Lesson 21 was played 5 times before I moved on. I am currently working with the Spanish CD's and am on series 4, lesson 22. I have found that I have to repeat the lessons-sometimes 4 or 5 times to entirely "get" the language. Most of the rants involve people not being able to understand the lessons on the first go round. Excuse me, Alliance Francaise is for only French, and I know there are lots of other languages! My bottom line - use the Pimsleur tapes, but supplement them with some additional lessons (Alliance Francaise or such)first. And she has a father who is fluent in Spanish and a grandmother whose first language is Spanish! However, I don't know when she would have the time(or motivation) to work on it, so I won't waste my money on that just yet. In fact, I've debated buying the Spanish tapes for my granddaughter (a junior in high school) who has taken alot of Spanish in school, but hesitates to speak it. I'm not sure I would want to start a new language this way, but Pimsleur sure did it for me with French. These tapes, which I work on frequently in the morning with my coffee, helped me bring it all together. But I had already taken years (YEARS ago!)of French, when grammar and reading were the main thing, not conversation. However, the Pimsleur (French) tapes have worked wonders for me in learning to actually SPEAK the language. Sally, I agree with you and others regarding needing to SEE the words. I'm a little further ahead in German than Arabic, and I expect to find it entertaining when the American man asks the young Arabic woman if she'd like to come for a drink at his place. Oddly, it does help to do two languages using Pimsleur at the same time because they use almost the same dialogue. Imagine sitting there in class doing dictees of German numbers and then being asked (or listening to someone else) recite the numbers back, first in German and then in French. (But that in itself is a challenge because the default language of explanation when German doesn't work is French. I'm not the brightest student in the class, but my pronunciation is spot-on. I'm also taking a German course at work, so I'm learning the basics of grammar at the same time. I try to balance the memory work with references to the written transcript, because I realise that it's important to get the sounds imprinted in your brain just as it's important to me to get a picture of the word imprinted behind my eyes. Luckily, I have a German colleague down the hall, so when I get stuck I can ask him a question. With German, however, I use a dictionary after the lesson to convert my phonetic translation into the correct spelling. With Arabic, that's as far as I can go because I can't read Arabic script very well yet. I don't transcribe everything in sequence, but I do transcribe the new words and challenging new combinations of words. (You are probably thinking German and Arabic at the same time? Are you insane? Did I mention that I'm living in Paris right now and also coping daily with "life as an ongoing vocabulary lesson"? But I digress.) I'm working with the German and Arabic Pimsleur CDs right now and have concluded that I also need to transcribe parts of the lessons in order to progress.
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