I'm a beginning language learner and monolingual. I've dabbled in some languages and in school I thought Pimsleur gave me an advantage over other students because I was able to duplicate a Spanish or French accent. However, I began studying Russian and I'm taking it a lot more seriously that I have other languages in the past. Pronouncing Russian is to pronouncing Spanish what the sun is to a lightbulb.
I'm not convinced Pimsleur is helping me pronounce Russian better. Actually, I think it's making my pronunciation worse. I'm glad that I taught myself the alphabet and how to pronounce each letter in the alphabet before I began using Pimsleur Russian, or else I would have no idea how badly I'm screwing up.
Today I attempted to contact a local Russian bookstore which you aren't supposed to go to without an appointment, and the call didn't go anywhere because the people there speak very poor English, so I figured I would call them back tomorrow and ask them in Russian "do you understand English?" Of course that won't make them magically understand English any better but maybe they will try harder to communicate with me if I put in some effort.
I have practiced saying "do you speak English?" many times in Pimsleur as this is one of the first things they teach you how to say. I just Googled the phrase and discovered it's spelled Вы понимаете по-английски (Vy ponimayete po-angliyski). The entire time I had been pronouncing the P sounds as if they are B sounds. I could have easily avoided that if I knew how it was spelled, but according to Pimsleur knowing how things are spelled makes your accent less "pure."
These are 'The Golden Rules of Pimsleur' according to Pimsleur:
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No paper, no notes, just listen – this keeps your accent pure.
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Complete one 30 minute lesson a day, in sequence. This ensures you make the most of the carefully structured program.
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Respond aloud, not in your head.
I'm not convinced the other golden rules are useful either. Every Pimsleur language follows a cookie-cutter formula, with no individual differences accounting for the difficulty, grammatical differences, or anything else about the language. This makes it unsurprising that I find it more necessary to repeat Pimsleur Russian lessons than I did when I heard the same lessons in Spanish. There's also absolutely no reason you can't do more than one lesson per day.
After seeing Stephen Krashen's research about how input is more important than output in the early stages of learning I'm not sure rule 3 is necessary. One of the things Stephen Krashen found in his research is that speaking out loud is not a useful method of practicing a language also.
Perhaps not everyone has the same issues understanding pronunciation from purely auditory input that I have. As a child, I spoke poorly and had to go to speech therapy to correct my pronunciation, so maybe my brain does not process sounds normally. I'm probably more naturally inclined to understand written words than spoken. But even if that is the case writing is important and there's no point artificially delaying learning that skill as Pimsleur seems to be trying to do. I suspect it's not just me though and anybody would improve their pronunciation if they knew how the word was spelled, assuming it's spelled the way it sounds and you truly understand the phonology.
I didn't even get to the worst thing about Pimsleur, the problem of it being massively overpriced. Fortunately, my library has all the lessons for free.
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