Two questions regarding Pimsleur Mandarin

[raydpratt]

Greetings 新墨西哥人 :

 

新墨西哥人  you are correct that I do not have Mandarin III and IV. I thought that I did because I have four parts: 1A, 1B, 2A, & 2B.  But altogether they comprise about 60 lessons, whereas a google search found that there are 120 available lessons, which are the missing lesson sets III and IV that I do not have.

Given the length of time that it has taken me to get where I am now, that is very stressful news. Nonetheless, I'm happy to know that I can go further with Pimsleur, which I trust and enjoy.

 

The book and CD that that I started with is McGraw-Hill's Chinese Pronunciation.

 

I have Pimsleur's Spanish lessons, but I am going to focus on my pronunciation of Spanish with some materials that are directed to just that issue. Like you in New Mexico, I in Tucson get a lot of opportunities to speak Spanish. I've got four college semesters of Spanish under my belt, and lots of self study and practice, but my self study of pronunciation created a lot of bad habits, and my poor pronunciation has contributed to my poor hearing of native speakers.

[lechuan]

If anyone's thinking of buying it, the digital version approaches the realm of affordability: http://www.pimsleur.com/Learn-Chinese-Mandarin/Chinese-(Mandarin)-Phase-4-Units-1-30/9781442369269

[Demonic_Duck]

$450 for a digital copy of a 64-hour course that (possibly, we're not quite sure yet) gets you to HSK1 level? Sounds absurdly overpriced to me. And yeah, quite possibly that's comparable to the progress you'd make by spending that much money on private lessons (though of course this depends a lot on the teacher, their rates, what you focus on, how much self-study is added to this 等等等等). More to the point, though, if you're paying a teacher, you're paying for their time (including lesson preparation) and expertise, not to mention any travel expenses, etc. If you're buying this course, you're paying for some tiny percentage of what it cost to produce the course, plus whatever it cost for Pimsleur to pursuade you to buy the course (seems Pimsleur has pretty good word of mouth and I can't personally recall seeing many ads for it, unlike Rosetta Stone which has terrible word of mouth and spends tons on advertising), plus whatever it costs to distribute files online (i.e. not a lot). Maybe I'm just not very bright, but I fail to see how they justify charging $450 a pop for that?

Just go to your local library, borrow their copy and rip it to your laptop. Maybe it's illegal, but I'm sure you'll be able to live with yourself.

[James3]

lechuan, somewhere along the way I got into the habit when buying something, and seeing a field labeled "coupon" or "discount code" or something like that, to do a Google search for "coupon for ____" and sometimes I get lucky. The site I seem to find these coupons or discount codes on the most, is www.retailmenot.com.

 

Just now I did a search for coupon for pimsleur and one of the search results was in fact from www.retailmenot.com. Looks like they've got several coupons:

 

http://www.retailmenot.com/view/pimsleur.com

 

FYI...

[DaveFromNY]

In fact I used one of those coupons to order the download of Mandarin IV yesterday. It's ~$90 with the coupon for the MP3

 

My only comment (having only sampled them) is that they sound a bit slower and a bit more "computer" than 3. The last few lessons sounded almost computer generated.  I wonder if they are trying to stretch their production dollars a bit since the market for level 4 is probably pretty small....

[andyfastow]

Pimsluer is the first material I've used for learning Mandaring and I'm almost finished Mandarin I now. I'm not sure I want to move on to II. I'm getting discouraged by just how little vocabulary I've learned so far. I know I can't expect the world from 30 half hour lessons but I wonder if I had invested the time elsewhere if I'd be further ahead by now. I think I might try private tutors and FSI for awhile and then consider whether I want to continue with any of the other Pimsluer courses.

[roddy]

Nobody's going to claim Pimsleur is vocab-intensive, but how you are feeling about your pronunciation? That's where you should be seeing the benefits. Maybe post a sample and see what people think. 

[andyfastow]

I'm not feeling that great about it. Thanks for the suggestion, Roddy. I'll post on that thread you linked to.

[新墨西哥人]

I was just wondering this weekend if Mandarin IV would have speech approaching real life speed. But it sounds like no, it's still kind of slow? Of course, I have not heard Mandarin III, just the beginning of Mandarin II.

 

I noticed in Mandarin II the English-speaking person (you know the guy) is pronouncing the "j" in Beijing correctly! It annoyed me a little in Mandarin I! I think he started learning a little Chinese along the way :-)

[James3]

andyfastow, your results may vary, but it's really helped me to practice whatever I'm learning from Pimsleur, with a language exchange partner from one of these sites:

MyLanguageExchange.com
ConversationExchange.com
LanguageForExchange.com

SharedTalk.com

There's pluses and minuses for each site (i.e., I had to pay $10 a year for the 1st one to be able to send messages, yet the search engine is great; the search engine for the 2nd one is bare bones, yet the site is free; the search engine for the 3rd one is very good, but you can only send 3 messages a week for free; the last site is totally free, and it's the very first one I used, and I still speak with the language exchange partner I found from this site months later, but the search engine is very limited.)  I have met (and practice with) language exchange partners from each site. Another site that looks great, but which so far has not yielded me any language exchange partners, is iTalki.com.

Sometimes I just can't tell for sure what consonant they're using on my Pimsleur lessons, and for that it's been wonderful to be able to get clarification from a native speaker on Skype.

Something else I learned from my language exchange partners (who are all from Northeast China), is just like the U.S., people from the South often speak differently than people from the North. Those more in the know on this topic could probably better articulate what I'm trying to say.

But bottom line, at least for me, is supplementing The Pimsleur Method lessons and practice with interaction with native speakers is very helpful. Some live in China, and some live in the U.S. I've had success with both.

[andyfastow]

Thanks for sharing those sites James, I'm hadn't heard of the first three so I'm going to check them out. I want to begin supplementing what I've been doing at home with private tutoring and language exchanges next week. Eventually I'd like to get to the point where I can rely more on the language exchanges and less on teaching material like Pimsluer and FSI but I definitely don't feel like I'm there yet. I know what you mean about not being able to tell for sure what consonant they're using in some words. This has happened to me to.

 

James I see that earlier in this thread you mentioned that you're on Pimsluer IV now. How far in to the Pimsluer materials were you when you started doing language exchanges? I feel like I hardly have anything at all to say to anyone right now given my small vocabulary which is why I'm thinking of doing private tutoring sessions first and then swapping those for language exchange later on as I build up my vocab.

[James3]

You're welcome andyfastow. I actually was only a few lessons into Mandarin I when I began to look for a language exchange partner. My intentions were not to have conversations in Mandarin, and thereby practice, as I cannot even yet do that today, and I'm now on Unit 9 of Mandarin IV.  No, my intent was to begin hearing a native speaker pronounce things, so as to supplement Pimsleur.  I wanted to compare how they said things, versus how Pimsleur was saying them. How cool it was to experience that they were identical.  (There have been a few times, when someone from Beijing added an "er" on the end of a word, without thinking, but when I asked them to explain why what they said sounded a tad different from what I'd heard on my Pimsleur lesson, that they corrected themselves, and explained that they had been using their local, Beijing flavor of Mandarin.)

 

Granted, pretty soon I met some people who did not know enough English for us to even communicate.  They weren't fluent enough in English for us to communicate, and I wasn't fluent enough with Mandarin for us to talk. But for the most part, the native Mandarin speakers I've met know far, far more English than the amount of Mandarin I know.  So, my protocol or habit by now, is to just find someone who is eager to talk with a native English speaker, to just have daily conversation, so they can practice their oral English, and listening comprehension. I have been surprised to actually make some very good friends via this method. This really helps facilitate my learning, because now I feel more relaxed, and feel less like I'm performing, when I try to speak Mandarin. I don't know about you, but I can put a lot of pressure on myself to sound perfect, and since I used to stutter as a kid, this is counter productive - it makes things worse. But talking with them enough to actually begin to get to know them has been awesome.

 

So, I really cannot recommend this method enough. For example, I talk with a Doctor who lives in Beijing, every weekend. And frankly, we mainly speak English. But I'm getting my money's worth, because when I need a native speaker's feedback, or take on something, she's right there. And it's also nice to get confirmation that if I can pretty well mimic what Pimsleur teaches me, she will be able to understand me.

 

I also talk weekly with a former Dentist from Beijing, who now lives in San Jose. Her English is very good, and she helps me quite a bit with my lessons. I write down the questions that Pimsleur asks in English, and give them to her, and she thus helps me practice my answers. Every now and then, since there's more ways to say things in Mandarin, just like there are in English, the answer she's looking for differs from what I learned via Pimsleur. So I bring that up, and she then mentions the other way to say it, and it's the one I learned. So, we focus on that answer (since it's the one I learned.)

 

One time my Pimsleur lesson was teaching me how to say that I liked sugar added to my tea, or coffee...and my language exchange partner asked me to pretend we were in the same kitchen, and I was asking her that. After trying my best, she kind of chuckled, and I asked her, "What?  What's so funny?" And she replied that I had asked her to add soup to my tea. I was sure I had used the right word, because I had listened to that lesson many times, so I asked her to explain. Turns out I used the wrong tone, and that soup in fact was the same word, just a different tone. So, lessons like this are wonderful, to let your language exchange partner just help you get the confidence to more boldly use the exact same questions and answers being taught on your current Pimsleur lesson.

 

I have found the Chinese I've met to be wonderful people. What an awesome experience I've had, to have stumbled upon this idea, of very early on...meeting and talking with people from language exchange sites.  Hope you can start this also, and I wish you the best of experiences.

 

Sometimes I get a language exchange partner who wants to actually teach me. But my preference is that they merely help me practice what I'm currently learning via Pimsleur.

 

By the way, I see I forgot to add SharedTalk.com, to my list, so I'll go back and edit the list.

 

One last thing - if your budget is tight, you can for sure find a certified Mandarin teacher who will gladly give you Chinese lessons, for free, in exchange for you helping them practice their English. I had one for a language exchange partner for a while (but I had to stop, because she wanted to teach me, instead of just helping me practice my Pimsleur material.) But even since then, I have run across several as I've continued to search those 4 language exchange search engines. So they're for sure out there.

[andyfastow]

I can relate to some of those points, like feeling a little too much like I'm performing every time I speak to a native. I imagine that will go away as I get more comfortable talking to people instead of talking back to audio recordings that can't give me feedback on how I'm doing. Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm glad to know the language exchanges were helpful for you even early on in your Pimsluer studies.

[James3]

I recently got an email from the folks at iTalki, and they included the following:

The US State Department (Foreign Office) has estimated how long it takes a native English speaker to learn a foreign language:

Category 1A: 600 Class Hours

Examples: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese

Category 1B: 900 Class Hours

Examples: German, Indonesian, Swahili

Category 2: 1100 Class Hours

Examples: Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese

Category 3: 2200 Class Hours

Examples: Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese

So, I guess we've chosen one of the hardest languages to learn. And, here all this time, you just thought you were slow! Just keep plugging away. Don't give up!

[raydpratt]

andyfastow:

 

As to your frustration with how much you are actually learning with Pimsleur, I have shared that frustration. I have been collecting movies with Mandarin soundtracks (and some in Cantonese for later), and it surprised me how little I could understand after getting into the 1B lessons, and even now while I am in the 2A lessons. My understanding amounts to just a few words for the most part, not even enough to figure out the rest from the context.

 

However, I have noticed a pattern of overcoming difficulties in Mandarin. The first difficulty was simply to hear and differentiate the tones. I still struggle with that a little even now, but nowhere like how difficult it was at the beginning. The next difficulty was that I simply could not read a Mandarin sentence in either characters or pinyin even if the translation was given. Pimsleur does not concern itself with that, but without Pimsleur it would have been very difficult to get to the point where I could actually read a Mandarin sentence.

 

Now that I understand the basic grammar of a Mandarin sentence, I can read quite a few sentences. And now, as of today, I had the wonderful experience of watching a Mandarin martial arts movie, Dragon, where I could understand a few sentences (yes, just a few sentences).

 

The point is that every hump in Mandarin is horrible, and that the progess is horribly slow, but that we are much farther over the initial humps than before.

 

I expected my progress in Mandarin to be similar to my past progress with Spanish, but Spanish is just English in a different form with many of the same Latin roots, and so it is naturally easier to make faster progress in Spanish than in Mandarin. The higher your level in English, the easier it is to read and understand Spanish because of the common Latin roots.

 

However, in the past few months, I finished studying a book on English grammar, and I found that it has helped me understand Mandarin word order. By understanding English more clearly in how it uses its building blocks, it is easier to notice Mandarin patterns that do the same thing. I've heard before that Mandarin and English are similar, and now I am starting to understand that grammatically. At some point, I expect to be able to creatively and correctly string together the building blocks of Mandarin in the same way that I can do so in English.

 

Admittedly, that point is a long way away. In the mean time, it can be a real thrill to say a little Mandarin to a native speaker whom you might already know or might randomly meet, and then watch that person's eyes light up in wonder.

[Demonic_Duck]

I recently got an email from the folks at iTalki, and they included the following:

The US State Department (Foreign Office) has estimated how long it takes a native English speaker to learn a foreign language: [snip]

So, I guess we've chosen one of the hardest languages to learn. And, here all this time, you just thought you were slow! Just keep plugging away. Don't give up!

Bear in mind that these are a) estimates, b) generalisations (if that native English speaker is an ABC who's grown up with Cantonese as well as English, obviously that makes a difference) and c) lumped into rather broad categories (really, this should be a continuum rather than descrete categories). But yeah, I think it's fair to say that Chinese is likely to take an English speaker about 4x as long as Spanish to get to the same level of proficiency.

[Adam_CLO]

Pimsleur was my first intro to Chinese back in the day and I loved it. It was the inspiration behind creating my own course.

 

I would highly recommend it to beginners wanting to know the basics to get started. However, as other posters have mentioned, serious learners should complement this program with other resources to take your learning to the next level.

 

My only other concern with it was that it's heavily Beijing centric in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary usage. I had to quickly relearn some of the local (Taiwan) equivalents of some of the terms.

[roddy]

And your own course is the ONLY other resource worth considering? C'mon, we try and do a bit better than that round here...

[traunk]

I tried Pimsleur back in 2003 during one of my first couple of start and stop attempts to learn Chinese. I liked it ok, but like some of the others mentioned I think you should supplement it. In my opinion you should supplement almost any course that isn't tailored around your needs and wants.
 
I feel like no one has given a concrete answer to OP's HSK question. People mention how "little" vocabulary is learned, but no one gave any numbers. I  am also curious about this. I went hunting for how much vocabulary is taught in the Pimsleur course, and found this link:  http://theory.stanford.edu/~trevisan/chinese/ I don't know for sure that this list is correct, but I am assuming it is and basing my numbers off of it. 
 

• Pimsleur 1
  • 160 unique terms
  • 158 unique characters
• Pimsleur 2
  • 162 unique terms
  • 195 unique characters
• Pimsleur 3
  • 95 unique terms
  • 162 unique characters
• All three processed together
  • 382 unique terms
  • 341 unique characters

Again, assuming that I have a good source and I processed the list right. Based on those assumptions, passing HSK 1(150 words) looks doable, and maybe even HSK 2(300 words). But to be sure I would suggest someone compare the list I found with the HSK vocabulary list to make sure mostly the same vocab is being taught. 

 

To get the above numbers I used the following commands against a text file version of the PDF's. The first is for terms.

cat pimsleur_words1.txt pimsleur_words2.txt pimsleur_words3.txt | grep -v "^[A-Za-z ]" | sort | uniq | wc -l

and For characters

cat pimsleur_words1.txt pimsleur_words2.txt pimsleur_words3.txt |sed -e "s/[A-Za-z0-9\)\( :;,.'?=-]*//g" | tr -d "\n" | perl -E 'use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq); use Encode qw(decode); my $string = decode("UTF-8", <STDIN>, Encode::CN); my @chars = split( "", $string); @chars = uniq sort @chars; say scalar @chars;'

[traunk]

Ok, so I couldn't put it down. Again, I am assuming things, and have probably made some errors.

 

I hunted down the HSK vocabulary list from their website. When they say 150 words they mean terms, not characters. I ran my one liner against their list to get the unique characters. 

• HSK 1
  • 150 terms
  • 176 unique characters
  • 42 characters not covered by Pimsleur
• HSK 2
  • 300 terms
  • 352 unique characters
  • 148 not covered by Pimsleur

 

I figured this number by visually looking at the two lists of unique characters and eliminating the duplicates. Looking at the first list of characters I noticed quite a few were words you would learn relate to textbooks or school, and it makes sense ( to me ) that they weren't covered in an audio only course. 

 

Here's the list for HSK 1.

习 些 亮 兴 再 叹 吗 听 呢 和 喂 坐 她 妈 字 岁 果 校 样 桌 椅 汉 漂 爸 狗 猫 睡 租 老 脑 苹 菜 衣 视 觉 词 语 读 都 里 面 高

 

Here's the list for HSK 2.

丈 为 习 些 亮 介 件 休 但 体 便 兴 再 准 别 副 务 动 助 千 卖 叹 吗 吧 听 告 员 呢 和 哥 唱 喂 因 场 坐 备 外 夫 她 妈 妹 妻 字 它 完 宜 室 容 宾 就 岁 希 帮 弟 形 得 息 您 情 懂 所 手 找 教 日 晴 最 望 条 果 校 样 桌 椅 次 歌 正 比 汉 泳 洗 游 漂 火 爸 狗 猫 玩 瓜 男 病 眼 睛 睡 离 租 穿 笑 第 篮 累 红 绍 羊 老 考 肉 脑 舞 色 苹 菜 虽 蛋 衣 视 觉 让 诉 词 试 语 读 课 足 跑 跳 踢 身 过 运 近 送 都 里 铅 错 长 阴 零 非 面 题 颜 高 鱼 鸡 黑

 

So based on the above I would say Pimsleur alone won't prepare you for the HSK tests, but it will get you pretty far along. I would also like to point out even though it may not teach you the words for "grammar" or "dictionary" it is teaching you words not covered by the HSK that are still useful.