Teach Yourself and Pimsleur – Pros and Cons
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.
Today I'm going to talk a bit about Teach Yourself and, specifically, Teach Yourself Romanian. I'm going to compare it a little bit to the Pimsleur Romanian and talk a little bit about what I've been listening to on my iPod Nano using my new Bluetooth earphones, which are very handy. So, last video I talked about Pimsleur and I said that Pimsleur for me, because I'm not so keen to be prompted to speak, I don't respond to their prompts to speak.
In other words, in Pimsleur what they do is give you a simple dialogue, break it down and then they ask you a question which you should reply to in Romanian, the target language. But I started two weeks ago, so it's a little bit early for me to try and say anything in Romanian. To me, Pimsleur is primarily a source of repeatedly listening to certain phrases, phrases that they have decided are important for me like: ‘Do you understand Romanian?
‘I understand Romanian.' ‘Where is the restaurant?' ‘It's on this street.' ‘Where is the hotel?' ‘Do you want to have dinner with me?' ‘Do you want to have a drink with me?' More or less that seemed to be everything, just going from memory. Bear in mind that I started on Romanian about 10 days ago and I started the minute we had launched Romanian at LingQ because I'm going to Romania in June for three days.
We got Romanian, I want to learn Romanian and so I decided to start. We didn't have any content in the LingQ library, so I went around looking in the bookstores and I found Pimsleur. So I started on Pimsleur and I, essentially, listen to it mostly in the car. I had an old copy of Teach Yourself Romanian, plus I went to the library and they had the CDs for it. I've gone through the Teach Yourself Romanian, so what do I think of it.
Well, it has a lot of advantages and some disadvantages compared to Pimsleur. The advantage is that it introduces an awful lot more vocabulary, lots. There are 20 chapters; I guess two or so of them are , which means to review. Other than that, each one of them introduces at least 20 or some new items of vocabulary. That's good. The other thing that's good is that they introduce different aspects of the grammar with lots of examples.
So rather than just explanations, they'll have an introduction and then they have lots of examples. I find it very useful to read these examples. I don't know whether they stick or don't stick, I mean you have to read these things over and over again. I'm reading the book now for about the third or fourth time, reading some of the same examples, reading the dialogues, going over the vocabulary list, all those things. So, to that extent, I'm willing to spend more time on Teach Yourself than on Pimsleur. At any rate, if I have dedicated time I'm going to read, I'm not going to listen.
That's just how I learn. Plus, I took the CD from the Pimsleur and I've listened to it a few times now. Some of the dialogues are still a bit of a blur. One thing that I don't like about Teach Yourself is that there is a fair amount of English. It's similar to Pimsleur, but the big difference between Pimsleur and Teach Yourself is that Teach Yourself the sound is not as clear. The clearest sound on the Teach Yourself is the British guy who's explaining stuff to you. Some of the Romanian speakers are clear, some are quite unclear. In some of the dialogues supposedly it's a phone call, so you hear the phone dial and one of the voices is kind of obscured because it's coming out of a telephone. They do things to make the sound less clear, plus some of the voices are not clear. I experienced this with my Czech Teach Yourself.
They had one voice there that was so soft and unclear it was too annoying to listen to. The big advantage of Pimsleur is the Romanian comes booming through very clear and I think it's very important for a beginner to hear the language very clearly. So, to that extent, as I said, Pimsleur is a good icebreaker. Pimsleur is a better icebreaker than Teach Yourself. Pimsleur kind of gets you ramped up to where at least some aspects of the language don't sound so strange, so then when you hit them in Teach Yourself I think you've already got a bit of momentum. I think it is good to use a variety of different systems.
People ask me what I think of Michel Thomas. Well, I listened to it a little bit. Personally, I don't like that format where he has these two students saying things incorrectly. For people who like that, it's also undoubtedly a good icebreaker. So, people who do Michel Thomas, in my opinion, should also do Teach Yourself because it's a different approach with more explanations, more examples and stuff like that, but the sound quality in the Teach Yourself is not nearly as good as in Pimsleur. Other than that, I'm enjoying it. The other thing about a system like Pimsleur or Teach Yourself is they have lots of different dialogues and things of that nature which they try to make interesting, but they aren't really very interesting at all.
To the extent that the dialogues aren't interesting, it doesn't really matter. It's just language in the initial stages as you're trying to get used to it. So what I did, finally, was I wrote out about 20-odd sort of what I call patterns in English using greetings and using ‘why', ‘where', ‘when', ‘because', ‘in order to', ‘although', ‘since'. For each one of these, I'd have six example sentences in English which I recorded in English, by the way, and put them into LingQ for those people who are starting with English at LingQ. Then I went through Elance on the Internet and found someone in Romania to translate those probably 24 times six sentences into Romanian and then to record them for me.
There was a bit of back and forth to improve the sound quality, but when they were finally done I imported them into LingQ. So now I have these clear phrases and sentences of things that I'm interested in learning in Romanian which I listen to over and over again. Then I read them on LingQ and save the words that I need. This is the other disadvantage for me in learning from vocabulary lists in say Teach Yourself.
It doesn't work as well for me as when I can read them on LingQ and see the yellow highlighting and have flashcards and so forth and so on, which also enables me to review those lessons on my iPad or on my iPhone wherever I am and so forth and so on. So I did that. That's why, I repeat, I think it's so good to sort of go at things from different directions. I found Radio Romania, _, I don't know, .
There you can download podcasts of the news which, of course, I don't really understand; although, there are a lot of words that sound very similar to Italian. But then they have little articles, so I can import those articles and save the words that I need. I have this impression that 70% of the words in Romanian are words that I already know from other romance languages. A surprising number are words that I know from Slavic languages and then there's all the connecting words ‘why', ‘because', ‘now', ‘since'. Some of the idiosyncrasies of the Romanian grammar I have to learn, but it's going to be a lot faster. So now if I read a news article on the Radio Romania website I understand it, basically. I understand it better than Korean, that's for sure. After having done Russian, Czech and Korean, boy this Romanian is really quite a piece of cake, I think; although, how well I'll be able to speak remains to be seen. But insofar as understanding it, it's certainly going very quickly. So I have all those different things on the go.
I don't think I'm going to listen to my Pimsleur again because it's just too limited. The vocabulary is too boring to hear over and over again. I'm still going to listen to my Teach Yourself and review some of the lessons there because there are still words that I don't pick up when I listen and there are still grammar patterns I need to review in order to have them sink in. I will be sending more patterns in English to my Romanian friend who will record them for me so that I can continue to work on some basic patterns, based on what I feel I need to have.
I'm hoping that over time as I read more and more of the articles on Radio Romania that I'll be able to understand more and more of the news reports. These articles are not the sort of transcript of the audio, but obviously the vocabulary is going to more or less reappear in the articles and in the recording. So that's kind of going to be my strategy and I am going to start speaking with my tutor in Romania this week, which for me is completely out of the norm.
The norm is that I'll go six months without speaking to anyone, but I don't have the luxury because I'm going to be in Romania for three days in early June. So I'm going to start struggling to speak here and, of course, the fact that 70% of the vocabulary I already have from Italian and so forth is going to make it easier. Nevertheless, I don't know how my first Romanian encounter is going to go, but we shall see. Anyway, I guess the conclusion in all of this is don't be afraid to use a variety of different systems to work on your language skills.
They all have their roles. I think Pimsleur is a good icebreaker, Teach Yourself introduces some of the basic grammatical concepts and then, I know from experience, I need an awful lot of exposure. So I'm just going to be listening and reading and gradually letting my brain get used to the language and get used to the patterns, occasionally review them in my Teach Yourself book. As I say, Pimsleur has served its purpose as an icebreaker. I don't think I'll be going back there because it just simply takes too long to get the vocabulary you need and I'm going to start speaking much, much earlier than I normally do. So there you have it, a bit of a review of Pimsleur and Teach Yourself and some suggestions of how to break into a language, particularly one where there is a lot of common vocabulary.
I would maybe close by saying that I think in language learning the biggest obstacle is the vocabulary. The closer or the more common vocabulary there is, the easier it's going to be to learn. With Romanian I think that gives me a big advantage, so I'm going to do that and then I'll go back to Korean once I come back from Romania. Okay.
Thank you for listening, bye for now.
