Review: Pimsleur Spanish

Pimsleur Spanish is a tried-and-true method for learning conversational Spanish. It's essentially an audio course of half-hour lessons, developed by Dr. Paul Pimsleur based on his research into how people learn languages. The Pimsleur Method is available for many languages, and millions of people have used it successfully. Here's a page where I compare the various Pimsleur Spanish programs and the prices of downloads compared with CDs.

You can learn Spanish fast -- at least basic conversational Spanish and likely even more -- with Pimsleur.

Recently a friend came to visit us here in Mexico. He had never before spoken Spanish, and I was amazed at how well he was doing immediately in conversation with Mexicans. His secret? Pimsleur Spanish. (He had taken high school Spanish several decades ago, and he thought that helped some too.)

I used Pimsleur myself to review my rusty Spanish before coming to Mexico over five years ago, and found it particularly good for pronunciation.

Some Pros and Cons

Some Pros:

• It's audio, so you can take it with you on an ipod or whatever, and listen to it anywhere.
• It repeats the same vocabulary a lot, so you really learn the words.

Some Cons:

• The Spanish it uses is rather formal in some cases. For example, "Encantado" instead of the more popular "Mucho gusto" for Good to meet you.
• It's relatively expensive. (But better priced as a download.)
• The vocabulary is not really large.

What is the Pimsleur Method?

The Pimsleur Method is based on four ideas about learning language:

1. Anticipation -- instead of just repeating what an instructor says, you have to think of what to say, just like in real conversations.
2. Graduated interval recall -- Review the words you know at increasingly longer intervals.
3. Core vocabulary --- learn the most commonly used words, and learn them well.
4. Organic learning -- learn by listening.

These four concepts are worked into the programs.

Pimsleur Offers a Half-Hour Sample Lesson

Here's a link to listen to a sample sesson... Lesson 1 of Level 1. I've got it set to open in a new window of your browser.

I just listened to part of it and it took me back several years, to when I studied it in my car, driving in Colorado!

What Others Say

I've mentioned my friend David who used Pimsleur to learn Spanish. He works reading water meters and was able to listen to Pimsleur cassettes (checked out of the public library) repeatedly as he worked. He actually had done this a couple of years before he came to visit us, without reviewing the program since then, and still remembered a lot!

A woman I know here in Mexico credits her good start at learning Spanish to both Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone.

And here's a review:

"Pimsleur programs provide plenty of positive reinforcement that will keep learners on track, and we found that Pimsleur gave us more proficiency and confidence in speaking the new language than any of the other language programs we reviewed."

-- AudioFile Magazine

There's no doubt that the Pimsleur Spanish programs are a very good choice for learning Spanish. They are similar to Rocket Spanish in being based on the listening process.

There are a number of different Pimsleur Spanish programs, and they overlap each other, so I've created a Pimsleur Spanish programs page that explains which is which and where to get both the CD packages and the downloadables.