Pros & Cons
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- Helps you speak and understand spoken languages
- Clear, audio-based instruction
- Superb lesson structure
- Programs for 50 languages, along with ESL courses
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- Expensive
- Difficult to learn new scripts
Pimsleur Specs
| Average Duration of Lesson (Mins) | 30 |
| No. of Languages Offered (Not Incl. English) | 50 |
| Price Includes | All Languages, All Levels |
| Style of Program | Audio |
If your primary goal is to speak and understand a foreign language, but not necessarily master your reading and writing, Pimsleur teaches pronunciation and listening like nothing else. Although the language learning service started as an audio-only program on cassette, it has evolved to include interactive exercises and a decent pronunciation feedback system. The core content is undeniably strong, and the framework for how many minutes per day you should study and what lessons you should do is crystal clear. It is expensive, however, and works best in combination with one of our Editors' Choice winners: Duolingo for free practice, Fluenz for structured learning, Lingoda for live classes, or Rosetta Stone for beginners.
Pricing: A Bit High
Before you pay for Pimsleur, you should take advantage of the option to listen to the first lesson of every language for free. You can also get a seven-day trial of all the content for all languages, though you must provide a valid payment method and cancel within a week to avoid a charge. Finally, you should check if your public library has Pimsleur.
(Credit: Pimsleur/PCMag)Monthly subscriptions are available for one language ($19.95) or all languages ($20.95). If you plan to study more than one language and are committed to using Pimsleur for more than about six months, the $164.99 annual subscription is a good deal.
You can buy lifetime access to just one Level of a language, though the price varies dramatically. Japanese, for example, costs $150 (that's the rate for most of the languages), but Lithuanian is only $49.95 (I suspect it has much less interactive content). Some offer multiple Levels, while others have just one. Levels include anywhere from 10 to 30 lessons. If you follow the learning instructions for a 30-lesson level to a tee, you are likely to finish it in about a month, assuming you don't need to repeat lessons. I'd pass on this option. The last option is for lifetime access to all levels of all languages for $798. Rosetta Stone charges $399 for its lifetime access plan, for comparison.
Pimsleur also sells other packages for some languages, too. For example, you can find courses on CDs, should you see the benefits in owning physical media. And you can also find them on Audible.com. As long as you know that library access is your best bet and the monthly subscription is second-best, you really don't need to look through all these options. You can learn via Pimsleur's mobile app (available for Android and iOS) or website.
Which Languages Can You Learn With Pimsleur?
Pimsleur offers an impressive 50 languages if your language of instruction is English: Albanian, Arabic (Eastern, Egyptian, and Modern Standard), Armenian (Eastern and Western), Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari Persian, Dutch, Farsi Persian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Ojibwe, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Spanish (Latin American and European), Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Twi, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.
It also has programs to help you learn English, with instruction in 15 languages: Arabic, Cantonese Chinese, Mandarin Chinese, Farsi Persian, French, German, Haitian, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. These programs are audio-only with no interactive exercises.
If Pimsleur doesn't offer the language you need, try Mango Languages pr Transparent Language. Transparent works best if you are dedicated and motivated enough to make your way through the nonlinear program by yourself. Mango isn't great by any stretch, but it offers quite a few languages that aren't widely available.
What Is the Pimsleur Method?
I've been using Pimsleur for personal study since the mid-2000s and have tested it formally on and off since 2013. Whenever I test a language app, I look at one language I don't know and one that I do. Because I've used Pimsleur so many times over the years, I've tried it for Spanish and Romanian (two languages I know) as well as German, Korean, and most recently Mandarin. I weigh my experience against other language learning I've done, not only with apps but also at the School of Language Studies at the Foreign Service Institute, in online or university classes, and with private tutors.
Pimsleur's core lessons are audio files, though the program also usually includes booklets that ship with the CDs or downloadable PDFs that show all the words and phrases in each lesson. You learn by listening and speaking out loud.
Pimsleur is named for Dr. Paul Pimsleur, an applied linguist who died in 1976. He spent years researching space repetition, a learning process that exposes students to an idea and then waits a predetermined amount of time before exposing it to them again or asking them to recall what they learned. The idea is to find an optimal series of intervals for maximum retention. As a result, the Pimsleur programs have extremely clear instructions. Each day, you're supposed to work through exactly one lesson, and you're supposed to do each lesson in order. There are even rules about when you should repeat a lesson instead of moving on. This structure gives you a clear vision of what you need to do, how long it will take, and when you can expect to reach certain milestones, such as the end of a Level.
(Credit: Pimsleur/PCMag)In each program, an English-speaking narrator or instructor gives directions while one or more native speakers provide information in the language you're learning. The English-speaking instructor never uses foreign words but still prompts you and guides you through the lessons.
A little more about spaced repetition: In between hearing a word for the first time and being asked to recall and say it again, you learn other words and phrases. As you progress, a few days might go by until the narrator (seemingly out of the blue) will ask, "How do you say, 'I would like?'" Then, you have to pull it from memory, even though it hasn't come up in a while. This is the secret sauce.
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It takes five or six lessons to truly get into the swing of Pimsleur. Once you learn how it works, you trust that vocabulary and concepts will repeat a few times and know it's OK if you don't nail it on the first go-around.
Course Structure: A Focus on Repetition
The most memorable experience I had with Pimsleur was my first one. I used the program to pick up a little German before a trip to Berlin. English is common there, so my goal was just to be able to be polite in the native language. After about three months, I picked up enough that I felt comfortable with basic greetings, saying "Excuse me," and ordering food. I probably could have given directions, too. To this day, I still remember quite a few words and phrases.
As mentioned, the program uses both listen-and-repeat and call-and-response patterns. The call-and-response portions challenge you to think about what you need to say, so you're not just parroting the entire time. Every lesson opens with a short dialogue. By the end of the lesson, you hear the dialogue again and can now understand it because you spent the majority of the lesson learning the words and phrases that make it up.
After the dialogue, you get into the heart of Pimsleur. It goes like this. An English-speaking narrator says something like, "Here's how you say 'I speak English' in Mandarin. First, just listen." Then, you hear a native speaker say the phrase a few times. The narrator follows up with, "Now, listen and repeat," and the Chinese speaker goes syllable by syllable through the word or phrase, eventually saying the whole thing several times with pauses in between so you can repeat it. Finally, the narrator says, "How do you say, 'I speak English' in Mandarin?" and a pause indicates you should say it aloud.
(Credit: Pimsleur/PCMag)Later, the lessons get a bit more complicated, but the basic setup remains the same. Words, phrases, and grammatical constructs you learn in the early lessons pop up again later. Everything that you learn comes back again. The more times you repeat something, the longer the interval until it resurfaces.
In the early lessons, you spend a lot of time breaking phrases and words into sounds. Pimsleur talks you through the sounds very slowly, getting you to master them. This part is key, especially for certain languages. With this method, there's no chance of getting tripped up by looking at letters and sounding them out as if they were English, such as when non-native Spanish speakers pronounce a 'v' in the English way instead of making it more of a 'b' sound.
With Chinese, the English-speaking instructor tells you to notice rising and falling tones as well as different pitches, but you don't get extensive lessons on all the tones up front. Rather, you get a short interjection explaining that tones are important, and that you should make your pronunciation sound just like the native speakers'. From time to time, the instructor adds new information about tones.
Learning Experience: Audio Lessons Are the Highlight
I took to Pimsleur easily and happily, perhaps in part because I'm a lifelong listener to radio and podcasts. It's already routine for me to find 30 minutes a day when I can listen to something. That said, you do need to focus your attention on the lesson and shouldn't multitask too much. You can do it while commuting (the app has a special driving mode that simplifies the interface, though please don't drive distracted), folding laundry, walking a dog, or any other time and place that works for you. You can download the files, so you can access them offline without an internet connection.
Interactive Exercises
As mentioned, you get interactive exercises for each lesson, such as an AI-driven pronunciation feedback tool called Voice Coach, flash cards, and a matching game. These exercises aren't a replacement for the audio lessons. They're more like mini-games to reinforce what you learn. They're entirely optional and aren't engaging or memorable in the way that activities in Duolingo and Busuu are.
(Credit: Pimsleur/PCMag)Whenever an exercise has a listening component, you can slow it down to 0.75x or 0.5x speed, which is helpful. The Voice Coach has you speak while the app listens, and it gives you a rating (fair, good, or excellent) on how well you did. The word or phrase appears on the screen, and the app highlights any part that you didn't pronounce correctly in red. I have yet to interact with any automated pronunciation tool in a language learning program that truly impresses me, however. You really can't replace a human teacher with AI when you need feedback on how you speak.
Some exercises contain written language. For languages that use a different script than English, you see the native script, the transliterated version, or (optionally) both, depending on the Level. With the Mandarin course, for example, you get both pinyin and Chinese characters early in the lessons, and you can choose to see one or both. The focus on audio-based learning can make it difficult to pick up unfamiliar scripts.
Optional PDFs
As mentioned, Pimsleur provides free PDF booklets to accompany its audio courses. These are largely optional, though they can be useful if you want to learn to read and write.
If you do use them, you can listen to a companion audio file that coaches you through the material. In the Mandarin course, you see both pinyin and Chinese characters for individual sounds and later full words. The audio files remind you how to pronounce words as you read through them and study their forms. This part of the course is much more self-directed than the rest of it.