Pharmacist

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Pharmacist

by Zoe
(Ohio)

I'm currently half way through Pimsleur Italian I. The course is good; however, I have a problem with the fact that no list of words/phrases are provided that you are learning. Sometimes it is difficult to tell exactly what either the male or female speaker is saying. Without seeing the word, I'm only guessing.

For example, I thought the word for eight was "octo", only to find after looking it up, that it is "otto". These are important distinctions. Other words, I don't even have a good guess.

If they provided a list with the words you just listened to, with the various tenses, masc. or feminine, etc. I think it would stick with me more and I would know for certain I am pronouncing it correctly. Seems like very little to ask. I won't be buying their part II or III or recommending it because of this. The so-called "bonus book", is a list of words that you don't even cover in any of the lessons. They teach you how to pronounce them.

So, the bottom line is, you don't have any list of the words you ARE learning and you DO get a list of the words you aren't learning. Sorry Pimsleur, your good idea is lost on me but I will try to complete Italian I.

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Pharmacist

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Pimsleur Excellent But Lack of Book Is Frustrating
by: Peggy

Except that I also love the Pimsleur method, and realized early on I had to supplement with some written material or I'd have been hopeless at spelling (and continued in some errors). Italian is very consistent as to pronunciation once you know the rules, but there's no way you could imagine how to read and write in Italian from listening to it, and as literate adults, that is part of knowing the language. I have begged Pimsleur to come out with supplemental books, even if you have to sign an oath that you won't break the seal until you have mastered each audio level! By the way, I am now halfway through Level III, but was able to function well in Italy on just Level I and impress people with my accent and fluency (until I quickly ran out of vocabulary - which again, gets back to the need for a book).

Re
by: Anonymous

I haven't been using this but have heard some samples, and I agree that this would be frustrating for me, though I did enjoy the audio course. One thing I would suggest is buying either a grammar book to teach you the rules as you go, and use both to gain excellent reading and writing skills, or at least to buy a dictionary to look up each word as you go, and write it down somewhere. Flash cards are good. Anyways, I will probably be using this course as a primary tool when starting to learn German (after finishing my studies of Italian).

In bocca al lupo! (Though I'm most likely using that idiom wrong).

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Pharmacist

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Pharmacist