If you’re in the market for learning Spanish, you probably have heard of Dr. Paul Pimsleur’s books and audio courses for language acquisition.

About Dr. Pimsleur

Paul Pimsleur was a French teacher, linguist and memory expert whose research focused on language acquisition and how children learn language without having formal knowledge of their language’s grammar and structure. His four basic tenets are: Anticipation, Graduated Interval Recall, Core Vocabulary, and Organic Learning. The result of this research was his language learning system that trains adults in a new language using an all-audio approach. Learners listen and speak along with a CD and learn their target language in a naturalistic fashion.

This is all good and well, but the typical Pimsleur course costs about $250. Is it worth it?

Free Spanish Lesson

See for yourself by taking the Spanish course for a test drive. Simon & Schuster, the publishers of Pimsleur’s works, offers the first 30-minute lesson of the Pimleur course for most languages. Download or listen to the mp3 of the first Spanish lesson, and see what you think.

Buy the Full Course

If you’re convinced, you can get it on amazon That’s the level one course, there are also level two and level three. Each one has thirty 30-minute lessons. If you don’t want to pop for one of these full-fledged courses, you can get just the first 8 lessons for about $20.

Here are links to these courses on Amazon, which is a lot cheaper than some other bookstores. Disclosure: If you use these links to buy a course, I will get a fee from Amazon for referring you to them.

• Spanish Quick & Simple (Lessons 1-8) about $15
• Spanish One (Lessons 1-30) about $220
• Spanish Two (Lessons 31-60) about $220
• Spanish Three (Lessons 61-90) about $220

10 July 2007 7:34 pm
Cats: Language Learning, Spanish
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