spanish class, but found that it was hard to learn with other people, who all had different learning styles and different speeds of learning.  (I’m a quick learner with little patience for those who aren’t!)  So I went back to the CDs and worked my way through the remaining 35 lessons, listening to them on my computer while I wrote down words and phrases I particularly wanted to remember.

I believe Pimsleur provided me with an excellent foundation for my Spanish.  My only gripe with them is that the lessons stop too soon.  If only they’d made an advanced series which included the more complicated tenses, I truly believe I could have used them to become completely bilingual.  As it is they were a great first step on my Spanish journey.

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See my Pimsleur review for more information, and here is one from Amazon:

This is a good one to try out Pimsleur Spanish

Pimsleur Spanish: A Review is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.