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October 19, 2009 | Arabic
Pimsleur Needs More Products
I wish Pimsleur offered more advanced levels of more languages.
Today I spent some time searching through the Pimsleur website, because I really don’t want to do languages for which they have no Level III. I’m disheartened about the Hindi and Greek situation. For Hindi they offer almost nothing. For Greek there are only two levels rather than the full three, which is unfortunate. I don’t want to end up glued to my computer with Rosetta Stone. But I just noticed: Pimsleur is adding Level III for Hebrew—tomorrow!!! That’s fabulous!
Which reminds me: doesn’t the absence of vowels in Arabic, and Hebrew too, make those languages much harder to become literate in, and much less accessible to people who want to learn them? I am still utterly mystified by the concept of languages that are vowel-free in writing. There are lots of possibilities for vowel sounds, and it seems impossible to me that they aren’t standardly indicated as a part of the writing system.
Another failed multitasking effort today: I tried to do Pimsleur while helping Brandt with an acting-related mailing. All I had to do was put stamps and address labels on envelopes. I offered to help because I thought I could do Pimsleur at the same time, but I guess even something as seemingly mindless as sticking stamps—and these were self-adhesive, by the way!—on envelopes requires some brainpower. I did terribly on my lessons.
Comments (1)
Jay • Posted on Tue, April 06, 2010 - 9:10 pm EST
Hello,
I have been following your blog recently and find it fascinating. I “friended” pimsleur on facebook and a link led to your blog. I also love to study languages and running! Your comment above about pimsleur needing more product stole my words. I have been after them for years to produce more cantonese. Level I came out in 2001. I have all the mandarin and have been through it. I even asked them back in 2008 for the olympics why they don’t put out a mandarin plus. Their lame response was that it ‘was not in their plans at this time’. Oh well. As for rosetta stone, i did not care for it very much. I am an aural language learner it seems. I didn’t get into looking at all those pictures and clicking a million times and hearing the right and wrong sounds, just me. Their vocabulary sequence was also strange. I had better end this before I go on way to long. I can talk about languages forever. See you on the roads…..
tsai jian (good bye-mandarin)
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