First off, credit where it’s due: over the past 5 months I worked through Italian 1-5. I’ve been in Italy now for three weeks and am having a much easier time integrating at work thanks to what I’ve learned with Pimsleur.
I have been almost constantly frustrated with PimsleurLanguageLearning ’s seeming dislike of working offline, and its tendency to delete lessons I’ve already downloaded. Thus if I live in an area with poor cell reception but have WiFi at home, I might go out for a walk hoping to do a Pimsleur lesson already downloaded to my phone, and two minutes into my walk find that the lesson is suddenly no longer there. When this happens, PimsleurLanguageLearning tends to display a message to the effect of ‘Functionality updated. Re-download lesson’. I’ve found this extremely inconvenient.
Finally, the lesson download functionality itself is inconvenient: say you want to download Level 1, all 30 lessons. You have to individually select each lesson. Ok, no big deal. But then you want to do something else while the messages are downloading: nope. If you switch screens within PimsleurLanguageLearning , if you try to open a different app, or if your screensaver kicks on, downloading stops, so you have to restart your download.
Obviously, despite the frustration, using PimsleurLanguageLearning is still easier than buying the CD’s and carrying around a CD player. But come on, Pimsleur. Your developers can do better.