Maria:
“How exactly does Pimsleur help one’s accent, do you know?”
If I wanted to focus on pronunciation/accent, I’d do something else than Pimsleur, but you can’t escape the fact that Pimsleur focuses on speaking skills. They assume you’re a total beginner, and they teach sentences “backwards” to give you a feel for the prosody used in the example sentences. (An interesting approach also used by Mike Campbell/Glossika, at least in his earlier videos)
It’s not uncommon to hear people say “For pronunciation, I’d better start with Pimsleur”, “Pimsleur first, then Assimil or FSI” and so on.
You wrote:
“Are you really of the view that if you are going to make a significant amount of mistakes in a language, it’s better to make the mistakes with an accent than without one as you just might be taken as a fool otherwise?”
I don’t know, but for me, pronunciation is (usually) easier than anything else (e.g. learning all the vocabulary and grammar), so hypothetically I could learn a couple of phrases in a random language and possibly fool someone, maybe even one who has studied the language. Whenever I’m at work (the library) and have to say a foreign language book title out loud, colleagues think I’m way above the level I’m really at. “Hey, you know French, there’s a French lady here looking for a book…”
“I know that you are a musician Jeff and it’s wonderful to hear that you don’t find pronunciation difficult. I wonder, do you think that comedians who mimic others to perfection in their own language, could learn languages faster?”
Who knows, all the above being said, I DO think that a good accent helps ME for the same reasons as you state (I can focus on other aspects such as the actual “language skills”), just as a good ear helps me exploring a new melody (or even a new instrument). I don’t have to study it formally as much as a total beginner, but I still have to practice to some extent.