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Vietnamese (Pimsleur)

Vietnamese (Pimsleur)

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $13.57
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Useful - but insufficient by itself
Review: By Edward Trimnell, author of "Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One" (ISBN: 1591133343)

Buy this course if you are new to the Vietnamese language, and you are having a really difficult time with the phonetics.

As another reviewer pointed out, the amount of actual content on this course is small. However, the course does give the learner a comfort level with the difficult sounds of Vietnamese.

This is a good one to start with. I would then recommend purchasing Colloquial Vietnamese (Tuan Duc Vuong & John Moore) and Teach Yourself Vietnamese (Dana Healy).

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Vietnamese for dummies: Easy to learn, but waaaaay to little
Review: I rated this with 1 star only to counter all the positive reviews a bit. It is actually not that bad, but it is definitely not worth 4 or 5 stars, maybe 3 at best.

So what do we get with this course? 5 cassettes with 10 lessons (1 on each side) featuring 5 hours of course material. There is a lot of repetition, which I guess is one of the strengths of the Pimsleur method, but on the other hand, it is also one of the biggest weaknesses: After 10 lessons you have almost learned nothing! The other strong point of the pimsleur method is the emphasis on pronounciation. Your vietnamese friends will probably understand you quite well.
So what can you say after 10 leasons?
------------
excuse me
may I ask you something?
Yes, no
I/you (don't) understand (English/Vietnamese)
I am American/Vietnamese
I (don't) know
How are you?
I am (not) fine
and, but, or, at, here, there, now, later, not yet, definitely not
ah (meaning: that's interesting)
when?
Where is .... street?
I want to eat (lunch)
I want to drink/shop/do what/something
What time is it?
It is 1/2/3/4/5/8/9 o'clock
never mind (this is only mentioned once)
hotel, restaurant, your/my place
wine, beer
---------
You can combine above into questions and other sentences, but that is about everything you learn from this course (I may have forgotten to mention some of the words you learn, but it is not much more than what I already mentioned).
I still can't count to 10, and I can hardly say anything interesting to any of my Vietnamese friends.
Also note the course teaches Hanoi dialect, while most Vietnamese outside Vietnam speak Saigon dialect.

Summarizing: you get 5 hours course material (which you probably only have to listen once), good pronounciation, fluency in the sentences you learn, the ability to combine the words you learn in different sentences, but very few words.
Personally I think the level of this course is far too low. There is lot of repetition and you can move on to the next cassette quickly so you get the feeling of progression, but at the end of the course you have learned very little. Other courses with comparable prices offer a lot more vocabulary. Yes you have to work harder and stick to a single cassette longer, but for the same money you learn a lot more.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A good starter!
Review: This is a simple audio course offered by Pimsleur, a reputable way to teach foreign languages. This set consists of 10 lessons, each of about 30 minute, every lesson contains a simple conversation at the beginning, step by step the instructor will help you to decode the message. The publisher claimed that after 10 lessons you will be able to understand about 120 Vietnamese words and their usages. The so-called Pimsleur approach was actually quite repetitive, but they said this repetitiness is dfferent and innovative because every time when you are asked to repeat, the audio course gives you about 2 seconds to think, so it enhances your memory. I had finished this simple course before I came to Vietnam, I found it easy and quite enjoyed using it, it gave me some very brief concept of the sounds and structures of Vietnamese in a lazy-to-learn way, but there're some tricky and important sounds in Vietnamese (e.g. ? that you probably can't hear the differences in the audio. There's no written copy of the dialogues in this package which could be quite annoying if you wanted to see how they were written, though this may also be a part of the Pimsleur approach, which forces you to learn a language by your ears like what you did when you were young. The only drawback of this course is its price, US$60 for 300 minutes of repetitive instructions, just too expensive per minute but you can probably find this at your local library. Note that the audio instructions are all in Northern Vietnamese.


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