Paul Pimsleur and his method

"Probably no aspect of learning a foreign language is more important than memory. Yet no aspect of language learning has been less well examined. ..." ( Dr. Paul Pimsleur)

Dr. Pimsleur was one of the world’s foremost experts in applied linguistics. He taught French phonetics and phonemics at UCLA after obtaining his Ph.D. in French and a master’s degree in psychological statistics from Columbia University. After leaving UCLA, Pimsleur went on to faculty positions at Ohio State and SUNY at Albany, where he held dual professorships in Education and French.

His research focused on language acquisition, especially the organic learning that takes place as children learn to speak their native language.

He discovered how to select and organize the materials of the second language to fit the one way that the stream of speech of an unknown language can enter the consciousness of the adult and be processed through the language learning power of the human brain.

He applied the results of his research on the acquisition process to second-language learning and the results became the Pimsleur Language Learning Method.

"Most teachers do little in the classroom to help guarantee that students will remember. Many do, of course, review vocabulary periodically. But there is nothing in a teacher's training that helps him to do this systematically, nor do the textbooks aid him in this task. ... "

Dr. Paul Pimsleur