I started Pimsleur Japanese 1 in June of 2005. I just finished it yesterday. No, that’s not a typo. I really started in 2005 back when the internet was still cool, and video games still released in Japan before the United States.
At the time, I always got to lesson 12 or 13 before stopping because I didn’t like what I was learning. Hello. Good morning. What do you want to drink? How many kids do you have? The conversations were so mundane I would get bored, stop, forget, and start again a year or two later.
This year I decided to finish at least Japanese 1. Why? I don’t know. Just some unfinished business, I guess. My last lesson lined up with the last day of my vacation on a cruise ship.
That’s when it hit me. I’d been having that same mundane conversation with many people over the course of the trip. “Hi I’m ____. This is my wife. We are from ____. We have __ kid(s).” It’s exactly what you learn throughout Pimsleur Japanese 1. Not enough to hold a job or really get to know someone, but enough to have that first conversation or two with the dinner guests you just met on a trip and will likely never see again.
I used to object to Pimsleur due to the upfront costs of the tapes/CDs. Checking the website now it looks like they’ve gone the month-to-month route for $15. At that price I’d argue it’s a fairly good deal. Are you getting a lot of content for that $15? No, not really, and definitely not anything you can’t get from anywhere else, but you are getting structure, some listening practice, and some spaced repetition thrown in there. Just take the marketing claims with a grain of salt. No, you’re not going to ‘put colleagues or clients at ease’ with this level of Japanese, but you can definitely start a conversation. If you can get a copy from a local library or can afford $15, definitely check it out.
Now I have to go do my reviews. I forgot to turn on vacation mode.
I haven’t looked at Pimsleur since it was a set of cassete tapes I listened to in the car on my way to work. My beef at the time was it went too-easy, easy, easy, WAY too hard suddenly, and there was no explanatory book or anything. If you didn’t get it from the sample conversation, tough luck.
I’m curious from someone who’s done the Pimsleur (congrats!) if the Irodori online free course is as good. It’s basic simple conversation like you describe, and has explanation and activities to go with it.
I haven’t used Pimsleur for Japanese but I did do the level 1 courses for a couple of other languages (Arabic and Swahili) so I can weigh in on this.
To me it’s an unmatched resource in what it provides, which is getting you speaking at a very early stage. After finishing a course, I found that I could hold a conversation (albeit very basic) in my target language, and had very good pronunciation for a beginner, which is a big plus as pronunciation mistakes can take some time to unlearn when you’re more advanced. I also found that it built my confidence to a point where I felt more comfortable experimenting with sentence construction during live conversations even as a relative beginner. That gives you a great leaping off point to fast track yourself towards speaking proficiency (which has been my main reason to learn any language).
I would certainly not recommend doing it all the way to level 5 in a language. At that point, you should be learning more in the “wild”, as your learning becomes guided by the kind of things that are interesting or relevant to you. However to build that initial confidence and learn some ice breaker vocabulary, it’s a quick and easy starting point.
What it’s also not is an all encompassing resource which given the price might be a concern. It barely digs into grammar and for languages that have different alphabets or where pronunciation doesn’t match spelling, you’ll need additional materials. Resources like Wanikani and Tae Kim could probably help fill that gap quite well.
Oh, the old Pimsleur Japanese. I believe they’ve updated all of their lessons since then. I still have the old audio lessons. Basically, in the past, if you made an account during the free trial period on the mobile app, it allowed you to download the lessons. I downloaded them all on my phone and then transferred them to my PC, letting my trial run out. I still have them to this day. I uploaded them all to YouTube but made the playlist unlisted. I also did something similar with KoreanPod101 when I was younger, downloading every lesson during the free trial, but I no longer have access to them. Also, I have most of Olly Richard’s Japanese course on my PC.