How Optomize And Accelerate The Pimsleur Italian Language Course

The Pimsleur Italian Language Course is one of the more popular language courses available. The entire course consists of 90 thirty minute lessons broken into 3 levels. Although Pimsleur refers to the lessons as Beginner Lesson number 10 and Intermediate Lesson number 10, I find it much easier to just refer to them as lessons 1 through 90.

The theory behind Pimsleur is vocal repetition based on timed intervals. By repeating a word or phrase at various time intervals after first hearing it, i.e., 10 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute, 5 minutes, etc, our ability to remember the phrase is supposedly greatly increased. You can buy the entire set or each individual level. Additionally, you can buy smaller sets of the beginner level.

I bought my entire set at http://www.pluralitylanguage.com/pimsleur/languages/italian.asp - they had the best price I could find at the time. As of today, the price is $156.95 per level for 30 lessons. Amazon.com charges about $236.00 for the same thing. For some strange reason if you buy all 3 levels, as a full set, from Plurality Language it costs you $529.95, not the $470.85 it should at a rate of $156.95. Go figure. Buy them separately and save $60.

I liked Pimsleur. I highly suggest it as a great course for someone starting out. It will never be your only course. There is no such thing. Sure, if you are easily pleased and boringly content with “Good Day” “Thank you” and “A glass of red wine, please” then one course is plenty. But we’re here for the real deal. We want all 3 courses AND the bottle of Chianti. So as your prima piatti, your first course, Pimsleur works well. There’s very little visual interaction – some light reading I’ll complain about later – but it is essentially an audio only system. It progresses in difficulty at a reasonable rate, it is professionally recorded, very short intros and outros, easy to hear, narrations that doesn’t annoy and I caught no mistakes outside of perhaps regional or interpretational differences. One example I ran into was Pimsleur’s word for “map” - “pianta.” I was told by a couple of Romans that if I asked for “la pianta” in Rome, I’d be buying a plant that couldn’t tell the difference between pasta and the Pantheon. “Piantina” was what I wanted to find my way or even better “la mappa!”

I completed the 90 lessons in well under a year but with my suggestions that follow, you could easily top that mark. In my estimation it is about 225 hours of work. I've seen far less time posted online but as I recall, it was by people who already knew a couple of languages. Work at your own pace but always push yourself. We can retain much more than we think we can. Remember, the hardest part is doing it every day.

I imported all of the lessons into my iTunes library and played them back through the speakers plugged into my MacPro or via my iPhone, or either of 2 iPods I own. Wow! Blatant Apple product plug! In plural! Buy Apple stock now!

By far, most of my Pimsleur learning was done while I rode my exercise bike. It was a challenge at times to repeat the sentences, complete with accent and inflection, while I was on the edge of cardiac arrest, but somehow I managed. And I learned something important because I was studying while riding the bike. I couldn’t stop the audio track. I had to just plow through each lesson and try to keep up. Later, friends told me they constantly stopped and started their Pimsleur lessons. Bad idea.

I think it is vitally important in your quest to quickly learn your language to NEVER STOP THE PIMSLEUR AUDIO TRACK! I can’t stress this enough. If you utilize the stop/start method you will double or triple the length of time necessary to learn the same amount of information. It is far more time efficient, and ultimately easier to remember the material if you repeat the entire lesson another day instead of starting and stopping. It only takes 30 minutes to repeat a lesson – starting and stopping takes much longer! Don’t do it. You’ll be tempted if not on a bike but I implore you – let it ride and do your best to keep up. Also, starting and stopping makes the whole experience quite exasperating. It will drive you crazy – and potentially kill you - especially when listening in your car.

Naturally, the first couple of lessons will be awkward and a bit difficult. Remember, you’re not just learning Italian, you’re learning an accent, and attitude. You’re learning how the whole Pimsleur method works. You’re learning how and where to respond. How quickly you need to respond. How loudly you like to hear the narrator. You’re learning the basics of Italian grammar – they may not be telling you you’re learning grammar, but you are. You’re also figuring out some things on your own that Pimsleur never bothers to explain. The Italian language is just one of many things you’ll be learning at the start. Relax. It’s a lot to take in. Trust me, it gets much easier after about lesson 8.

In the beginning, I found myself having to repeat the lessons an average of 3 times. Later, around lesson 15 or so I had to do a few lessons 4 or even 5 times in order to respond instantly and perfectly. At first I repeated the same lesson three times in a row. Later, I found it much more enjoyable to work on a set of lessons, say, 10, 11, 12 & 13 and repeat as a group. It had a tendency to keep like-minded subject matters grouped together. And easier to remember. And that brings up an important point I learned around lesson 50 or so. I was spending too much time getting the lessons perfect instead of moving forward and learning more material. In retrospect, I could have finished Pimsleur 1-90 faster if I had spent less time perfecting it. The reason I say this is that Pimsleur repeats 80% of the material many, many times. If you’re not perfect by the end of doing the lesson 3 times, you’ll have it a few lessons later. Don’t worry. Move on and get a bigger picture of what they’re teaching you. Don’t obsess on that one word or that one phrase that is 3 times harder to say or remember than anything else. One phrase that comes to mind is “Non si pau sbagliare,” loosely translated as “You can’t miss it.” It was a tongue twister for me when I first heard it. I worked real hard on that phrase. First dissecting it to figure out what the hell it was made of. I listened intently to figure out precisely the words it comprised. In other words, I spent way too much time figuring out something that just won’t come up that often in basic conversation. Unlike, say, a phrase such as “Does this very tailored, sexy Italian shirt come in XXXL?”

At the end of every other lesson, the narrator instructs you to go back to the beginning and start over. I found this method helpful at the beginning but by lesson 30 it wasn’t as necessary. I’d go 4 or 6 lessons before returning to the top for a review. I didn’t notice a marked decrease in memory retention by skipping the reviews. A real time saver over 90 lessons!

Every now and again, you’ll hear a word that you just can’t figure out. What I mean is, you can’t tell if the speaker is saying the letter “T” or the letter “C”. One example I remember fretting over was the word for the number 8. I assumed it was “octo” as in octopus (8 legs and all) when I first heard it. A few weeks later, when I was reading some Italian, I saw it written and realized it was “otto.” I had been practicing it wrong for weeks. My advice is to look up any word you’re not positive about on the internet. Sometimes www.freetranslation.com will help but usually just typing the Italian into Google will get the results you need. Misspellings and all. Don’t waste time practicing a wrong word!

The Pimsleur Italian lessons also come with additional reading. It’s a little book with audio accompaniment that you regurgitate like a robot with the intended consequence of familiarizing yourself with common sounds in Italian. It’s a waste of time. First of all, they never tell you what any of the words mean. Second, the words are rarely any of the words you’re learning in the regular audio series so it doesn’t work as a review and/or visual enhancement. And thirdly, you’ll never use any of it because you have no idea what it is. I will say, however, that as an additional learning tool at the end of all 90 lessons, if you don’t mind sitting with your Italian/English dictionary and looking up the words you don’t know, it functions fairly well.

My last tip for using the Pimsleur method in a quick efficient way and to judge how well you know the material is to juggle the order of the lessons, either by creating a new playlist in iTunes and shuffling yourself or choosing “Shuffle” under the “Controls” menu in iTunes and running through the lessons out of order. When you do the lessons in linear sequence, you often know what the narrator is going to say before he/she says it. Randomizing the lessons makes it much more improvisatory.

One last tip for the truly obsessed. Because I work in the music field for a living, I decided to edit the Pimsleur lessons – all 90 lessons – to create mini review lessons. Without a doubt, Pimsleur should offer this free of charge and I have written them about releasing my mini versions but, alas, I’m still waiting by the phone. What I did was cut out every repeat of any word or phrase. It cut a 30 minute lesson down to about 12 minutes. I may go even shorter as I keep finding repeats of phrases several lessons later. My goal is to only have each phrase only appear once thereby giving me the ability to review the entire series in something like 15 hours or less instead of the normal 45 hours.

To recap Scooter’s suggestions for blasting through the Pimsleur Italian Language Course:

1. Never stop the audio track
2. Don’t waste time getting each lesson 100% right. Full comprehension will come as you get further into the course.
3. Group lessons together in sets of 2 or 4. Don’t keep repeating the same lesson in a day. It becomes boring and too repetitive.
4. Don’t fret the occasional very difficult word or phrase.
5. By lesson 30, don’t review as often as Pimsleur instructs you.
6. Look up any questionable word on the internet. Don’t waste time practicing wrong words.
7. Skip the reading portion until you’ve finished all 90 lessons.
8. Randomize the sequence of lessons for quick review.
9. For the truly obsessed, edit the lessons down to 10 minutes for future review.

The Single Hardest Part About Learning A Language

My guess is that quite a few people who want to learn a language don’t ever get started because they make some false assumptions about learning. Whether they’ve heard too many stories about people who have tried and failed, or they have tried and failed, or they worry the words might be too hard to memorize, or the pronunciation may prove too difficult to literally wrap your lips around or they just aren’t smart enough.

It’s all bullshit.

There’s only one thing that is incredibly hard about learning a language. Just one. And it takes no talent, no superior intellect, no secret to master it. I did it. You can too.

And it’s the only effective and time efficient way to learn a language.

The single hardest part about learning a language IS DOING IT EVERY SINGLE DAY. Every damn day in and day out. Through rain or snow, in sickness and in health. Committing to it as if it were air. Or water. Or food.

That’s it. If you can muster the discipline, the self control, the drive – to be involved with the language just once per day – you will succeed. Words, pronunciation, grammar – it all pales in comparison to committing to do something every day.

Was I 100% successful over the past 14 months? Absolutely not. And neither will you. But that’s OK. Sure, the goal is to be 100% successful in soaking something in everyday but it is almost impossible to achieve. At one point, I caught a terrible cold and missed two days. A few months later, I got behind in my work and missed a few more. Other days I was so fed up with learning Italian, I just couldn’t do it.

But I made up for it on other days. Days where I kicked some serious Italian ass. For instance, on a vacation to Hawaii, while sitting on the beach staring out to sea or taking long walks on the shore, I practiced my Pimsleur 4 hours a day. My Mom lives 90 minutes away from me by car so when I go visit her I get in about 3 hours of Italian in a day. So we all have good days and bad days. Just like life.

The goal is to participate in some form of learning your language everyday. My early goal was 90 minutes every day. That’s a big commitment. So I decided to combine two things. Exercise and Italian. Every morning I rode my stationary exercise bike, a Schwinn 213 Recumbent Exercise Bike, - silent, wonderful, well built – and listened to my Italian. Because I was tackling 2 chores at the same time, both of which I knew were good for me, it was doubly difficult to blow off a day.

Inevitably, there were days I couldn’t face the bike or the Italian. On those days I came up with alternatives. Things that immersed me in Italian but didn’t require robot-like repetition.

In future blogs I’ll go through these alternatives in detail, but here are a few I’ve used. I watched RAI Italian television, I tried to read an child’s Italian book I bought online, I visited and perused various online sites that teach Italian, I listened to Italian radio shows online, I watched YouTube videos in Italian, I cruised the headlines of the prominent Italian newspapers, I read through lists of cognates, and I had lunch with one of my several friends who had started learning Italian and gave up. These lunches allowed me the opportunity to act as a kind of “teacher” to them and talk about the tiny bit more I had learned.

Again, to beat the dead horse, the goal is to hear it, see it, read it, absorb something of the Italian language every day. It gets your ears and eyes used to it. Even in desperate times, a few minutes each day will move you an inch closer to the language being comfortable. Everyday. Commit to it.

My example with RAI Italian television is a case in point. I ordered the service from Dish Network for an added cost of $9.95 a month. (I love it so much I am now upgrading to the multiple Italian channels package for $20.) At the end of my workday, I’d turn on RAI and watch. I tried to listen but I was brand new and knew nothing. But I’d try and follow the story line or try and figure out what they were talking about. Some days I’d just admire how damn beautiful the women were! But the dialog? All gibberish. I couldn’t get anything. A couple of weeks went by. Then out of nowhere it seemed, I heard a word I knew. Vorrei. I backed up my Tivo-like device and listened again. Aha! Over the next few weeks I started grabbing a few more words. Little bits here and there. And then, like a miracle from heaven, a few months into this, I heard my first complete sentence. It was like a lightning bolt hit me.

In those early weeks, although by all outward appearances nothing was happening, somewhere deep inside my head, my brain was getting used to hearing the “sound” of Italian. Slowly, day by day, I got a little better. I heard patterns of words. I grabbed half a sentence. It was a diversion from repetitive Pimsleur but I was still learning.

Every day. That’s it. The rest will come.

Phase 1 Complete!

Having just returned from a two-week trip to Rome, my experience with speaking a new language reached a new level. This new level has prompted me to begin this blog about learning a new language – in my case Italian.

My saga to learn Italian began 18 months ago when I visited Italy for 19 days. I fell in love with the country, the people, the wine, the food and the life. After coming home, I found myself constantly thinking about Italy and was quite surprised to discover how strongly I wanted to return to the place. I made myself a promise that I would get back there soon – and this time, speak a little of the language to enhance the experience.

Around Christmas of 2006, I started investigating the best method to learn to speak Italian. This is my first time learning a new language – besides the required 2 years of Spanish in high school – and I had no idea where to start. The only name I knew was Pimsleur, and that name only because my wife had once purchased the beginning lessons of Pimsleur French.

My goal was to conquer the 90 half hour lessons of Pimsleur Italian before I returned to Italy. Not only did I achieve that goal, but I also finished two other courses, Michel Thomas and Living Language. I will write complete blogs about all three learning systems in subsequent entries. I went so far as to order RAI Italian television on my Dish satellite, listen to Italian radio over the internet and find the very rare acquaintance who spoke a little Italian.

14 months of hard work. 14 months of ups and downs, trials and tribulations, successes and failures, mood swings, alcoholic indulgences and learning. But I made it through. I survived. I taught myself a crap load of Italian.

And then I returned to Italy.

I was nervous, I was scared that all of that hard work would go to waste. I was afraid that it wouldn’t matter once I got to Italy. I was wrong. I was thankfully very, very wrong.

This recent trip to Rome became a big moment in my life. A turning point in realizing what can be accomplished. With a payoff that is so often hard to come by in life.

I spoke Italian with Italians.

And when you speak Italian with Italians, it takes your trip to a whole new level. A deeper, more interesting level. It creates a slightly closer bond with people. Hell, I think I even liked the wine a little more because I could actually order it in Italian.

And I got compliments. On my accent! I was asked if my parents were Italian. And when I told them I had learned by myself with audio CDs – they were flabbergasted. And I was overwhelmed. 14 months ago I had set a goal of having a conversation with someone in Italian – in Italy – and I had not only succeeded, I had been complimented.

This experience was so astounding, so completely fulfilling, that it has forced me, seriously, to write about it. I’m writing about it so that maybe someone else can benefit a little in their quest to learn, that someone finds a tip in here that gets them over the hump, or that someone gives me some helpful advice that gets me further into the full immersion of learning a language.

I’ve titled this blog entry Phase 1 Complete! because I feel after my trip that I conquered basic understanding and simple conversation. Of course I couldn’t understand everything that was said to me in Italy, the speed at which people talk and their various accents made even simple sentences sometimes hard to understand. My guess is that I know about 1,000 words - my goal now is 3,000. And to be fully fluent. A year from now. April 2009. Fluent in a language in two years.

Easy? Hell no. Impossible? Not at all. Rewarding? More than I could have ever imagined.

730 days. 2 years. The longer you wait to start, the further away your goal will be. What else are you going to do over the next 2 years? Watch more TV?

Imagine, fluent in Italian in April 2010. It has a nice sound to it.