Charles J. Ferrera

Learning by listening

Revisado: 03-22-15

The Pimsleur method works exclusively through listening and repeating. There are no "official" written materials, but you can find transcripts on the web. For Mandarin , this method is ideal. The biggest barrier to being understood in Mandarin is learning how to make the sounds properly. This involves two different problems: first, making sounds that you're unaccustomed to making in English and second, making the sound with the proper pitch pattern. Although there is a western-type "alphabet" called pinyin, trying to divine the sound and the pitch from it is virtually impossible. So, here, where you have no written materials, you are not tempted to try to "learn by looking." The lessons keep the number of new vocabulary words down to a minimum and the focus is on learning how to make sentences and, you use what you know in many different settings. The upshot is that if you have "learned" something, it means you know how to use it. This is very different from other methods where you could "know" quite a bit about the language in terms of vocabulary, grammar, etc., but being unable to really utter a sentence or answer a question. I think it's, by far, the best thing there is out there.

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