Learn Haitian Creole with The Pimsleur Method

Comments about Haitian Creole Phase 1, Units 1-30:

We are so impressed with how much we have learned. It repeats just enough to help us learn without being boring or redundant. We are recommending it to all of our friends who want to learn Haitian Creole.

Comments about Haitian Creole Phase 1, Units 1-30:

I have used this course to prepare for our adopted daughter coming home from Haiti.
After using the 30 lessons I was able to communicate with the children in the orphanage and with Haitians speaking Creole as I traveled. I am hoping for an intermediate course so I would be able to help our daughter retain her native language. This course far exceeded my expectations.

Comments about Haitian Creole Phase 1, Units 1-30:

I purchased this program for myself and our daughters, age 10 and 12, for a school subject. We have used it for two months. We will be adopting two children from Haiti, and hope that this helps us communicate more easily with them. I find that the speed and sound of the speakers in the program are very much like what I experienced in Port au Prince.
Pros-
The sound is a quality recording, and directions are clear. Because lessons are not overly long, they are not overwhelming. I love that there are two speakers to hear two slightly differnt ways things are pronounced. And male and female voices add to that distinction. The fact that they are speaking at a normal speed is so helpful. We find the lessons humorous and not overly demanding, with time to predict a response and correct ourselves once or twice after the correct response is given.

Cons-
We cannot always agree on what the speakers are saying. Is the speaker using a 'm' or 'n' sound? Is there an additional consonant sound in that word? Although that is accurate to 'real life' listening, it does not help us reproduce an accurate sound in response. For those who learn visually, you need to wait for lesson 11 for any written words. I think that I am having more of a problem with that than my daughters- young brains have the advantage here. But I would love to have a transcript or at least a basic vocabulary list.

Comments about Haitian Creole Phase 1, Units 1-30:

Have a one hour commute to work. Study it then.
Uses a great teaching method.

Comments about Haitian Creole Phase 1, Units 1-30:

This 30-day course is an outstanding introduction to spoken Creole. Two different native speakers, a man and a woman, present all the words/phrases/sentences. Towards the end of the course, a third speaker is introduced. I found that having more than one speaker to listen to was very useful. By the end of the course, I was able, with some help from a dictionary, to prepare a simple speech which I delivered to a Haitian audience. Afterwards, I received many compliments about my accurate pronunciation, which I credit to Pimsleur.

There were only a few minor things that I would warn the prospective buyer about:

1. If you already know French, then some of the material here will be boring. For example, the numbers from one to a hundred are (with only a few minor differences in pronunciation) the same as in French.

2. In one or two places, it seems that there has been an editing mistake, because a word is used in a lesson, but the word is not explained until a later lesson. However, this happens very rarely.

3. Sometimes the two native speakers pronounce the same word a little differently. I eventually inferred that the woman would stick closely to the "official" Creole pronunication, while the man would sometimes pronounce things with a French accent (e.g., using French vowel sounds that are officially not present in Creole). In some ways this is a good thing because after all, different accents exist in real life and you have to learn to cope with them, but it can be a little confusing for the beginner.

4. It probably helps to supplement the Pimsleur course with a basic Haitian grammar and dictionary. I'd recommend Turnbull's "Creole Made Easy." This will allow you to generalize more confidently beyond the limited amount of material presented in the course itself.

5. There is at least one rather startling conversation in the course where you are invited to play the role of an American man who keeps pressuring a Haitian woman to go out with him, despite her repeated nos (and even after she says that she is married). I didn't take this too seriously and got a laugh out of it, but it did raise my eyebrows when I first encountered it.