Pimsleur

[bomaci]

And I am rather hoping that later on in the lessons they ween you off the English dependancy. However, I guess that's where they dump you - advanced level, then you're on your own....

Well unfortunately they don't which is why I am not that fond of Pimsleur anymore. Furthermore my biggest pet peeve with it is that you learn so few words. If you stick to the one lesson a day format you will spend 3 months with the course and only learn about 500 words. Furthermore your listening comprehension will not amount to much. You will find it very hard to find a chinese speaker how is willing to speak at the sluggish pace of the Pimsleur speakers.

[RobAnt]

I try to earwig in on conversations between my friends, and occasionally pick up the odd word or even sentence - but you're right - they go like the clappers sometimes.

Anyway, I guess I'm acclimatising to the speed independently of Pimsleur, at least I hope so.

[stephanhodges]

Where's the best place I can pick up the Intermediate and Advanced lessons?

There's several posts about this. If memory serves, you can get them half price at www.cheappimsleur.com I believe there's another web vendor that also sells at about half price. Lot's of people resell on Ebay also.

Also, some library systems (in USA) offer them for free. Don't know about UK/Sweden.

[leosmith]

Quote:

Where's the best place I can pick up the Intermediate and Advanced lessons?

There's several posts about this. If memory serves, you can get them half price at www.cheappimsleur.com I believe there's another web vendor that also sells at about half price. Lot's of people resell on Ebay also.

Also, some library systems (in USA) offer them for free. Don't know about UK/Sweden.

Also, note that if you buy new, even from the "discount" sellers, there is a buy-back program that will return 80USD cash or 100USD credit.

[zenwizard]

Where's the best place I can pick up the Intermediate and Advanced lessons?

"Yeah, the courses are very expensive. I bought the first one and got the others for free through our public library's netlibrary. I just downloaded them and converted them to .mp3 for my mp3 player. Now I listen to them alot. You might want to check if your library has an agreement with netlibrary too. Or maybe they have the Pimsleur courses on the book racks in the audio section.

I would agree that Pimsluer alone will not get you fluent in mandarin. It is lacking in grammer usage, vocabulary, and without pinyin, its hard to know for sure the correct tones. Plus it seems lack in that it trains you to speak mandarin better than understand it -- at least for me.

I have been supplementing my pimsluer with a free online book by Julian K. Wheatley, which I found very helpful!