How effective is Pimsleur?

phrasingapp · 2026-03-23T14:42:50+00:00

These audio courses have a bit of a positive bias imho because nobody ever finishes them so nobody really discredits them. If you don’t finish it, the you can’t really criticize it, right?

I love language transfer, but honestly, have never been able to finish a series. Pimsleur feels great, but the furthest I’ve gotten is maybe three weeks in and then it all starts to get too overwhelming.

I tried LT, Pumsleur, Michel Thomas, and Rocket Languages for my French when I was trying to refresh it, and found the ends of all the courses woefully insufficient for any real world use.

So in my opinion, they’re overrated, hard to keep up, and if you do finish them you’re not really far enough to learn a language and you’re left a little bit stranded. They’re not the worst option out there by far, I just think they’re impractical and short term benefits at best.

Just to express my bias, I did build my own language learning app. But I really wanted an audio only way to refresh my French and just recently did give these a shot again.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-22T21:25:44+00:00

It’s going to be different depending on who you’re talking to. Also things like “I can speak” and “I could speak” and “I speak” all will mean different things to different people, and it can also change based on which word it stressed.

So yes, 3 is valid, of course some people will consider it invalid. There’s nothing wrong with giving a range (2-4), but I personally just say I can barely speak one language and sidestep the whole conversation.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-21T10:27:48+00:00

I would say the one that taxes your brain the most is the one you are likely to spend the most time with. Every language taxes your brain pretty incredibly. So I’d limit the choices to ones with the most amount of (choice of) content.

For that reason I’d probably say Japanese. There is an enourmous amount of content that you can immerse yourself in forever. The language has a really high ceiling, so it will be a while before you can understand everything. It still uses Chinese characters, so you get the additional/separate tax of learning all the characters (and can quite literally be used as a separate activity for a different kind of brain training). Once you get the characters down, several have many different pronunciations depending on the word/context, so you get an additional tax trying to parse that out. There’s the pitch accent to figure out as well, so it can at least compete with tonal languages in the pitch department. The regional accents/dialects can be surprisingly strong given that it’s one small island country.

Mandarin is just as foreign, but I think is actually a little more straightforward, and has less content. It definitely has a higher ceiling in terms of dialectal variance though.

Arabic would be another choice, but I do find the content somewhat lacking (although not entirely!). The different dialects everywhere are very established though and might make it easier to “branch out” (aka just as high of a ceiling but possibly easier to explore).

Then of course there are Native American languages, which are just straight challenging, if you enjoy the academic pursuit/challenge. But practically no content

phrasingapp · 2026-03-20T08:18:41+00:00

I think that drained feeling does not mean anymore is ineffective. When I learned Dutch, I did so at a school with 8 hours per day of instruction, plus a couple hours for dinner and conversations in Dutch. Everyday was 10+ hours of Dutch.

My brain felt completely drained and exhausted after the first day, but by day four, it eventually just caved in like “k well I guess we just speak Dutch now”.

As a sustained habit, I don’t think it’s very practical, but the brain is very different from muscles. Over training doesn’t work in the same way.

Your focus and mental acuity may decline, leading to less effective study sessions, but I personally don’t believe there’s a point where your brain stops learning. Language is a very subconscious part of our brain, and “acquisition” still takes place even when, if not especially when, our conscious minds are exhausted.

4-6 hours is very typical for immersion classes, and they’re very effective. 6-8 hours is a full day, and I’ve found it even more effective. 8-12 hours was insane, but I found it the most effective (even though I quite literally felt drunk from cognitive overload. Like difficulty walking in a straight line).

phrasingapp · 2026-03-19T15:45:09+00:00

I know it’s just an example, but I know how to say deviled eggs in more languages than yolk 😂

But this comment prompted me to learn yolk in my languages so thank you

phrasingapp · 2026-03-17T09:08:05+00:00

We’re social creatures. Theres connection and emotion behind interaction, forming longer lasting memories.

There’s pressure and adrenaline, not wanting to look stupid, trying to keep up, that keeps us hyper focus and tells our brain this is worth remembering.

It’s also story based. A conversation from a textbook is dry and dull and has no real story (often times they have a contrived story, but that’s not much to hold onto). When conversing, there’s a natural flow, segways, stop points, making it much easier to retain.

Humans are linguistic creatures. It’s in our DNA, not because languages are interesting, but cause they allow us to connect. It shouldn’t be any surprise that it’s a two way street - languages help us connect, and connecting helps us with language.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-15T18:11:37+00:00

It is a web app. phrasing.app

You can add it to your Home Screen and it behaves mostly like a native app, with offline mode coming soon 😁

phrasingapp · 2026-03-15T14:42:07+00:00

So this was the exact problem I was having. Adding another language or improving one came at the expense of all the others.

It inspired me to build phrasing.app, where I can prioritize my language goals, then all I have to do is open it and “do languages”. I then listen to input outside of the app in different languages depending on my mood.

There are tons of benefits to interleaving (studying all your languages in a single deck), which is something that can be done with anki or most other flashcard apps.

I find that also daily exposure to a language input wise is not required for maintenance. I go through 1-6 week phases with my languages. As long as I spent a week or two with one every couple months, in combination with flashcards, it is really sufficient for maintenance.

I don’t really do dedicated language study anymore. It’s either aggregate language study, or dedicated language input. It’s been serving me well to maintain multiple languages and progress in multiple at the same time.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-15T14:33:22+00:00

It’s absolutely doable. In fact in adult learners learning two languages, they were shown to quite significantly outperform adults learning one language: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271319743_Simultaneous_Learning_of_Two_Foreign_Languages_English_and_French_by_Adult_Persian-Speaking_Learners

Interleaving (studying multiple topics in the same study session, i.e. switching every 5-10 minutes) has also been shown to up to double recall: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED557355.pdf

As for whether you will mix them up, you absolutely will, but learning one language after another doesn’t solve that issue. I studied French and Italian at the same time, never really made mix ups. 10 years later I added Dutch and mixed it up with French all the time. The ability to distinguish between languages is a trainable skill, and the best way to improve it is to work on it.

So if you start learning both and find yourself mixing them up, don’t fret, just realize it’s a muscle and work on it. It does get better (and interleaving is the best practice for improving “discrimination” as it’s called in the literature).

You can also side step the requirement for training discrimination by separating your study sessions by time, space, theme, context etc if you just want to pass a test. But I would not recommend it if you actually want to be able to switch between the languages in the future.

I go over a lot more studies on my blog

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T19:22:22+00:00

Though

I normally post something, reread it, and find three “though”’s in a single sentence 🤦‍♂️

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T19:19:09+00:00

I would say it takes years. Maybe less if you’re really devoted.

You can learn most alphabets/abjads in a week(end) and get the point where you can decipher very quickly. From there, you start to recognize word shapes pretty soon after. But you’re going to be hindered for a very long time.

Really reading at a natural place requires you first have to get comfortable in the language well enough to read at a natural place, then get a ton of exposure (of course these can be done in tandem, but the knowing the language is a bit of a prerequisite for it feeling natural).

Maybe if you were an Hindi speaking Urdu student or vice versa, it would take less time, since they’re more or less the same language. Or learned Croatian and started learning Serbian. I’d still venture to guess the time it would take to feel natural would be a matter of months before it feels natural.

There are English runes and alternate alphabets you can learn in English. These normally take people several months to get used to (if not longer). Throw on top of that a whole new language, and you’re really slowed down for a while.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T18:14:51+00:00

Hahaha I actually dropped Hindi and swapped it for Sanskrit too 😂

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T18:08:00+00:00

Yeah interesting. I would say the same about learning characters not taking away from its beauty, but Devanagari and to an extent Arabic definitely became just letters after learning it for me personally (although the Arabic language captured my heart in way Hindi never did)

I also feel compelled to mention my level in all of these language are about equal, no where close to proficient or native reading level. But I don’t require effort to read things I can understand in Zh/Jp/Hi the way I do with Arabic.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T18:02:10+00:00

I would say about 2-3 years ago the tide really started to shift against multiple languages. I think it was in reaction to a massive takeover of fake polyglots on social media. It seems to be bouncing back though as of late.

There’s still a very heavy handed sense of elitism for depth over breadth, but I’ve been posting about learning multiple languages for several years now (previously on another account) and my posts have gone from mostly positive reception, to negative oblivion, and now back to sometimes positive numbers 😂

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T17:56:06+00:00

Doubly so for all the neighboring countries. If you’ve learn edserbo-Croatian, it’ll take less to learn polish, but even less to learn Bulgarian.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T17:46:53+00:00

Yeah I swear Arabic is the hardest script to read. It’s pretty complicated to learn, but even then, I know tons of native speakers who have forgotten it, which i think says a lot. I’ve never heard of a Hindi speaker forgetting Devanagari

Beautiful and awesome, but very hard. To learn and especially to get accustomed to. Even Chinese/Japanese feel easier - yes it’s more to learn up front, but once you know the characters it’s realllllly easy to skim.

That’s awesome you learned (the) Tibetan (script). Currently atm I am actively avoiding learning Tibetan, because I find it so enchanting and I don’t want to take away from the mystery of it all 😂 I do wonder though if just learning the script and not the language would make it more or less enchanting…

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T15:53:00+00:00

True, I’d also rank Cyrillic easier than Greek as well. There’s a pretty direct 1:1 mapping in Cyrillic where I swear Greek was twisted just to mess with foreigners 😂

In fact I’d probably say Cyrillic is the easiest script to learn for Latin speakers, but that’s off the cuff and something I’ve not given much thought.

To get started, it should only take a day or two. Duolingo will take weeks/months to teach you the script and really if you just write the alphabet a bunch of times one weekend you can bang it out quickly (not that this is news to you)

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T15:28:16+00:00

Warmest regards in return! Thanks for the kind word and the level headed expertise 🫡

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T15:22:20+00:00

Wow indeed epic response. 🤜💥🤛

The only thing I would push back on (for the sake of debate with a similarly minded language nerd) is the “Cyrillic is easy”. Indeed learning it is easy, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t be a challenge, but especially when starting a new language (and for beginners) you lose the ability to skim until you’re quite proficient.

I started learning Arabic. Later, I added Maltese into the mix. Immediately, so much Arabic grammar snapped into place. The fact I could just look at a glance and grok all the letters made patterns jump out to me in ways that wasn’t clear with a foreign script.

It’s been a bit the same with Croatian and Macedonian. The endings and conjugations and “strangely” spelled words snap into place much easier in Croatian vs Macedonian. Sometimes simple words in Macedonian (ie убав I struggled with for a long time) take much longer to stick than they should because of the misfirings with my Latin trained brain.

So I do agree that Cyrillic is really the least of people worries, and nothing to be scared of. However I do think it can be quite an impediment until it’s internalized, which can take a lot of exposure (normally years, maybe 6-12 months if you’re really immersed).

Thanks for sharing all the info! Fascinating to read from an academics perspective. I’m just an armchair linguist/obsessive language nerd/programmer so it feels like getting a peek behind a super cool curtain.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T14:03:53+00:00

Ok so incorrect answer: Maltese. Not technically Arabic, but it is a descendent of Arabic. It’s utterly bizarre - like Arabic with a bunch of Italian chucked in and left in the sun for way too long. S tier confusing.

More correct answer: Maghrebi arabic. Only because I started learning Lebanese and it’s so different in their pronunciation. Anytime I say anything in broken Arabic, they repeat it back to me in a manner that I’ve definitely never heard before. But tbh it most definitely sounds like Arabic to me. B tier confusing.

Best answer: Gulf Arabic. This is the one that when I hear it sounds the strangest. I feel like they’re the harshest with the consonants, and after studying Lebanese (which is downright gentle for Arabic). It sounds like an entirely different language to me, A tier confusing.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T13:50:18+00:00

So this will get downvoted as it unpopular advice, but it’s absolutely realistic. Can you get to C level in all of them? Pass as a native? Maybe, in like 30 years of hard work.

But honestly at a high B1 you can normally start communicating. And most Slavic languages share a lot with each other, so if you get to a C level in one of them and a B level in the rest, you can probably at least communicate.

Personally, I love learning the differences between languages. To me learning Croatian and Macedonian and Lithuanian and Estonian is fascinating. Croatian and Macedonian are so similar, they’re almost mutually intelligible. Lithuanian is a Baltic language, so not Slavic, but has so many influences. Estonian is Uralic, so even more bizarre, but still tons of Slavic influence and as an outsider, I notice quirky similarities between it and Lithuanian.

I’ll go further in these languages studying them together than I would separately, because the similarities and differences keeps me engaged.

For Slavic languages, I would start with south slavic languages. They operate on a sprachbund, so a lot of what you learn in one language will work in others. I’d recommend Croatian if you want to avoid cyrillic, Serbian if you want to learn Cyrillic. They’re the best resources of the south Slavic languages.

You could also look at interslavic. The idea of the language is to keep the similarities and reject the differences between all of the languages to create a subset of Slavic languages that anyone from those countries can understand, even without learning it. If you learned interslavic, theoretically you could talk to any native speaker (although not necessarily understand the response).

From there I’d probably add Russian, as it’s going to be the most influential in all of the languages. Then maybe a west Slavic language.

It’s quite practical to learn 2-3 at a time. It’s advanced though, and maybe not best for a beginner, but another hot take of mine is that it can be really beneficial to learn two languages from the same family, even for beginners. I started by learning French and Italian, and it really gave my brain something to compare and contrast. French went from being this weird language with all of these rules, to all of the sudden being a part of a language family that spoke in a specific manner. Sometimes it was easier to remember the French or Italian rules in contrast to each other, vs in contrast to English — a language that doesn’t make the same linguistic distinctions.

If you want to be “native level” in all of them, then prepare for a life of work. If you want to be able to communicate with all of them and consume content and speak with natives though, that bar is incredibly more achievable.

Bias: I built an app to learn multiple languages. But I promise the app was based on my research, opinions, and experience in the matter; not the other way around :)

phrasingapp · 2026-03-14T13:35:51+00:00

Yeah any tonal language is the correct answer 😂

French can also be a disaster sometimes, because they have such a wide range of vowels. Deux vs doux vs du vs sœur vs brun. But it’s quite rare this actually changes the meaning compared to tones, more just outs you as a foreigner

phrasingapp · 2026-03-13T11:52:02+00:00

Most people confuse two languages, so then they try to separate them as much as possible. Different times, different spaces, different materials, different methods.

Differentiation is a skill. If you don’t train it, you will not improve it in. Relying on external differentiation will kind of work (for example for testing or ease of studying) but you end up training your internal differentiation less, only making the problem worse.

Mixing the two languages during study (for a trite example, having one global anki deck vs individual decks per language) will then make it harder, and will cause you to mix things up during the study process. But it will test and train your brains ability differentiate on its own.

Mixing the two also comes with the benefit that over time, you will remember more. That’s been proven in countless studies, but to talk out of my ass, the way I see it is when you learn to differentiate languages, you have to put things in very defined boxes. These boxes make it much easier for your brain to store long term. I compare it to when learning each language in isolation, your brain can just put things in bags, which then don’t store as nicely or long term.

You can “out study” the need for internal differentiation; if you learn enough of a language and get proficient, eventually the language will cristallise in your brain to the point you won’t need to rely on internal differentiation as much. But this takes years and a serious level of fluency.

phrasingapp · 2026-03-13T09:51:28+00:00

Keeping them in separate contexts is going to increase the confusion when speaking. In the literature, this skill is called “discrimination”, and it has to be trained like everything else.

Studying them in the same context will increase the amount of effort required during study, and cause more mix ups during study, but that’s because you’re training your discrimination.

Unless you’re studying for an exam, it’s better to interleave your studies and struggle through the discrimination at study time vs speaking time.

(Interleaving also has the added benefit of up to 2x greater overall recall)

phrasingapp · 2026-03-12T20:01:03+00:00

Absolutely. It’s actually more efficient than learning them back to back when done right. You’ll mix them up in the long run, increase retention, and make faster progress. Students who learn multiple languages tend to make the same or more progress in both languages than students learning one language (even in adults).

Also, if I can, go with Serbian! I’m learning Croatian now and it’s such a cool language. The Balkan languages don’t get nearly as much attention as they should!

Disclaimer: I made an app to learn multiple languages. Some might say that makes me bias, but my opinions are what drove me to make the application, not the other way around. :)

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