I thought Pimsleur was pretty good, but I hit a pretty big brick wall at one point. I was saying things properly accented, and I was doing really well in the prompted exercises. But I wasn't really getting any real understanding... I was just getting very good at memorizing whole-sentence responses. And at some point, they try to mix things up and I just had no idea how to go from what I "knew" to what they wanted me to say.

So I was very, very good at my canned sentences, but had no real language ability.