The Pimsleur Method is built for our natural language learning capabilities. When we were children, we seemed to absorb language without thinking. As we age, the language learning process tends to becomes more difficult. Dr. Paul Pimsleur studied the way that language skills are developed as we grow up and applied those techniques to his unique and innovative system.

What is the secret of the Pimsleur programs that makes this happen?

The Pimsleur Method takes advantage of the way the human brain acquires language as speech. The program is built around the findings of scientific studies that showed how people acquire the ability to communicate in any language--through patterns and memorization.

It is well known from studies of the brain that human beings recognize, identify and capture patterns of speech. This is how infants learn their first language in the first six years of life.

With that task accomplished, everyone has the necessary physical and mental capacities to go on and acquire additional languages. What differentiates language acquisition from then on is merely the selection and organization of the language materials which are created to manage second-language acquisition.

It is not efficient for an adult to learn by simply being exposed to other languages because there now has to be a different motivating factor as well as a second-language program which is especially prepared to recapitulate the original process of language acquisition.

It was Dr. Paul Pimsleur who, through many years of research and development, discovered how to select and organize the materials of the second language to fit the way that the speech of an unknown language is processed through the language learning power of the adult brain.

The Pimsleur technique to acquiring language -- using repetition as a vehicle for memorization -- looks easy and basic, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Designing and recording just one Pimsleur program requires some 2,000 person-hours of three trained individuals to prepare thirty lessons. The Pimsleur approach to learning a language is based on the core principal of "graduated interval recall," which is the process of repeating vocabulary for maximum comprehension. It is based on research which determined how memory retention is affected by the frequency and longevity of new spoken language vocabulary. This is the key difference between Pimsleur programs and all other language learning materials. It is the reason why Pimsleur works and creates a significant and measurable set of communication skills, while other programs fail.

The "Building-Block-of-a-Language Theory"

Some people believe languages are composed of "building blocks." These consist of neat rows of verb conjugation tables, grammatical rules, and vocabulary lists with translations. Language builders overlooked the fact that the building blocks of language cannot be arranged and taught as spoken communication skills. Why not? The missing ingredient is the way humans string together language in the form of meaningful speech acts, which accounts for the way we both create and understand language. In other words, without the proper context, words can be meaningless.

If learning to understand and to speak a language were simply a matter of memorizing and storing words and sentences, an infinite number of sentences would have to be over-learned, which is obviously impossible, since an infinite variety of sentence patterns are used in ordinary speech. Dr. Pimsleur's research on how we learn language as adults led to the invention of the modern language lab, and the Pimsleur instructional series we offer you now.