There are a number of programs that use a purely audio-lingual approach with translation, like Pimsleur or the <language>pod101 series. In both cases, when I tried them as a short term tourist, people were surprised how well they could understand me for the short time I’d been learning. These were tonal languages very few tourists tended to learn, so local expectations were low and just being comprehensible was a win.
Pimsleur is very effective when just starting out a new language.
In general, I find that the most important thing to learn first with a new language is the pronunciation. Compared to learning thousands of words, it's not that difficult to learn to correctly produce the sounds of a foreign language. If you are able to pronounce things properly, native speakers will think much more highly of your abilities in the language (which can backfire when they assume you're fluent).
Yeah I've actually done one of Pimsleur's courses for Mandarin. But that's not the same thing as it's just like most courses in that they have you speak early rather than focus on listening.
I had been learning my target language mostly from books (and then watching/listening to media for osmosis) for years before I discovered Pimsleur. I can confidently say that Pimsleur increased my skills by orders of magnitude. Being forced to 1) speak out loud, 2) create sentences under time pressure and 3) absorb language rules implicitly rather than explicitly was a major game changer.
My only disappointment is that Pimsleur only created 2 levels for my target language, so after I had repeated them a number of times I had to look elsewhere for other (less effective) materials. Recently, I've been using the ChatGPT Voice Assistant to try and approximate the Pimsleur experience - it works to some degree, and it's novel that I can ask it questions during learning, but it can't really offer a curriculum in the same way.
