Pimsleur Challenge: July 2019 Update

Pimsleur has revolutionized my language-learning progress. I spent years with grammar books, "intro to..." books, and the like, but I never really felt like I had made progress in a language.

I knew words, I could conjugate verbs, and got pretty good at etymology. However, I could not understand a native speaker to save my life. Watching a film in a language I had studied for years was a humbling experience, because it might have been as if the actors were speaking Martian.

Learning by Listening

At some point I purchased an old cassette version of Pimsleur at a discount price. Then, on a rainy July evening in 2013 I slapped the cassette tape (yes, an actual cassette tape) into a player and pressed play. I fell back on my counch, closed my eyes, and swallowed my pride. After years of high school Latin, years of college Greek, and years of German personal study, I decided to start from scratch. That night changed everything. Instead of looking up words in a dictionary, instead of reading about the subjunctive, instead of trying to memorize strange verb forms, I just listened.

"Wie sagt man?" the recording repeated. After studying German on and off again for some eight years, I was now hearing native speakers speak digestable sentences. Fast forward six years, and I have completed six Pimsleur levels. Each Pimsleur level consists of 30 lessons that are each 30 minutes. German, like other popular languages, currently has five levels, or a whopping 75 hours of audio training. And you factor in that it often takes three or four goes through for each lesson, and the commitment is easily in the hundreds of hours.

After finishing the German levels, I gave Mandarin Level 1 a go early this year, and it took the a whole season to get through it, kind of like training for a marathon. Completing a full Pimsleur course is a great accomplishment, and it trains your ear in a challenging yet stimulating way. I encourage all language learners to take on the Pimsleur challenge. My progress as of July, 2019:

Updated July 2019
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