A bit of a long story about my Journey. It may be helpful for someone just starting out, or anyone also interested in Korean. Cliff notes: I love Pimsleur and want another program like it as a supplement.
I studied Korean off and on for a few years. Took several classes and used quite a few tutors. I also completed all 3 units of Pimsleur (they do not have 5 like Japanese, only 90 lessons total) and found it to be, by far, the most helpful learning tool for speaking/listening.
Even after all of that, I’m no where near fluent and cannot understand native Korean media at all. I can however, carry very simple conversations in Korean with a decent amount of confidence. Koreans always appreciate it and it’s a lot of fun. When I take Korean classes, my speaking is more confident than other students, unless they studied abroad in Korea.
Anyways, I decided that getting beyond the upper beginner/low intermediate level in Korean was going to be nearly impossible and I decided to start spending time studying Japanese. I learned to read Hiragana and Katakana after maybe a month of practicing. I have little to no interest in learning Kanji. It just seems too difficult. The payoff for learning it is not great enough to justify all the time needed. I get much more satisfaction from having conversations with new people. Maybe I will memorize a few hundred Kanji someday, but it’s not a priority for me now.
I started using Pimsleur for Japanese from day 1 since I knew how helpful it was for my Korean. My initial thoughts were, “wow, this is a lot easier than Korean”. I feel that speaking/listening to Japanese is much easier, although there are still some words that are difficult here and there. Japanese has more of a “peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” kind of flow to it that takes some getting used to. Whereas Korean is much more slurred and not very clearly pronounced.
I listen to 2 Japanese Pimsleur lessons about 5-6 days out of the week. I have to listen to almost every lesson twice. A few I have had to listen to 3 times if there were a lot of new words introduced. I also do the pronunciation practice and flash cards to help memorize the new words before each lesson. So, if I work really hard – I might get through 5 lessons in a week. If you already have some understanding of Japanese and know a lot of words, you’ll progress faster. I’m 50 lessons in right now and intend to complete all 5 levels…maybe by early-mid summer if I’m lucky and stick to it. I find that I focus the best if I do the lessons while driving. I will sometimes drive for almost no reason other than to complete my daily lessons. It’s too easy to get distracted at home.
The only problem is, there are still soooo many basic nouns and words that I do not know. It’s also easy to forget material once you progress several lessons beyond it, because some phrases are never introduced again. I’d really like to use another program similar to Pimsleur to help fill in some of the gaps. Using another program will help me obtain new vocab and cement in the vocab and grammar I have already heard.
I downloaded Duolingo and it seems like a complete joke. Apparently it works for some people, but I can’t imagine how it would help with speaking / listening. Same with Rosetta Stone. If you want to practice reading/writing and taking multiple choice tests while staring at your phone, then go for these. If you want to converse with native speakers, I would not bother.
Anyways, I am hoping there is another program similar to Pimsleur for Japanese. There is not for Korean, as language learning material is a bit less for that language (beyond beginner), but there are so many more Japanese learners, so I’m hoping there is another good conversational style listen and repeat program out there.
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I got not quite as far as you in pimsluer, maybe 30 or 40 lessons into it before quitting. Because of some of the same frustrations you listed. I do have a soft spot for pimsluer because it was so helpful at the beginning! But I feel like the further you get, it has diminishing returns. I’ll tell you what is working now for me.
Pimsluer has listening and speaking.
What I ended up replacing it with for listening was Podcasts (Nihongo con Teppei for Beginners, and Japanese with Shun).
For speaking I found a language exchange partner on hello talk. This is also listening practice if you have a partner who can lower their speaking to a level you can understand.
I also found my understanding of grammar severely lacking from pimsluer, so I started watching Tokini Andy’s Genki 1 grammar stream cuts.
For lacking vocabulary, I worked through the Tango N5 Anki deck, but with as audio on the front instead of the written word, because I want to focus on listening, not reading (for now).
There’s lots of other things I try here and there, but these are the main ones for now.
Let me know if you have any questions!
EDIT: for something more precisely similar to Pimsluer, you can try Tokini Andy’s shadowing videos available on his website. 🙂 (These can be downloaded as audio files to listen while you drive)