Let me tell you a tale of foreign languages. A tale of awful public school instruction and half-assed attempts at learning.
My freshman year of high school, I was taught Mexican Spanish by a white lady from Chicago who once spent a year in college studying in Mexico. The next year, Peruvian Spanish by a kind lady from Peru. The next, Argentinian Spanish by a woman from Buenos Aires. Then nothing my senior year, because high school is just as nonsensical as the real world.
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Cut to adulthood. I was still desperate to get a working grasp of Spanish—so I dove into all the apps: Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, and iTalki, plus books and in-person language learning groups on Meetup. I began watching TV shows without captions and trying to strike up conversations with locals on vacation without understanding first the elementary underpinnings of the language. (One thing I didn’t try: bingeing speed).
Nothing worked. Everything sucked. Then on a desperate Google search one day, I came across an awful lot of language enthusiasts on Reddit talking highly of Pimsleur. “What the hell have I got to lose?” I thought. “There’s a seven-day free trial, anyway.”
Well, I stuck with it a lot longer than seven days. After decades of rough starts and stops, Pimsleur brought my threadbare Spanish up to a conversational level. And then through Pimsleur I learned Swahili, which I’d always wanted to do. Ninafahamu na ninasema kiswahili kidogo… si vzuri sana, lakini naweza kuongea kiswahili. Poa, ndio? Then recently I began using it to learn French.
So why the change after three decades, from someone who told people I’m just a big dummy who can’t learn languages to someone who’s learning three of them for fun? Turns out I wasn’t incapable of learning a language after all. I just needed to find an instructional method that didn’t suck.
Pimsleur Review: A World of Choice
For each of the 51 languages Pimsleur teaches, there can be up to five levels of 30 lessons each. Both their Castilian and Latin American Spanish courses have five lessons. I hopped into level three of Latin American Spanish because I already knew the basics. What I needed was help breaking out of beginner Spanish and turning a rudimentary classroom understanding into a language I could use in the real world. How else could I confound Dominicans and Cubans with my bizarre and inhuman requests for sugarless black coffee?
How It Works
Each Pimsleur audio lesson runs for about 30 minutes. The first Pimsleur courses were offered to consumers in 1980. As funny as it may seem, the audio lessons on the app aren’t that different from these original courses on cassette tape. You listen to conversations and are asked to answer questions and repeat phrases out loud. Each lesson tends to focus on one or two unifying scenarios so that the new phrases and words you learn aren’t a random grab bag of information.
Instructions are given in English, although later in the course, instruction is increasingly given in the language you’re learning. Saying the phrases out loud helps with understanding and remembering them. And while I could pause the audio track for a bit more time when I needed to think of the right phrase for longer than the given pause, I found that keeping my finger off the pause button propelled me to start thinking more quickly on my feet, a vital skill in real-life conversations.
New words and phrases are peppered into each lesson, but not too many as to be overwhelming. I’ve always thought that people understand and remember conclusions they come to themselves (or at least feel that they’re coming to themselves), rather than having it spoon fed to them in a super dry way.
What I noticed early on is that one reason Pimsleur works as well as it does is because that it may not, say, tell me outright that a verb has a certain ending, if I’m speaking about multiple people doing it. But after I learned enough of these phrases to recognize the pattern, I’d think, “Ohh! This is a foundational rule of the language, and I can apply it to any verb in this tense when speaking about a bunch of people, not just the verbs I learn in the app.” That sort of instruction wedged into by brain far better than any book, teacher, or competing language learning app ever did.
Take it day by day
Pimsleur says the method works best if you do one audio lesson each day. No more, since you want to give your brain enough time to absorb each lesson, but no less. While I very occasionally skipped a lesson because (insert bullshit excuse), I’d notice it was easier for me when I did the lessons daily. Each successive lessons builds on the previous ones, so you’ll continue to hear and practice phrases and words from prior lessons.
Thirty minutes per day may seem like a big ask compared to all the apps that promise you only have to commit to 10 or 15 minutes per day. And there’s no gamification that promises to make learning “Easy! Quick! Fun!” You don’t get magic rings or treasure chests for correct responses. But the point is that it works. I don’t care how many wacky noises an app spits out at me if it doesn’t deliver. I learned more in a week of Pimsleur than during my 550-day streak on Duolingo.
Over time, I began to do my daily audio lessons while I performed mindless chores about the apartment. Unloading the dishwasher, doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning. Because the main parts of each lesson—the audio—was entirely hands-off, I could layer my daily learning over an otherwise mind-numbing chore. I couldn’t do that with Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, Memrise, or Babbel.
conversations with myself
Completing each audio lesson unlocks “skills,” or phrases mentioned in the audio track, that you can review and save. There are a lot of more interactive, optional components to each lesson that are designed to be reviewed after the audio part. There’s Voice Coach, in which you not only have to translate a given English phrase, but you have to pronounce it correctly, too. It grades you on a 100-point scale not just on whether you put the right words in the right order, but how well you pronounced them. Speak Easy gives you a screen full of sentences spoken by native speakers, and you try to match your pronunciation to theirs without time limits or grades.
The voice recognition software worked very well through my iPhone 15 Pro. Duolingo had always pissed me off because it never understood what I was saying, but Pimsleur was quite accurate. Even my Google Nest Hub’s Google Assistant and my iPhone’s Siri have a harder time understanding me than Pimsleur.
Reading lessons begin at certain points further into each course. As Pimsleur itself says, reading and listening are different skills processed uniquely in the brain. Nailing down the spoken components first and introducing the written components later and separately like this worked a lot better for me than other apps that vastly prioritize written content, like Duolingo, or blend them together from the start, like Memrise.
Flash cards were useful for routine practice. I could select whether I wanted English to (target language) or vice versa. It’s an excellent tool for staying sharp and not forgetting previous words and phrases. There are a few optional games in each lesson, too: Quick Match and Speed Round. These were my least favorite parts of Pimsleur, mostly because they were so stupid-easy.
no more false starts
You can sign up for a free lesson to try Pimsleur out, or you can get a seven-day free trial if you sign up for a subscription. The app is available on Android or iOS, or you can use it on the desktop. And you can always cancel before the seven days are up. (My skeptical self thought I’d be canceling, too, when I signed up.)
A monthly subscription runs $20 for a single language, but for $21 a month you can access all 51 languages. The extra buck a month was a no-brainer for me, so after my trial was up I let my money ride on the $21-per-month subscription and began learning Swahili, too. And I’ll point out here that I didn’t ask Pimsleur for a discount or complimentary test period or even let them know I may be reviewing it. I paid full price out of my own pocket from the start.
There aren’t a ton of resources for learning Swahili. That Pimsleur not only has Swahili but did just as well teaching it to a native English speaker as it taught me Spanish, a much more common language closer to English, sold me on the idea that the Pimsleur method is sound. So you can teach me Spanish, French, German, Italian—the typical languages? Fine. But you can teach me an East African Bantu trade language from the 8th century? Now that’s impressive.
There was only one Pimsleur level for Swahili, and its 30 lessons ran at a quicker pace than the Romance language courses. Some individual lessons were more heavily packed with information than Spanish lessons, but the method was solid.
With my Swahili journey on Pimsleur wrapped up, I picked up the French course. Like Spanish, it had five levels. By now Pimsleur had done well polishing up my beginner Spanish and teaching me from scratch a language entirely unlike English. How well would it do teaching me French, a common second language for Anglophones, as a complete beginner?
I’m only a few weeks into it, but it’s going wonderfully. Spanish and, especially, Swahili are very straightforward in how written words are pronounced. French sure as hell isn’t. The few times I took a stab at French, I’d get my brain all tied up in knots trying to read a French word and then pronounce it. Taking the reading out of the equation and letting Pimsleur’s audio lessons be my introductions into new phrases got me over that roadblock. Later on I’d consult the French reading lessons, but then it was more, “Oh, so that’s how it’s spelled,” rather than, “Well, shit. How in the world would I say that?”
Five levels of French mean that if I keep up with my daily practice—and I have been—then I’ve got five months of coursework. Like with any language, I can always return to the flashcards I’d saved of especially useful or tricky phrases, plus reading lessons and quizzes that I can practice on the subway to keep myself sharp.
it’s no competition
Pimsleur Vs. Rosetta Stone
Once the bliss of not having to stumble through Spanish for grades wore off, I decided to pick it up again in my 20s. Rosetta Stone made no impression on me. Rosetta Stone often says in its marketing, “By mirroring the way you first acquired language as a child, Dynamic Immersion provides maximum exposure to your new language through audio spoken by native speakers, written words, and real-world images.”
But it never clicked for me. Showing images on screen and blasting me with the spoken phrases felt too clumsy, too much error in “trial and error.” Besides, I thought, how many years did it take to learn a language as a child? Do I have that kind of time on my hands? If I pour five years of learning into this and end up talking like a (Spanish) five-year-old, I’d be pissed.
Pimsleur Vs. Duolingo
Duolingo was mostly a multiple choice quiz. It was catchy and fun, but I was only halfway decent when a list of possible phrases was put before my eyes. There’s a reason schoolchildren like multiple choice tests (as much as anyone can like a test). It’s because it’s the easiest one to guess at if you don’t know or aren’t confident in the answer. Works the same way with languages. I’d score hundreds on Duolingo but never feel like I had a grasp of actually using the language. The spoken component was focused more on sounding exaggeratedly slow and silly than realistic.
Pimsleur Vs. Babbel & Memrise
Memrise and Babbel, at least, had real people speaking normally. It was better for comprehension, but I was still selecting from multiple choice answers. It wasn’t as hands-off or seamless as a Pimsleur audio lesson, and it felt to me that selecting from written answer choices interfered with my conversation comprehension. I prefer how Pimsleur delays the optional written lessons until after you complete each audio lesson.
I even went vintage and bought a famous Spanish language instruction book called Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, published in the 1950s. Aside from learning lots of ways to ask for a smoking pipe and buying the latest vinyl records from shopkeepers, the method was too dense and dry to translate into a conversational tool for me. Plus, there was no spoken element. If I wanted to talk with people in Spanish, I needed to learn by hearing people speaking it. Dropping into Puerto Rico for a visit and, later, living in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City confirmed that while I’d learned about tenses and conjugating, I was still trash as far as navigating actual spoken conversations.
the world is now your oyster
So what’s next? For honing my Spanish and Swahili into fluency, Pimsleur has been a wonderful foundation for bringing my learning into the real world. I’ve yet to find another Swahili speaker in person, but I’ve got a few people to speak Spanish (and French) with in real life. (You know what I use ChatGPT for? Practicing conversations in these languages. It’s the best use I’ve found yet for this double-edged technology sword.)
And I’m watching television shows and movies in Spanish. (Frontera Verde? Buenisimo.) No language learning app is going to bring you to complete fluency along. They’re not designed to. The good ones will imbue you with a functional grasp of the language and springboard you on a path toward fluency as you move your learning into the wider world.
As for my next steps with Pimsleur, I’ve been eyeballing their three-level course in Levantine Arabic. And I once took some halting steps toward Russian in my pre-Pimsleur days, in which I’d never progressed beyond dim-witted three-year-old or clever parrot. I wonder if I picked up Pimsleur’s five levels of Russian instruction, whether I could finally say da svidanya to those Russian children’s books on my bookshelf, with which I’d apparently been wasting my time.
