4

Learning the script for Arabic, Greek, Russian, etc. seems too expensive an investment if one wants to learn just a little of the language (say A1 in the CEFRL). Likewise grammar beyond the very basics mostly pays off for the medium-to-long run.

Personal experience: I am studying Japanese, and when I finished a book that had 600 kanji, I felt that I pretty much had to choose between leaving it at this or going all in and learning 2000+ kanji.

Does it make sense for people who have different target levels to learn the same language differently? (If so, one needs to decide upfront how much one intends to learn.)

Mathieu Bouville
  • 203
  • 1
  • 8
  • These are very different amounts of work. Cyrillic or Greek is an afternoon of work if you know the Latin script; Arabic is more challenging because learning to see the glyphs is harder when you are not used to the script, but still fundamentally a few dozen symbols. Iconographic scripts like Chinese, cuneiform, Mayan, Egyptian hieroglyphs etc is a completely different type of task because of the different character of the script. Japanese arguably adds another set of challenges because it is fundamentally an adaptation of Chinese to a language with completely different syntax and morphology. – tripleee Feb 01 '23 at 08:17

1 Answers1

2

Absolutely. If you are shooting for A1, I would recommend the first thirty lessons of any Pimsleur course. If you want to learn more, you can choose to buy 5 or more additional lessons at a time.

K Man
  • 995
  • 4
  • 12
  • If you say that going beyond A1 means doing the same as A1 and then some more, should your answer not be 'no'? – Mathieu Bouville May 05 '19 at 12:28
  • You asked if one's target level makes a difference, and my answer is yes. Rather than invest in an entire course, the benefit of Pimsleur in my experience is that you can buy as few as 5 lessons at a time until you are satisfied with the level of proficiency you attain. – K Man May 05 '19 at 13:03