About Dr. Paul Pimsleur from Pimsleur Direct
About Dr. Paul Pimsleur
Dr. Pimsleur spent most of his life teaching and researching languages, and was one of the world’s leading experts in applied linguistics. After obtaining his Ph.D. in French from Columbia University, he taught French Phonetics and Phonemics, and supervised the language laboratory at UCLA. He went on to become Professor of Romance Languages and Language Education, and Director of The Listening Center at Ohio State University; Professor of Education and Romance Languages at the State University of New York at Albany; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Heidelberg.
Dr. Pimsleur was a member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). He was published widely, from books to scientific articles, which brought his revolutionary theories of language learning and teaching to the greater public.
After years of research and development, including field studies of spoken language training with adults, Dr. Pimsleur and partner Charles Heinle created a new method for self-instruction in spoken languages that is based on the way the human brain processes language as speech. The Pimsleur Method has two key principles—the Principle of Anticipation, and a scientific principle of memory that he called Graduated Interval Recall. Of all the language learning options available, only the Pimsleur courses incorporate these essential principles to provide you the most rapid and cost-effective learning method available.
Charles Heinle is an applied linguist based in Concord, MA who worked with Dr. Paul Pimsleur to develop and distribute scientific method behind the Pimsleur Language Programs. The early courses in the series were published under Heinle & Heinle Enterprises. He later sold the series to publisher Simon & Schuster in 1997, and founded Pimsleur Direct in 1998, as the first online Pimsleur retailer. He works as a consultant and runs the Center for Curriculum Development. His wife, Barbara Heinle, is the Executive Editor for the Pimsleur Language Programs to this day.
“[I] don’t believe there’s any such thing as a student who can’t learn a language. Language learning is an ability shared by all humans.”
> Dr. Paul Pimsleur
1928 – 1976
- Shopping Cart
- No items in cart yet
- Search
"There truly is something very powerful and familiar in the way Pimsleur taps into those primitive parts of your brain in the learning process, almost like hypnosis. Having done it successfully, I realize that it is a revolutionary learning protocol that was designed to bypass all the things that would get in the way of me learning and not wasting time."
