Pimsleur: The Duolingo of my youth

I spoke Italian until age four. I have good stories about what happened after that, but they're mostly made up, and I did not grow up fluent in Italian. I took French-language courses in school until the end of highschool. Other than that, no real foreign-language experience on my part.

Post-grad school, I had an opportunity to study Italian in Italy. I moved to Florence for a couple of months, where I went to classes in the morning and walked around the city in the evenings. The lessons helped, but not much. I started looking for supplements.

This was in 2006, so there weren't any mobile apps. After some basic searching, I found old copies of the Italian Pimsleur program on some torrent site.

From Wikipedia:

> Dr. Paul Pimsleur, a professor and expert in applied linguistics and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, wrote the original five courses: Speak & Read Essential Greek (1963), Speak & Read Essential French (1964), Speak & Read Essential Spanish (1966), German Compact (1967), and Twi developed for the Peace Corps (1971). The programs were originally called "A Tapeway Program".

Pimsleur Wikipedia page

The lessons consisted of ~90 audio recordings of about 20-30 minutes each. Each lesson generally had you practice a few new words, and then had you repetitively participate in a scenario-specific "conversation", like ordering a meal at a restaurant.

I remember two major things about Pimsleur.

The first is how much it helped my pronunciation. After doing it for a couple weeks, I started playing a game where I'd go to a random bar in the afternoon, order a coffee, and talk to the barista. I'd roughly time how long it took them to figure out I was a foreigner ("straniero".) I hadn't learned much about future or conditional tenses, so I sounded very confident about everything; I couldn't talk about the future, and I couldn't express doubt. I was surprised how far I could get if my pronunciation was good.

The second was how weird the conversational scenarios were in the lessons. Many of the early lessons had a tourist man meeting an Italian woman at a cafe and pestering her with questions. He asks her if she wants to eat something; she says no. How about drink something? No. And this goes on for minutes. At first, she sound coyly interested; by the end, not so much. Finally, exasperated, she says "I don't want to eat or drink anything with you!" And then the lesson ends. Was this intended to foreshadow the foreigner experience?

I tried the French and Japanese lessons as well, and the scenarios were the same. After roleplaying this man getting rejected in three different countries, I started to feel bad for the guy.

Later lessons had other social scenarios that felt weird partially because they were constructed to practice specific phrases, but also because there was a feeling of tongue-in-cheek subtext there that was awkwardly funny. Which, I guess, is what it feels like when are trying to express yourself meaningfully in a language you don't know well.

I loved Pimsleur. They were easy to do daily, and I felt a meaningful improvement after each lesson. It didn't help me much with grammar or expanding my vocabulary, but it did give me a lot of ease in many everyday scenarios. One unexpected downside: My pronunciation improved enough that people assumed I was a lot more fluent than I was.

I've briefly tried language-learning apps, but I churned out of them very quick. I don't want language-learning to feel like a game, which seems to be the most frequently taken tack. There's something satisfying about getting conversationally comfortable in a new language before learning all the specific bits that you need to actually know what you're doing.

I don't have as much interest in learning languages anymore, but if I did, I think Pimsleur would probably still be my starting point.