My experience to get the best Chinese ‘blended’ learning with Pimsleur

[MarinaT]

I want to share here my experience with Pimsleur and some advises that worked for me.

A couple of years ago, I wanted to learn Mandarin. I have used (amongst others) Pimsleur CDs (all 3 series, up to advanced) and I must say that I liked the method a lot, as it really ‘prints’ the words and sentences into your brain. Before you realize, you have all these new words and sentences at your disposal in the new language.

BUT…

What I really missed was being able to exercise real conversation plus someone correcting me, especially the pronunciation. I was never sure that what I was repeating after the CD was right (and with Mandarin in particular, correct pronunciation is even more critical: just a slight mistake in ‘tone’ and the word has a totally different meaning). Also, when listening for the first time to natives I had difficulty understanding them, because they normally speak with different speed and intonations then the recordings in CDs.

What I noticed is that I could repeat all the sentences as learned, but I was not able to have a conversation in a real life situation.

This is where I think a good teacher can make a difference. I tried a couple here in Holland, where I live, but they were either too expensive or not good enough.

Until I found the solution: I am now taking one-on-one conversation classes with a native Chinese living in China.

I have sent to my teacher the transcript of the main sentences and words learned with Pimsleur, and he structures the conversation lessons around these, with a lot of questions and answers, adding different way of saying the same thing, as well as different combinations of words and sentences.

I must say that this is an incredibly effective combination.

After just a few lessons I feel I can now have basic but already interesting conversations.

At 10EUR per private lesson, that is not much compared to what I would have paid here in Holland.

I really believe blended learning can be extremely effective, as it combines the convenience of asynchronous methods as Pimsleur with the interaction with a real teacher. This is often done within language schools. So why not giving the possibility to everyone to do its own ‘self service’ combination of blended learning from home?

This is only my experience, but I hope it can be useful to some of the readers out there who are really interested in learning a new language.

Does any of you has also experience of combining Pimsleur (or similar programs) with teacher's support?

Marina

Admin: Advertising bits removed.

[Roman]

Hi Marina,

thanks for sharing your experience.

I've made the same experience with Pimsleur, too: as if being a cassette recorder I

can spit out sentences, but not mantain a true conversation with a real human..

Some questions:

- do you communicate with your madarin teacher over skype?

My experience with calling over Skype was not that good. The quality was low and

I would get tired of speaking (yelling) very soon, plus tone subtleties get lost quickly.

- where did you find your teacher? (one who has a real job attitude towards this, not

an occasional student seeking time to time conversation)

- How do you conduct the payment? (paypal maybe?)

Thanks,

Roman

[yjb_montreal]

Hi,

I started with Pimsleur, then went on-line and am doing both (+ trying to watch some TV, talk to the local grocer,plus...).

Online is really good, as good as a local private tutor and far far cheaper (less than $10 per hour). You can set the pace, your class can often consist of material you bring in.

When I started the online course I left the Pimsleur CDs aside for a month and then went back. I blew through an entire unit (30 lessons) in a week. Now I use them for dictation and just to keep drilling and reminding.

Another interesting source of really current stuff is Melnyks. It builds like Pimsleur but is topical and therefore interesting and useful.

It's all up to us (those learning) to keep immersing ourselves as often and for as long as possible in every way possible. It's all good if it fills up another hour of chinese practice.

[fredrik_w]

I first tried to do the only-audio approach with Pimsleur Mandarin. About halfway I understood I need to change something. This is what I did and it worked very good for me:

- Reviewed the transcript for each lesson. Checked out the new words introduced. Google for "Pimlseur mandarin trancripts"

- Practiced the pronunciation by listening to Wenlin dictionary recordings (very good quality). There are also good on-line resources for this.

- Added the new words in a SRS program, google for "anki SRS". Very good software and free.

- Read about pronunciation at Sinosplice (http://www.sinosplice.com/lang/pronunciation/)

I believe its important to learn pinyin from the beginning for two reasons; its easier to remember new words (for visual learners such as me) and its easier to get a correct pronunciation.

Pimsleur is a really good introduction to Mandarin and you will hear from native speakers that your pronunciation is sooo good. Compared to other learning methods your pronunciation will be better than most but dont forget its far from really good. For example, you will hear the word xing1qi 星期 be repeated many times during the lessons. If you havnt paid very close attention you will probably say something like xing1xi (this is what I did and I was almost angry when a native speaker corrected me, I thought I had at least that word under good control !!)

A few words about on-line lessons: I have tried Skype lessons with a teacher sitting in China and Im not so positive (I paid US8/hour). The sound quality is not so good and that is very important, especially for Mandarin. For simple conversation practice, I believe its OK but not for practice pronunciation. You will get far my follow the steps I wrote above and if you can find a native speaker that you can meet either face to face or on-line, its much better than having a teacher working from China. Also I must add, on-line lessons are fun and you will feel a significant improvement of your self-confidence of speaking Chinese after 10-15 lessons, no question about that!

One final remark: Use on-line lessons as a compliment and do at least 10 hours of self-study for each on-line hour.

And an other final remark: Use Pimsleur for what it is, an introduction to the language. Dont spend more than three-four months before you move on to other resources (for example Foreign Service Institute). This might be hard if you have paid a high price for the material but you just need to accept it.

Edited August 9, 2008 at 05:23 AM by fredrik_w
spelling

[Dawei1]

Pimsleur is superb at getting you to "think" Chinese and giving you good pronunciation. If you can find a copy, I also highly recommend an old Pimsleur cassette version issued by the American Management assoc. It's 30 lessons differ from the 90 newer Pimsleur lessons and gives you more practice in comprehension (by chance, my local library had this version).

I found Pimsleur was good at getting me to express my needs, but my comprehension was very weak. Also, Pimsleur offers limited vocabulary. To improve comprehension, watching movies w/subtitles is extremely helpful.

When I first started movies, I understood ~1 in 50 words. This progressed to ~1 in 20 and now is ~2 in 10 (after ~3 1/2 yrs of self-study). Despite my limited comprehension of the movies, this helped in my day to day comprehension with Chinese friends. Watching movies also taught me how to use various phrases I already knew. It's also helpful to see how phrases are translated. (and watching a good movie makes the experience enjoyable).

Another way to improve comprehension & add vocabulary is Chinesepod.com. Chinesepod has wonderfully creative teachers and lessons on virtually any topic. The downside is their verbal lessons are passive (you listen, but don't respond). Hence, I find my retention of Chinesepod lessons much less than Pimsleur.

As noted, learning pinyin is invaluable. Dr. Xie provides a freely downloadable macro that converts numeric tones to actual ones: i.e., Zhong1gou2 to Zhōnggóu

www.csulb.edu/~txie/PINYIN/pinyin.htm[/url]

It takes seconds to download, install and use.

In my experience, Pimsleur is the best way to get started.

[Hoy Sum Fu]

I like the Pimsleur system o.k. exept,as mentioned on other threads, the cantonese course has only one level.

Which leads me to my main gripe... There are few decent cantonese language courses. Of the 'big three'; Rocket, Rosetta and Pimsleur, only the latter has any canto at all. Frustrating for home instruction. Anyone know any great, lesser known cantonese courses?

[imron]

The FSI course.

[BrandeX]

What was originally a spam advertising thread just keeps a-going, hehe.

http://www.google.com/search?q=My+experience+to+get+the+best+Chinese+%E2%80%98blended%E2%80%99+learning+with+Pimsleur&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a

[Hoy Sum Fu]

Thanks, Imron!

That's a great course, particularly for a freebee:mrgreen:

Is that your photo in your avitar? Do you practice chinese martial arts?

[fubidou]

I learnt some Japanese with Pimsleur, but although it was quite good and did make you think, I still felt the need to visually refer to a book. I think some people learn in different ways, and I really like tables and stuff to get the grammar clear in my head. I guess I'm a visual person.