Product Description

The 16-lesson (8 CDs) Conversational Course gives customers the first half of the incredibly effective and efficient, world-famous Pimsleur Comprehensive Program. Customers will love the experience of acquiring the essential grammar and vocabulary of Turkish during the spoken practice sessions. It is this ease of language acquisition that makes the full Comprehensive Pimsleur Program so popular and successful for adult language learners.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #175109 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-12
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 8
• Binding: Audio CD

Review
"Pimsleur programs provide plenty of positive reinforcement that will keep learners on track, and we found that Pimsleur gave us more proficiency and confidence in speaking the new language than any of the other language programs we reviewed."-- AudioFile Magazine

"EXTREMELY ACCESSIBLE...each section within the lessons is short enough to hold our attention, and there is enough repetition to teach even those who consider themselves slow learners...Pimsleur [programs] are extremely thorough and easy to use -- quite lively!"-- Boston Herald

"Learn French while commuting, German while jogging, Spanish (or Russian, Italian, and Japanese) while cooking all with NO WRITTEN MATERIALS!"-- New York Daily News

"Designed for the ear and not the eye...the lessons provide PERFECT 30-minute bites of work."-- St Louis Post-Dispatch

"Learn to habla español or parlez français before your next trip aboard. The interactive LESSONS CHALLENGE STUDENTS to use new words in conversation instead of memorize them."-- American Way (American Airlines inflight magazine)

"I tried other language programs with little success...This is the best by far!"-- Pamela A. Mitchell, Pilot, International Society of Women Airline Pilots

About the Author
Dr. Paul Pimsleur devoted his life to language teaching and testing and was one of the world's leading experts in applied linguistics. After years of experience and research, Dr. Pimsleur developed The Pimsleur Method based on two key principles:  the Principle of Anticipation and a scientific principle of memory training that he called ?Graduated Interval Recall.?  This Method has been applied to the many levels and languages of the Pimsleur Programs.

Customer Reviews

Worth The Wait
Turkish has been a pretty glaring hole in the Pimsleur catalog for some time now. It always seemed a bit strange that a company that takes the trouble to make programs for Irish, Ojibwe and Lithuanian would overlook a language with over 60 million speakers in such an important part of the world. Further, Turkey does everything it can to reach out to the West, economically, culturally and politically.

But after studying Turkish on my own for a while, I came to see why it may have gotten pushed to the back-burner. It is not a terribly difficult language to learn, but it is quite different in its structure to languages that have previously been produced by Pimsleur. Like Hungarian and Finnish - other popular languages that don't have Pimsleur courses - Turkish is an agglutanized language, which simply means that sentence structures are formed in large part by building on the base word. For example, they don't use prepositions as we do in English, they merely add a suffix on the word. "Sut" means "milk", "sutlu" means "with milk." School is "okul" - from school is "okuldan." And so forth.

While this concept alone doesn't make Turkish improbable for the Pimsleur format, bear in mind that words can become quite complicated when you begin adding attachments for possessive cases, plurals, location, tense, etc. It is not uncommon for words to eventually grow into the size of small sentences. And note negation; "I understand" is "biliyorum" but "I don't understand" is "bilMIyorum." So proper listening requires you to catch agglutinzed portions of the word in the middle of the sentence, otherwise the meaning is completely the opposite of what is understood.

Ok, with that out of the way it must be said that Pimsleur did a superb job of comporting Turkish into the script format that has remained pretty consistent through the various languages. Unlike Spanish or Italian, the pace is a little slower to make sure you "get" what is being accomplished as the vocabulary is built up and key concepts are explained. But the pace does keep up, which I found to be very satisfying. One of the great assets of Pimsleur (as opposed to say, the "Rocket" audio programs) is the lack of pointless chit-chat in English, and the steady pace to keep you focused on the target language. The Turkish script not only navigated the tricky points of Turkish quite well, but also happened to give among the most clear and concise introductions into the points of grammar as they came.

Again the voices are good, the speech is clear, and the vocabulary is useful. This one is a winner. Turkish is a great language, and very easy to speak with regards to pronounciation (say, compared to Arabic, Chinese or Russian). A month invested in this program would be all you would need to have a fantastic time in Turkey. Though I have not yet visited, my Turkish friends say if you know a little of the language, the hospitality is overwhelming and you will never be lacking for an invitation for dinner. I imagine with this program under your belt you'd eat like a king in Turkey!

The most successful way I've found to learn Turkish
I've wanted to learn Turkish for a long time now. My wife is Turkish, and I can't communicate with her family (yes, I know, to some that would be a problem not worth fixing).

This is an excellent audio course, and it has no fluff in it whatsoever. You start playing the CD, and GO! I use it during my 1 hour commute each way in the car. As others have said, I sometimes need to rewind because I can't always think as fast as they want me to, but I transferred it to my mp3 player, and it's easy to go back a few seconds and try it again.

I've tried Rosetta stone, but basically it just sat there because I had to dedicate the time to sit in front of a computer and do it. For me, this is much better.

Be forewarned, however, that you need to repeat things out loud constantly, and if you are not in a private place, it's not going to work out.

In the very first lesson, they start by saying, "Listen to this conversation in Turkish." Only 30 minutes later, you listen to the exact same conversation and you understand it!

5 stars.

Good for listening to in the car
I am supposed to be going to Turkey to teach there for a year, so a few months ago I bought this program to start learning Turkish. I chose Pimsleur over Rosetta Stone for a few reasons: 1. It's much cheaper. 2. I can listen to it in the car while driving around instead of having to find time to sit in front of the computer. 3. Pimsleur teaches useful phrases whereas Rosetta Stone really does not in its whole language approach.

Overall I am pleased with Pimsleur. There are sixteen 30-minute lessons. I find I need to listen to a lesson at least three times before moving on. There is plenty of review though; each new lesson also reviews old material. They do explain some of the grammar but do not overwhelm you with it. It seems to me that some lessons introduce more new material than others. For example, I got through lesson ten rather quickly, as there was not much new, but I am now on lesson eleven which seems to introduce quite a bit of new material.

One thing I don't like about the audio program is not knowing how to read and write what I am learning to say. It is a good idea to purchase a Turkish grammar book and study that to supplement Pimsleur. Unfortunately there is no text or phrasebook included with Pimsleur, just the CDs in their own little case. I also bought "Teach Yourself Turkish" and although it is good, I just haven't devoted the time to it that I should.

As an experienced language learner (I speak French and some Spanish) and language teacher, I find Pimsleur great for an audio-lingual program. It helps teach proper pronunciation and intonation whereas simply studying a grammar book would not. However, I think it is best to purchase both Pimsleur and a book and devote time to both. The most effective language learning and teaching should involve not only listening and speaking, but also reading and writing.