Pimsleur Language Programs
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Seems like a company run by incompetent amateurs
The Pimsleur organisation appears to be suffering with the employment of substandard amateurs. The audio is terrible, in that it's very woolly, with the treble content diminished - like listening to the sound through a thick blanket. Consequently, it lacks clarity. Having checked a number of different language options, this appears to be the case for all the Pimsleur courses. I acquired and proceeded with the Castilian Spanish course, but found the male 'native speaker' to be diabolical, in that he constantly speaks too fast and slurs words together, while the woman, on some occasions, just pronounces so quickly that phrases can become unintelligible. Furthermore, many words and phrases are wrong, ie. they don't quite match what the English-speaking narrator says. However, it's possible that this could be due to a mediocre audio engineer indulging in a bit of incompetent copy-and-pasting. Unfortunately, I also find the 'native speakers' occasionally pronouncing words in Latin American Spanish rather than Castilian Spanish. To make things worse, there is not even a booklet supplied with a lesson-by-lesson list of words and translations which would, at least, help to figure out what the badly pronounced words and phrases are supposed to be! I sent an email through the Pimsleur website reporting all these issues but have not received a single response, which says much about this travesty of a company (a part of Simon & Shuster), all of which is a pity because the structure of the course is rather good. I have had to spend many hours loading the files into audio editing software to improve the sound and correct as many of the glitches that I can find, before saving to mp3 files that can be played repeatedly in the car and next to my bed as I sleep, which is at least allowing me to steadily but slowly absorb the language. Incidentally, the Pimsleur courses are primarily aimed at North Americans, which is why they assume the student to be from there - hence the constant referring to 'dollars' and "I am American". To people not emanating from there, these sections are obviously somewhat useless.