Back to Pimsleur

I recently came into possession of Pimsleur Italian I. It's been a while since I've done Pimsleur, and it's certainly a level of Italian that I know.

But there's a difference between knowing a language and knowing a language - a distinction between having it in your head and getting it out of your mouth. And since I've been out of practice with my Italian, it's a lot easier to, say, read a short story than to discuss the weather. That's changing.

Doing the Pimsleur course, I've been reminded again how nicely it furnishes little building blocks for wrapping not just your brain, but also your mouth, around a language. One flaw, though, that I hadn't thought about before: There's no explanation, eg, of how to roll an "r". You are asked, "Did your pronunciation match that of the speaker?" but you aren't cued in on how to match it or what to be listening for to know if you're not. With Italian this is a minor thing. But in thinking about this, I think I've realized why Pimsleur Mandarin taught me good tones for a lot of the phrases that I mastered but without figuring out how to replicate them when learning and using new words outside of Pimsleur. Thanks to Michel Thomas Mandarin, I now look at the pin yin and toss in a blue finger up, black finger down, etc, and the tones stick with me about 50% of the time - considerably better than before.

This leads to two thoughts: 1) If you're learning a new language and don't know where to start, Pimsleur could well be the place. 2) If the Pimsleur phrases sound sing-songy and indistinct to you and you're not sure your responses aren't the same way, you might need a second source, like a phrasebook with a CD, to make sure you have some sense of the lexical units you're manipulating (though once you do, you should continue with Pimsleur, of course).