The Pimsleur® Method teaches speaking
and understanding right from the start
The Pimsleur® Method is recognized by experts worldwide as one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn to speak another language. With Pimsleur you will learn in the same way you learned your first language as a child, acquiring the vocabulary of the new language, along with the melody, rhythm, and intonation of the new language as used in everyday conversation.
The Science of Memory
Dr. Paul Pimsleur’s research on memory was one of his most significant achievements: he discovered that if reminded of new words and information at gradually increasing intervals of time, the learners would remember the words or information for increasingly longer periods. Dr. Pimsleur documented that the new material would actually move from short-term into long-term, or permanent, memory. This is the key to how the Pimsleur Method works.
Dr. Paul Pimsleur (1928 - 1976) devoted his life to language teaching and testing and was one of the world's leading experts in applied linguistics. He was fluent in French, good in German, and was proficient in Italian, Russian, Modern Greek, and Mandarin Chinese. He received his Ph.D. in French and an MA in Psychology from Columbia, he taught French Phonetics and Linguistics at UCLA. He later became Professor of Romance Languages and Language Education, at Ohio State; Professor of Education and Romance Languages at SUNY Albany; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Heidelberg.
Today, all the Pimsleur editorial work, and language recording, is done in Concord, MA. Native speakers and scholars are recruited from the greater Boston area to participate in the painstaking process of building the lessons line by line. We maintain the dedication to quality, and strict adherence to the scientific principles of the method we use to build a course, that has made Pimsleur successful for almost 50 years, with over 60 different languages.