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I Was Trash at Learning Languages for 30 Years—Until I Tried This App

Dump that emotionally manipulative green owl. Pimsleur is the app that actually taught me Spanish while I knocked out household chores.

By Matt Jancer | Reviewed by Ysolt Usigan

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Anyone (but especially Americans, like me) will tell you that learning a foreign language in adulthood is hard. Despite middling teenaged efforts in middle and high school, I entered my thirties still strugging to get a working grasp of Spanish.

I dove into all the apps: Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Babbel, Memrise, and iTalki, plus books and in-person language learning groups on Meetup. I even began watching TV shows without captions and trying to strike up conversations with locals on vacation without understanding first the elementary underpinnings of the language. (One thing I didn’t try: bingeing speed).

Nothing worked. Everything sucked. Then on a desperate Google search one day, I came across an awful lot of language enthusiasts on Reddit talking highly of Pimsleur. “What the hell have I got to lose?” I thought. “There’s a seven-day free trial, anyway.”

Pimsleur Language Learning App (opens in a new window)

Well, I stuck with it a lot longer than seven days. And after decades of rough starts and stops, Pimsleur brought my threadbare Spanish up to a conversational level. And then through Pimsleur I learned Swahili, which I’d always wanted to do.

Ninafahamu na ninasema kiswahili kidogo… si vzuri sana, lakini naweza kuongea kiswahili. Poa, ndio? Then recently I began using it to learn French.

So why the change after three decades, from someone who told people I’m just a big dummy who can’t learn languages to someone who’s learning three of them for fun? Turns out I wasn’t incapable of learning a language after all. I just needed to find an instructional method that didn’t suck.

Pimsleur Review: A World of Choice

For each of the 51 languages Pimsleur teaches, there can be up to five levels of 30 lessons each. Both their Castilian and Latin American Spanish courses have five lessons. I hopped into level three of Latin American Spanish because I already knew the basics.

What I needed was help breaking out of beginner Spanish and turning a rudimentary classroom understanding into a language I could use in the real world. How else could I confound Dominicans and Cubans with my bizarre and inhuman requests for sugarless black coffee?

How Does Pimsleur Work?

Pimsleur is structured around audio lessons that are focused on conversation. In fact, the first Pimsleur courses were offered to consumers in 1980. And as funny as it may seem, the audio lessons on the app aren’t that different from these original courses on cassette tape.

So this is really an old-school—yet tried-and-true—method, more so than an app. The app serves to organize and manage the curriculum, but the lessons themselves mostly just one-sided conversations, with openings for you to chime in, and lessons sprinkled in intermittently.

Each Pimsleur audio lesson runs for about 30 minutes. You listen to conversations and are asked to answer questions and repeat phrases out loud. Each lesson tends to focus on one or two unifying scenarios so that the new phrases and words you learn aren’t a random grab bag of information.

Instructions are given in English, although later in the course, instruction is increasingly given in the language you’re learning. Saying the phrases out loud helps with understanding and remembering them.

And while I could pause the audio track for a bit more time when I needed to think of the right phrase for longer than the given pause, I found that keeping my finger off the pause button propelled me to start thinking more quickly on my feet, a vital skill in real-life conversations.

New words and phrases are sprinkled into each lesson, but not so many as to be........

© Vice