It's Never Too Late to Learn a Language from Pimsleur Direct
It's Never Too Late to Learn a Language
Surveys of adult language learners have revealed that their first priority in studying a foreign language is acquiring the ability to understand and converse with native speakers. Whether you’re a traveler, language enthusiast, or student, the Pimsleur method will help you learn a new language.
How Do Adults Learn Languages?
Dr. Paul Pimsleur had a vision of a language teaching method which would elevate adult learners to specific and measurable levels of spoken language proficiency after a series of programmed lessons. Through research in language labs, he discovered that adult language learners were absolutely unable to acquire fluent speech by just breaking down a language into its component parts and studying those parts. But that was the current academic philosophy of language teaching!
Dr. Pimsleur realized that since language is communicated as speech, adult second-language learners could only obtain spoken proficiency in other languages if they were presented language as it is actually used. This began a completely new language teaching approach, the Pimsleur approach, which was developed to provide a way for adults to learn practical, spoken-language skills.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Pimsleur completed his research and development of the highly sophisticated, self-instructional, fully programmed, foreign-language teaching program. Dr. Pimsleur was neither the first nor the last linguist to observe that specific, culture-based languages exist as an essential part of human life among specific language communities. It is now commonly understood that learning a particular spoken language, with the skill to use it, occurs best through communication experiences with members of the language group. Full cultural immersion and immersion language courses are now regarded as the best ways to learn a language.
Thanks to his pioneering research at the University of California at Los Angeles, Dr. Pimsleur was the first linguist to develop and create teaching/learning materials based on this observation. He proposed that since it is the sounds of human speech which provide the raw materials of a language, each and every language learner has to acquire the organized sounds of a specific language as a result of authentic communication experiences with native speakers.
The major question that needs to be answered in connection with text-based teaching methods is: What is missing in this manner of teaching another language?
Answer: Adult learners who approach learning to speak a language with a printed text are missing the essential meaning carrying elements of a language—the sound based melody, the intonation, the music that reveals the grammar and the meaning of speech.
Written language has always influenced the way adult learners go about selecting the foreign language materials they purchase. As it turns out, Dr. Pimsleur’s research revealed that written language simply adds another level of difficulty to learning spoken communication, and in fact prevents learners from acquiring the power of speech in another language. The phrase “visual learner” has been defined as a person who would rather learn by reading than speaking. Every year many adult language learners continue to select foreign-language courses and materials based on written-language teaching methods and then blame themselves for being “poor language learners” when they fail to communicate well outside of the classroom.
What Makes Pimsleur Language Programs Different?
Each of the three levels of the Pimsleur Language Programs contains 30 audio-based lessons. Every lesson of a Pimsleur Program contains six parts, which is what ensures that you will learn to both understand and to speak the language in digestible amounts.
With Pimsleur, you will learn a new language, guaranteed. Here’s how the course works:
- Participate in introductory conversation, where you meet the two native speakers (male & female), and your tutor who will assist you through the program;
- Review previous material at specific intervals to assist your memory;
- Learn new material in organic conversation;
- Follow integrated review, which gets you to utilize and create grammatically correct new sentences with what you have learned in new situations;
- Learn with reading Lessons, included in language courses in which the language has a written alphabet, to teach you the spelling of key items for sight-reading.
Don’t delay, and see the full list of available Pimsleur language courses!
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"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."
