Pimsleur Review

Tuesday, March 18th

2025 French Lesson Reviews

Pimsleur

• Daily audio lessons
• Good for on-the-go learning
• Learn French in 30 minutes a day
• Created by a linguistics professor

Think about it: in real life, when you want to converse with a person in French, would you study flashcards first? Would you want to know the vocabulary list and memorize the words first? No, and a linguistics professor - Dr. Paul Pimsleur - knows that, creating the Pimsleur method where you listen to French right away in each lesson you take. After the lesson, you can practice speaking, reading, and writing to fortify your new knowledge. Learn French in 30 minutes each day.

Learn for long-term retention

How many times have you heard people say that they took four years of high school French and they don't remember a thing? Does it make you nervous that if you take French lessons now, you won't remember them long-term either? Well, the Pimsleur method is designed to help you retain French words and phrases for a long time. They use graduated interval recall so that with each lesson you'll learn new words and have them pop up again and again so you commit them to memory.

Listen and learn

What makes Pimsleur unique is that they don't start out by having you study random flashcards. Each lesson starts out with you hearing French. You'll hear the phrases they want you to learn and you'll hear them over and over so that you catch on and they become a part of what you know. Hearing French in context and then working with it is a nice change. It's actually how you learned as a child. Did your parents test you on flashcards first thing each day? Or, did they talk to you for a long time before they expected you to talk... or read... or write? Yes, they did, and Pimsleur does too, to a point. It's a good method.

Created by a linguistics professor

Dr. Paul Pimsleur, a researcher and linguistics professor at Ohio State University and UCLA, discovered that language acquisition occurs naturally when we hear the language over and over, in everyday context. Then you interact with what you're exposed to so you can speak it, then read it and write it.

Costs

Here's what you can expect to pay for the different Pimsleur programs

• Free 7-day trial period, but only when you purchase a subscription
• Premium: $14.95 per month
• All-access: $20.95 per month

The audio lessons go in order of difficulty

In order to make the Pimsleur method work, the lessons should go in order of difficulty, and they do. The downside to that, if you will, is that some people want to pick and choose their lessons in order of themes that interest them. Yes, you could stay more interested, but it's harder to build on and repeat those phrases for increased memory. Pimsleur's method works when you give it the chance. It might seem slow going at first due to repetition, but you should find out later that it's needed to have a good basis to build on.

It works easily with your schedule

Pimsleur's on-the-go method of listening to audio lessons is especially helpful if you want to learn French on the go, while cleaning the house, cooking dinner, commuting, or waiting in the doctor's office. If you're at home and moving about, try the speaking practice activities. If you're not driving and can sit for a bit, choose to do the writing or reading activities.

You get what you pay for, so we suggest going higher than the basic level

With the basic-level access, you can listen to lessons and definitely learn some French. There's more to learning a language, though. You might want to purchase a subscription package so you can use flashcards, get pronunciation practice, or test yourself with flashcards.

So what do you get?

What you get with each subscription package:

• Audio only. You can listen to any of the audio classes and aren't restricted from any.
• Premium. You'll get audio and reading lessons, get some practice games, save vocabulary words so you can review them later if you want, and get access to extra vocabulary.
• All-access. You get everything from the Premium level plus have access to all 51 languages. Maybe once you get started with French, you might want to brush up on a language you've already studied, or add another one to your repertoire.

You only get a free trial when you pay for a subscription

If you want to dabble and see if Pimsleur's right for you, you can't just get free access like you can with most rival French programs. You have to literally give your payment information in order to have a seven-day trial. For us that's a no-go. With so many programs out there that let you test drive before you commit, even with Pimsleur's seven days to change your mind, this policy doesn't sit well with us. Be sure to cancel before the 7 days if you don't want your card to be charged. This offer is only given to new customers; if you've tried Pimsleur before, even with a different language, you don't get this free trial. We even clicked on "see full terms” to make sure we were understanding properly, but we got caught in a loop and never got to the full terms.

Best for overview of the language and getting a handle on it

Pimsleur has an excellent teaching method of listening to input. Listen to the lessons and the French dialogs. Learn some good, applicable vocabulary, and practice it. If you already know a lot of French and want to get even more fluent, Pimsleur's probably not for you, and unfortunately there aren't too many competitor programs out there for you either. We do have some we can recommend, so check our list. However, if you want to get a good grasp of French and are patient with the repetition, you can try the Pimsleur method.