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How to Learn a Foreign Language
In this entertaining and groundbreaking book, Dr. Paul Pimsleur, creator of the renowned Pimsleur Method, the world leader in audio-based language learning, shows how anyone can learn to speak a foreign language.If learning a language in high school left you bruised, with a sense that there was no way you can learn another language, How to Learn a Foreign Language will restore your sense of hope. In simple, straightforward terms, Dr. Pimsleur will help you learn grammar (seamlessly), vocabulary, and how to practice pronunciation (and come out sounding like a native).The key is the simplicity and directness of Pimsleur’s approach to a daunting subject, breaking it down piece by piece, demystifying the process along the way. Dr. Pimsleur draws on his own language learning trials and tribulations offering practical advice for overcoming the obstacles so many of us face.Originally published in 1980, How to Learn a Foreign Language is now available on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Pimsleur’s publication of the first of his first audio courses that embodied the concepts and methods found here. It's a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the mind of this amazing pioneer of language learning.
160 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 3, 2013
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754 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 49 reviews
January 31, 2018
The best book about language learning I've read so far. Quick read. It goes straight to the point. Only a few anecdotes to illustrate the main points. But no fluff. Highly recommend it. To the beginner and the advanced learner.
"The willingness to risk dropping one's own identity may be the crucial factor that enables certain people to learn a foreign language like a native." - Paul Pimsleur
"The willingness to risk dropping one's own identity may be the crucial factor that enables certain people to learn a foreign language like a native." - Paul Pimsleur
May 11, 2016
Language learning pedagogy is interesting to me, even if I never use a particular approach, and even though the books tend to be redundant. Let's see what Pimsleur has to offer.
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. . . Very little.
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. . . Very little.
October 19, 2020
more academic than practical value - most of what is written here is already well known by language learners today, but that‘s because paul pimsleur was the one to popularize these methods. so at the time it was a revolutionary book. (also it’s veeeery american/english centric)
February 29, 2024
This was a VERY good book about interesting and useful methods for learning a foreign language. I've started the programme recently and I've got this little book as a gift to the package. I love how it explains not only the whole programme, but also the fundamentals of learning. So far this is the best book I've read on this topic (I've read a lot about languages learning).
January 21, 2024
A tiny and very enjoyable book about language learning! Fun stories about awkward travel and language scenarios in various countries mixed with the principles and reasoning behind the Pimsleur style of learning languages. Pimsleur is the only type of language learning that I’ve found to be extremely useful and immediately applicable to actual travel in foreign countries. And the learning sticks!
May 2, 2020
Got this as a free download when I signed up for Pimsleur Russian. Surprisingly interesting with insights I haven't seen elsewhere.
"The basic grammar of a language can generally be explained, with copious examples, in fewer than one hundred pages." p9 -- I would love to see the difference in thickness between a Spanish language grammar and a Japanese one. The Japanese one has to be longer.
"It takes about fifteen hundred [words] for a 'basic' command of a language and perhaps five thousand to be really fluent." p9 -- Well, at least we know what we're aiming for.
"As native speakers of English, Americans are in a favorable position to learn foreign languages, for English is related to two important language families. We enjoy a head start whether we are learning a Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan) or a Teutonic language (German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic)." p10 -- What a nice way to put it. I always thought Americans were at a distinct disadvantage at language learning because most of us don't live very close to countries that speak other languages, and because English is not as closely related to any other language, as say, Spanish and Italian.
"The average American who knows no French can guess [...] about 30 percent [of French words correctly]." p11 -- Another glass-half-full statistic.
I really want to know why Indonesian (Malay) and Swahili are Group 1 languages (easiest to learn from English). And if Indonesian is anything like Tagalog, which it must not be.
"Some educated people [in America before travel abroad became common] resembled the upper-class British gentlemen of the nineteenth century who typically 'knew' French but were disinclined to imitate the 'peculiar' sounds a Frenchman makes when speaking." p13 -- Really? But Amy March spent time in France, and I thought those British gentlemen did too. C.f. Mr. Rochester. And Jane Eyre spoke French with a good accent, despite never going abroad. France and England are right next to each other!
"If you are a language learner of average ability, and you undertake an 'easy' [Group 1] language, it will probably take you about 220 hours to get to the first level of mastery in speaking it, and double that to get to Level 2." p 15 (Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale: Level 1, Elementary proficiency, "satisfy routine travel needs and minimum courtesy requirements." Level 2, Limited working proficiency, "satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements." Level 3, Minimum professional proficiency, "sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics." Level 4, Full professional proficiency. Level 5, Native or bilingual proficiency.)
"If one's aim is to speak [a language] comfortably (say, 2+ on the FSI scale, this is likely to take the equivalent of six months of full-time study." p16
"BALANCED COMPETENCE. It is entirely possible, by taking a foreign language course sequence in a college 'extension' division or at the YMCA, to become able to read with ease, understand the gist of what you hear, and write a satisfactory business or personal letter. At the rate of six hours per week-three of class and three of homework-a person of average aptitude can acquire a fair mastery in two years' time. He should not expect, however, to be completely fluent in speaking, nor to understand everything he hears." p17 -- After eight years of studying Spanish in school, I feel like I'm here with Spanish (worse on listening) ... rather discouraging to hear that I should have been able to get to this point in two years :-P.
"EDUCATED MASTERY. If your objective is to master the language fully in speech and writing [...] A good plan would be to study the language for three to six months at home, and then go to the foreign country for at least a year, during which time you must speak only the foreign language. At the end of this time, you would understand most people and even television and movies, read almost any written matter without a dictionary, and perhaps write with a modicum of style." p18 --Still probably worse for Japanese than a Romance language though.
I love the section on which language to select - I wish I had known this when I was choosing a language in middle school. (Though actually, I would have still picked Spanish, but I might have put more effort toward German instead of French.)
"French [...] Verdict: if you are reasonably good at telling dialect jokes and imitating foreign accents, then French pronunciation should hold no terror for you. But if you have a poor ear, or get mixed up easily in spelling, or cannot tolerate 'illogical' grammar, then maybe you had better pick a language farther down the list." p20
"German: It is easy to 'get along in German on the damn-the-grammar basis, for the Germans are nice about trying to understand what you say, no matter how you massacre their language. [...] Verdict: if you don't mind learning grammar as long as it is orderly, then German may be for you. The effort of learning it is amply rewarded by the countries you can visit (Switzerland and Austria as well as Germany) and the many books, plays, and operas you can enjoy when you know it." p21
"The common teaching method that obliges students to learn one complete verb conjugation at a time, even though they do not have the vocabulary and grammar to put that verb to work, is a monstrosity. [...] Moreover, it is a perfect prescription for tedium." p32 -- He maintains the language points should come up "organically". I don't even want to think about the hours I've spent on verb conjugation tables.
On how to recognize a good teacher - many of these points remind me of Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College
- More "student-talk" than "teacher-talk" (almost never happened in my classes)
- English vs. foreign language: "A good teacher teaches his class, early in the course, to understand all the repetitive pieces of classroom business: 'open your books,''go to the board,' 'listen carefully,' 'repeat after me,' 'say it once more.' All that and more can be done in the foreign language soon after the course begins. As a general rule, no more than fie minutes of a class ought to be spent talking English-just enough to get a tough grammar point across or give an important assignment." p35 -- I don't think this happened in any of my classes until I got into higher level Spanish.
"A foreign accent is merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another, and one can infer a good deal about French, for example, from the way a Frenchman talks English." p38
"A person studying a language has got to trust the spoken word, insubstantial and evanescent though it is." p39 -- After a story about a businessman who wrote down phrases from his Greek lesson and ended up with the Greek "in his pocket, but not in his mind."
"The teacher's function is to set day-to-day goals, encouraging his students to concentrate, not on the distant objective of total fluency, but on taking one more step. [...] It is not so much his knowledge that counts; one can find that in a book or record. His skill in fashioning a long chain of learning into viable, satisfying links is what keeps his students moving along when they might otherwise be tempted to quit." p 41
"Practice whole phrases, not words. [...] If you stop to take a breath in the middle of a foreign phrase that should be said in a single burst, you are not saying it correctly; you even risk being incomprehensible. Most people think of language as a collection of single words, perhaps because dictionaries are arranged in one-word entries. But what is convenient in a dictionary actually does violence to the reality of language." p 51 -- Like what I learned in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, language is made of "utterances".
"Difficult sounds in each language are few in number [...] Speech problems are not endless, as they often seem, but actually quite few in number, and definitely fixable." p 53
"Pierre Delattre, commenting on an experiment he performed where one class learned French grammar by the rules while another learned it by listening to recordings, reported that 'students who worked with recordings acquired grammatical habits with unexpected ease. They surmounted problems that looked very intricate in the light of linguistic analysis.'" p57
"The commonest violation of this principle among language teachers is their nagging insistence on repetition. They make students parrot sentences in the foreign language, in the naive expectation that the correct forms will thereby 'sink in'. But [...] the known facts about the workings of the brain 'plainly imply that repetition is the first law, not of learning, but of habituation, whose influence upon learning is a negative rather than a positive one.'"p61 "The real secret of learning is gradually to mix together diverse points of grammar-to mix 'to go' together with other verbs in the past tense, then with other verbs in other tenses-so that 'to go' is elicited unexpectedly."p62
"A dozen or so common verbs (be, do, go, etc.) account for a very high percentage of all verb occurrences. These few are almost all 'irregular,' for, being on people's tongues more often, they have evolved and changed form faster. The dozen key verbal concepts are the following: to be, to have, to be able, to come, to go, to know, to take, to want, to say or tell, to do or make, to see, to give." p64 -- Why does no teacher acknowledge this?
"Learn verbs horizontally" - ie, all the "I" forms, all the "you" forms, instead of every conjugation for one verb, then every conjugation for the next verb.
"Learn the hardest thing first." - Two pronouns, or two adverbs, "furnish added practice at little added cost." "Good sense dictates that one should attack the hardest features at the beginning of each lesson, when one is most receptive. The simpler points then tend to fall into place by themselves, and the remainder of the lesson is like coasting downhill." p68 - Also very true, why did I never see this before?
On gender - people think it's an embarrassing mistake because in English, the only thing one can mix up gender of is people, and calling a man "she" is extremely awkward and embarrassing. Good to know that "A daily audience-participation show on French radio is built around a standard type of stickler, which is to telephone a contestant at home and read him a list of eight French words. He is scored on how many words he can give the correct gender." p70 -- Good to know it's a challenge ... but people actually listen to such a show?
"It has been shown that five repetitions randomly spaced have more effect on long-term retention than several times that many done by rote." p74 - And yet all children still sing the ABCs and counts in order.
"I learned [...] that all educated people in Germany have essentially the same vocabulary. The German language builds its words out of a relatively small stock of basic components. Every German knows them all by the time he finishes high school; hence every German high school graduate has essentially identical vocabulary." p81 -- I guess the SAT Verbal section wouldn't work there then.
"The vocabulary 'hump' is reached earlier in German than in most other languages. The thousand most frequent German words actually comprise about 80 percent of most reading matter; the second thousand words raise this figure to 90 percent." (As opposed to 75% and ~80% in other languages) "What makes German relatively easy is that after one has made the initial effor of learning the most frequent words, new words become so highly 'guessable' that they are usually obvious without consulting a dictionary. The 'hump' in German is passed when one knows fifteen hundred to two thousand words; and many of those, we must remember, look at least vaguely familiar because of their similarity to English words." p 81 -- I'm so studying German. Just as soon as I get past this Russian phase.
"A person can read French with ease as soon as he has a vocabulary of about three thousand words and can guess the meaning of unfamiliar words with 70 percent accuracy. [...] However, that five thousand figure includes a heavy proportion of words that are identical to English words or similar enough that they are recognizable and easily learned. As in German, the 'hard-core' problem in learning to read French probably comes down to learning about fifteen hundred to two thousand non-cognate words." p 82
"Letting yourself play the role of a foreigner will improve your performance [in speaking the language]. [...] The willingness to risk dropping one's own identity may be the crucial factor that enables certain people to learn a foreign language like a native." p89
"The basic grammar of a language can generally be explained, with copious examples, in fewer than one hundred pages." p9 -- I would love to see the difference in thickness between a Spanish language grammar and a Japanese one. The Japanese one has to be longer.
"It takes about fifteen hundred [words] for a 'basic' command of a language and perhaps five thousand to be really fluent." p9 -- Well, at least we know what we're aiming for.
"As native speakers of English, Americans are in a favorable position to learn foreign languages, for English is related to two important language families. We enjoy a head start whether we are learning a Romance language (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan) or a Teutonic language (German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic)." p10 -- What a nice way to put it. I always thought Americans were at a distinct disadvantage at language learning because most of us don't live very close to countries that speak other languages, and because English is not as closely related to any other language, as say, Spanish and Italian.
"The average American who knows no French can guess [...] about 30 percent [of French words correctly]." p11 -- Another glass-half-full statistic.
I really want to know why Indonesian (Malay) and Swahili are Group 1 languages (easiest to learn from English). And if Indonesian is anything like Tagalog, which it must not be.
"Some educated people [in America before travel abroad became common] resembled the upper-class British gentlemen of the nineteenth century who typically 'knew' French but were disinclined to imitate the 'peculiar' sounds a Frenchman makes when speaking." p13 -- Really? But Amy March spent time in France, and I thought those British gentlemen did too. C.f. Mr. Rochester. And Jane Eyre spoke French with a good accent, despite never going abroad. France and England are right next to each other!
"If you are a language learner of average ability, and you undertake an 'easy' [Group 1] language, it will probably take you about 220 hours to get to the first level of mastery in speaking it, and double that to get to Level 2." p 15 (Foreign Service Institute (FSI) scale: Level 1, Elementary proficiency, "satisfy routine travel needs and minimum courtesy requirements." Level 2, Limited working proficiency, "satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements." Level 3, Minimum professional proficiency, "sufficient structural accuracy and vocabulary to participate effectively in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social, and professional topics." Level 4, Full professional proficiency. Level 5, Native or bilingual proficiency.)
"If one's aim is to speak [a language] comfortably (say, 2+ on the FSI scale, this is likely to take the equivalent of six months of full-time study." p16
"BALANCED COMPETENCE. It is entirely possible, by taking a foreign language course sequence in a college 'extension' division or at the YMCA, to become able to read with ease, understand the gist of what you hear, and write a satisfactory business or personal letter. At the rate of six hours per week-three of class and three of homework-a person of average aptitude can acquire a fair mastery in two years' time. He should not expect, however, to be completely fluent in speaking, nor to understand everything he hears." p17 -- After eight years of studying Spanish in school, I feel like I'm here with Spanish (worse on listening) ... rather discouraging to hear that I should have been able to get to this point in two years :-P.
"EDUCATED MASTERY. If your objective is to master the language fully in speech and writing [...] A good plan would be to study the language for three to six months at home, and then go to the foreign country for at least a year, during which time you must speak only the foreign language. At the end of this time, you would understand most people and even television and movies, read almost any written matter without a dictionary, and perhaps write with a modicum of style." p18 --Still probably worse for Japanese than a Romance language though.
I love the section on which language to select - I wish I had known this when I was choosing a language in middle school. (Though actually, I would have still picked Spanish, but I might have put more effort toward German instead of French.)
"French [...] Verdict: if you are reasonably good at telling dialect jokes and imitating foreign accents, then French pronunciation should hold no terror for you. But if you have a poor ear, or get mixed up easily in spelling, or cannot tolerate 'illogical' grammar, then maybe you had better pick a language farther down the list." p20
"German: It is easy to 'get along in German on the damn-the-grammar basis, for the Germans are nice about trying to understand what you say, no matter how you massacre their language. [...] Verdict: if you don't mind learning grammar as long as it is orderly, then German may be for you. The effort of learning it is amply rewarded by the countries you can visit (Switzerland and Austria as well as Germany) and the many books, plays, and operas you can enjoy when you know it." p21
"The common teaching method that obliges students to learn one complete verb conjugation at a time, even though they do not have the vocabulary and grammar to put that verb to work, is a monstrosity. [...] Moreover, it is a perfect prescription for tedium." p32 -- He maintains the language points should come up "organically". I don't even want to think about the hours I've spent on verb conjugation tables.
On how to recognize a good teacher - many of these points remind me of Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College
- More "student-talk" than "teacher-talk" (almost never happened in my classes)
- English vs. foreign language: "A good teacher teaches his class, early in the course, to understand all the repetitive pieces of classroom business: 'open your books,''go to the board,' 'listen carefully,' 'repeat after me,' 'say it once more.' All that and more can be done in the foreign language soon after the course begins. As a general rule, no more than fie minutes of a class ought to be spent talking English-just enough to get a tough grammar point across or give an important assignment." p35 -- I don't think this happened in any of my classes until I got into higher level Spanish.
"A foreign accent is merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another, and one can infer a good deal about French, for example, from the way a Frenchman talks English." p38
"A person studying a language has got to trust the spoken word, insubstantial and evanescent though it is." p39 -- After a story about a businessman who wrote down phrases from his Greek lesson and ended up with the Greek "in his pocket, but not in his mind."
"The teacher's function is to set day-to-day goals, encouraging his students to concentrate, not on the distant objective of total fluency, but on taking one more step. [...] It is not so much his knowledge that counts; one can find that in a book or record. His skill in fashioning a long chain of learning into viable, satisfying links is what keeps his students moving along when they might otherwise be tempted to quit." p 41
"Practice whole phrases, not words. [...] If you stop to take a breath in the middle of a foreign phrase that should be said in a single burst, you are not saying it correctly; you even risk being incomprehensible. Most people think of language as a collection of single words, perhaps because dictionaries are arranged in one-word entries. But what is convenient in a dictionary actually does violence to the reality of language." p 51 -- Like what I learned in Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, language is made of "utterances".
"Difficult sounds in each language are few in number [...] Speech problems are not endless, as they often seem, but actually quite few in number, and definitely fixable." p 53
"Pierre Delattre, commenting on an experiment he performed where one class learned French grammar by the rules while another learned it by listening to recordings, reported that 'students who worked with recordings acquired grammatical habits with unexpected ease. They surmounted problems that looked very intricate in the light of linguistic analysis.'" p57
"The commonest violation of this principle among language teachers is their nagging insistence on repetition. They make students parrot sentences in the foreign language, in the naive expectation that the correct forms will thereby 'sink in'. But [...] the known facts about the workings of the brain 'plainly imply that repetition is the first law, not of learning, but of habituation, whose influence upon learning is a negative rather than a positive one.'"p61 "The real secret of learning is gradually to mix together diverse points of grammar-to mix 'to go' together with other verbs in the past tense, then with other verbs in other tenses-so that 'to go' is elicited unexpectedly."p62
"A dozen or so common verbs (be, do, go, etc.) account for a very high percentage of all verb occurrences. These few are almost all 'irregular,' for, being on people's tongues more often, they have evolved and changed form faster. The dozen key verbal concepts are the following: to be, to have, to be able, to come, to go, to know, to take, to want, to say or tell, to do or make, to see, to give." p64 -- Why does no teacher acknowledge this?
"Learn verbs horizontally" - ie, all the "I" forms, all the "you" forms, instead of every conjugation for one verb, then every conjugation for the next verb.
"Learn the hardest thing first." - Two pronouns, or two adverbs, "furnish added practice at little added cost." "Good sense dictates that one should attack the hardest features at the beginning of each lesson, when one is most receptive. The simpler points then tend to fall into place by themselves, and the remainder of the lesson is like coasting downhill." p68 - Also very true, why did I never see this before?
On gender - people think it's an embarrassing mistake because in English, the only thing one can mix up gender of is people, and calling a man "she" is extremely awkward and embarrassing. Good to know that "A daily audience-participation show on French radio is built around a standard type of stickler, which is to telephone a contestant at home and read him a list of eight French words. He is scored on how many words he can give the correct gender." p70 -- Good to know it's a challenge ... but people actually listen to such a show?
"It has been shown that five repetitions randomly spaced have more effect on long-term retention than several times that many done by rote." p74 - And yet all children still sing the ABCs and counts in order.
"I learned [...] that all educated people in Germany have essentially the same vocabulary. The German language builds its words out of a relatively small stock of basic components. Every German knows them all by the time he finishes high school; hence every German high school graduate has essentially identical vocabulary." p81 -- I guess the SAT Verbal section wouldn't work there then.
"The vocabulary 'hump' is reached earlier in German than in most other languages. The thousand most frequent German words actually comprise about 80 percent of most reading matter; the second thousand words raise this figure to 90 percent." (As opposed to 75% and ~80% in other languages) "What makes German relatively easy is that after one has made the initial effor of learning the most frequent words, new words become so highly 'guessable' that they are usually obvious without consulting a dictionary. The 'hump' in German is passed when one knows fifteen hundred to two thousand words; and many of those, we must remember, look at least vaguely familiar because of their similarity to English words." p 81 -- I'm so studying German. Just as soon as I get past this Russian phase.
"A person can read French with ease as soon as he has a vocabulary of about three thousand words and can guess the meaning of unfamiliar words with 70 percent accuracy. [...] However, that five thousand figure includes a heavy proportion of words that are identical to English words or similar enough that they are recognizable and easily learned. As in German, the 'hard-core' problem in learning to read French probably comes down to learning about fifteen hundred to two thousand non-cognate words." p 82
"Letting yourself play the role of a foreigner will improve your performance [in speaking the language]. [...] The willingness to risk dropping one's own identity may be the crucial factor that enables certain people to learn a foreign language like a native." p89
May 29, 2023
One should always strive to achieve a native-like accent; this is part of the ambition to learn the language well. But we must concede that a person can thrive in a foreign country, converse freely, and even conduct business though his accent may be far from perfect.
The knowledge that there is only so much grammar, and no more, can help rekindle a person’s courage when a tough point of grammar makes the language seem impossible to master.
Like Burton, many people work better in short, concentrated spurts. If so, then that is the way they should study. Three spurts of twenty minutes each may add up to more than an hour in results achieved.
certain vocabulary words or certain points of grammar do not mean anything to you right now, you can let them go, knowing you can pick them up at a later time.
Let the “living purpose” for which you undertook the language be your guide in how to learn it.
I believe it is fair to ask, at the end of a language lesson, be it the first or the fiftieth, “What did I learn today that would help me if I left immediately for the foreign country?”
One way to judge a teacher is to calculate the ratio of teacher-talk to student-talk. With a good teacher, it will be heavily in favor of student-talk.
. As a general rule, no more than five minutes of a class ought to be spent talking English—just enough to get a tough grammar point across or give an important assignment. The rest can and should be spent in the foreign language.
Experience shows that there is not a single point of grammar in an elementary course that cannot be explained in four minutes or less. If a teacher goes on longer than that, he is stealing time from the class’s real need: practice, practice, practice.
No private discussions during class time, please.
A good teacher directs all questions to the entire class, and does not call on anyone until all have had a moment to think of an answer. Then, if the first student called on does not have the answer ready, the teacher moves on quickly to someone else.
Teachers are paid professionals. They should be judged, at least in part, the cost-accounting way: by output per unit of time. A student is entitled to ask whether the hours he spends in the language class are giving him a fair return in usable language skills.
Better still, imitate the way the foreign person speaks English. A foreign accent is merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another, and one can infer a good deal about French, for example, from the way a Frenchman talks English.
It appears that the basic error in language teaching methods is one of order. We put the cart before the horse. We use the eye before we use the ear; we take up writing before we take up speaking; we teach reading before we teach pronouncing; we study the rules before we study the examples; we concentrate on quantity before we concentrate on quality. In all this, our error is that we go against the facts of language. A language is first of all “speech”—a system of sounds transmitted directly from mouth to ear and produced by automatic reactions of the speech organs. The functioning of those automatic reactions depends on the linguistic habits of the speaker, and it is the acquisition of those habits that must come first.
In learning a language, the long-range purpose—to master the foreign tongue—often appears unattainable. One must have short-range goals as well.
The teacher’s function is to set day-to-day goals, encouraging his students to concentrate, not on the distant objective of total fluency, but on taking one more step. A good teacher will break the language down into manageable tasks, help you to accomplish them, and reward you when you do.
The correct learning sequence is this: listen carefully to get the sound firmly planted in your ear; then gradually imitate it with your tongue. Do not use your eye till you have the pronunciation down pat.
Work with a Model
Pronunciation deteriorates easily, so the longer you go without checking yours against a native, the more likely you are to revert to English speech habits. Check your pronunciation often until good speech habits are firmly established in the new language.
Always practice sounds in a specific setting. The French r, reputedly a very difficult sound, is easier to pronounce in the word Paris than in rouge, and needs to be practiced in both. The Spanish r, too, is harder to pronounce at the beginning of a word (rojo, “red”) than in the middle (duro, “hard”), and in fact is slightly different in each of the following words, depending on the sounds that surround it: rio, por, para, padre, Francisco, tren.
Practice Whole Phrases, Not Words
The important thing in mastering a difficult sound is to listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality. Good pronunciation, as I have tried to explain, begins not in the mouth but in the ear.
Invite a Friend to Make Fun of You
When you have trouble hearing the difference between what you are saying and what you ought to say, ask an acquaintance who is a native (or who sounds like one) to imitate your pronunciation followed by the right one. Wrong-right, wrong-right, just like this: roo/rue . . . roo/rue . . . over and over. Just listen and try to seize where the difference lies. Don’t try saying it yourself prematurely; you risk becoming discouraged easily at this point. Keep listening until you feel the difference penetrating you, and the urge to say it yourself becomes strong.
A person’s minimal goals should be: (1) to learn all the sounds of the foreign language so as not to risk saying one word for another, and (2) to speak the language with an inoffensive accent. Beyond that, the desire to possess a perfect accent must be weighed against the amount of practice and attention needed to obtain it.
. If you insist on correct grammar from the outset, you may well give up out of sheer frustration.
The rather encouraging answer is that all the grammar a person ever needs to know is covered in a typical year-long college course (two years in high school). After that, further courses merely repeat the same grammar in more complex sentences—sentences that become more literary as you advance, that is, further and further from normal speech.
Grammar through the Ear
Pierre Delattre, commenting on an experiment he performed where one class learned French grammar by the rules while another learned it by listening to recordings, reported that “students who worked with recordings acquired grammatical habits with unexpected ease. They surmounted problems that looked very intricate in the light of linguistic analysis.
The students in the “experimental” group came to the language laboratory twice. Working with tape recordings, they first repeated about thirty French sentences containing pronouns. Then they did a variety of “pattern drills.” The tape would say, for example, Je reçois le paquet (I receive the package), and during a pause the student was to respond with Je le reçois (I receive it).
The practice sentences gradually grew more complex until the students could respond to a cue like Je donne le cadeau à Henri (I give the present to Henry) by saying, Je le lui donne (I give it to him). During the two thirty-minute sessions, they heard and said over a hundred French sentences containing pronouns in various configurations.
The outcome was that, when both groups were tested on their ability to say and write French sentences containing pronouns, the students who had spent only sixty minutes practicing in the lab did slightly better than those who had spent more than a week on it in class.
The reason for their advantage is simple. They had heard and said a large number of correct French sentences, and their ears had become so attuned that only a correct sentence “sounded right” to them. The conventional group, having to rely on the rules, was obliged to figure out each sentence with painstaking care. Not only did this take them longer, but they were much more apt to make trivial errors by slightly misapplying the rules, since they had no “sense of correctness” to fall back on.
The best arrangement of material for learning, one that many good teachers use instinctively, is: (1) pose a challenge, (2) let the students try to respond, and (3) provide the correct response.
It is novelty that sparks the mind to attention; we perk up our ears at the unexpected.
Obviously, the promotion of novelty rather than of repetition should become the primary law of learning.
To “program” your learning of grammar most efficiently, prepare your own exercises using the three-step formula. First, devise a series of cues in the foreign language that will elicit sentences containing the desired grammar. Next, record them on your cassette or tape recorder, leaving just enough pause after each cue so that, if you knew the grammar point thoroughly, you could give the answer in the time allowed. Then record the correct response after each pause.
As you progress, your drills will grow more complex, but that does not mean merely using longer sentences. The real secret of learning is gradually to mix together diverse points of grammar—to mix “to go” together with other verbs in the past tense, then with other verbs in other tenses—so that “to go” is elicited unexpectedly. The key feature is to have it pop up unexpectedly, thus providing the novelty that accelerates learning.
One has not really mastered the grammar point until one can use it aloud at something near conversational speed.
The dozen key verbal concepts are the following:
to be
to have
to be able
to come
to go
to know
to take
to want
to say or tell
to do or make
to see
to give
Make it one of your earliest jobs to find out how the language you are studying expresses these concepts. (Some of them, like “to be” in Spanish and “to know” in French, may be expressed by more than one verb.) Learn to recognize them in the present and past tenses.
LEARN VERBS HORIZONTALLY.
Reading across, line by line, we discover that each of the six “persons” has a characteristic ending, regardless of which “conjugation” the verb belongs to. The plural endings are identical in all conjugations (-ons, -ez, -ent), and so is the second person singular ending (-s). The -iss- inserted in the plural of -ir verbs is regular and easy to master. The only learning problems will be the first and third person singular endings, and even here the range of possibilities is very limited: the first person ends either in -e or in -s, and the third person in -e, -t, or in nothing.1
Learn the hardest thing first and the rest will then seem easy.
The simple-to-complex procedure is psychologically backward; one expends fresh energy on simple things and is fatigued by the time the complex ones arrive. The net result is often a sense of discouragement.
I believe good sense dictates that one should attack the hardest features at the beginning of each lesson, when one is most receptive. The simpler points then tend to fall into place by themselves, and the remainder of the lesson is like coasting downhill.
in practice it turns out that the sentence with several pronouns (“She gave it to him”) is as easy to learn as a sentence with only one pronoun. Perhaps easier.
Similarly, a sentence with two adverbs (“The horse ran exceptionally fast”) is hardly more difficult than a sentence with only one (“The horse ran fast”),
The same principle may help you. Try to inject a note of urgency into your attitude as you learn vocabulary. Even do it artificially. Later on, the emotional attitude you had at the time of learning may help you to remember.
What one hopes to accomplish in learning vocabulary is to strengthen the bond between stimulus and response—between some life situation that calls for a particular utterance and the utterance itself.
It is better to write a whole phrase on the flash cards than a single word, for a phrase is not much harder to learn and is very much more useful.
Phrases are more serviceable than single words because they are ready to go to work without further adaptation. If you are studying English, and you learn the phrase “Give me a menu, please,” you can use it as is when you go to a restaurant. You also may be able to combine parts of it with pieces of other phrases already learned. By substituting for the word “menu,” for instance, you can produce sentences like: “Give me a screwdriver, please,” or “Give me a timetable, please.” Or you can insert other phrases into the same slot, producing new utterances like: “Give me a bowl of soup, please,” or “Give me that pair of shoes, please.”
Write on your flash cards a phrase or sentence that shows a typical usage.
English Side
French Side
I never go out at night.
Je ne sors jamais la nuit.
Good night.
Bonne nuit.
I slept badly last night.
J’ai mal dormi cette nuit.
Mix those cards in with the others so they’ll come up in random order. Once you can deliver the French sentence in response to these three different stimuli, you “know” la nuit in a much richer sense than if you could say it only in response to the English word “night.”
A typical list of foreign language vocabulary to be learned looks like this:
night—la nuit
day—le jour
happy—heureux
question—la question
answer—la réponse
. . . and so on. However, this is not the way your flash cards should look, for at least two good reasons. You do not want to pair up French words with English words lest you be able to recall la nuit only when thinking “night.” Rather, you want la nuit to occur to you when you are “thinking in French,” without having to go through English to remember it. Secondly, you want to practice the word nuit in the very situations in which you might have to use it.
It was the teacher’s job to keep them from forgetting, not just warn them to remember.
I maintain that a student’s memory is largely the teacher’s responsibility.
(1) Learn the commonest words first because they will accelerate your guessing power; (2) begin reading as soon as you have learned five hundred to a thousand common words; (3) pick reading material that interests you strongly and continue to learn words following the natural frequencies.
The informants stopped the lesson, and for the first time said, “There. That was very, very good. That was authentic.”
Jerry had done something brave. He had cast off his own natural behavior—his identity—and taken on that of a Filipino. In doing so, he had risked sounding and looking ridiculous.
That is the kind of risk you should be prepared to take if your objective is to learn a language really well. Letting yourself play the role of a foreigner will improve your performance. It may help you to hurdle pronunciation problems that had been getting you down before. It also will enliven the class for you. During moments of boredom, you may gradually imagine your new, foreign self in more detail: your job, your family, your boyfriend or girlfriend.
One should arm oneself, too, with an attitude—that one will remain in command of the situation and not succumb to embarrassment despite the psychological disadvantage of being a stuttering foreigner.
When a strange reaction follows something you have said, always track down the reason. Never let a chance go by to correct a wrong habit; these mistakes are finite in number and it is possible to correct them all.
The knowledge that there is only so much grammar, and no more, can help rekindle a person’s courage when a tough point of grammar makes the language seem impossible to master.
Like Burton, many people work better in short, concentrated spurts. If so, then that is the way they should study. Three spurts of twenty minutes each may add up to more than an hour in results achieved.
certain vocabulary words or certain points of grammar do not mean anything to you right now, you can let them go, knowing you can pick them up at a later time.
Let the “living purpose” for which you undertook the language be your guide in how to learn it.
I believe it is fair to ask, at the end of a language lesson, be it the first or the fiftieth, “What did I learn today that would help me if I left immediately for the foreign country?”
One way to judge a teacher is to calculate the ratio of teacher-talk to student-talk. With a good teacher, it will be heavily in favor of student-talk.
. As a general rule, no more than five minutes of a class ought to be spent talking English—just enough to get a tough grammar point across or give an important assignment. The rest can and should be spent in the foreign language.
Experience shows that there is not a single point of grammar in an elementary course that cannot be explained in four minutes or less. If a teacher goes on longer than that, he is stealing time from the class’s real need: practice, practice, practice.
No private discussions during class time, please.
A good teacher directs all questions to the entire class, and does not call on anyone until all have had a moment to think of an answer. Then, if the first student called on does not have the answer ready, the teacher moves on quickly to someone else.
Teachers are paid professionals. They should be judged, at least in part, the cost-accounting way: by output per unit of time. A student is entitled to ask whether the hours he spends in the language class are giving him a fair return in usable language skills.
Better still, imitate the way the foreign person speaks English. A foreign accent is merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another, and one can infer a good deal about French, for example, from the way a Frenchman talks English.
It appears that the basic error in language teaching methods is one of order. We put the cart before the horse. We use the eye before we use the ear; we take up writing before we take up speaking; we teach reading before we teach pronouncing; we study the rules before we study the examples; we concentrate on quantity before we concentrate on quality. In all this, our error is that we go against the facts of language. A language is first of all “speech”—a system of sounds transmitted directly from mouth to ear and produced by automatic reactions of the speech organs. The functioning of those automatic reactions depends on the linguistic habits of the speaker, and it is the acquisition of those habits that must come first.
In learning a language, the long-range purpose—to master the foreign tongue—often appears unattainable. One must have short-range goals as well.
The teacher’s function is to set day-to-day goals, encouraging his students to concentrate, not on the distant objective of total fluency, but on taking one more step. A good teacher will break the language down into manageable tasks, help you to accomplish them, and reward you when you do.
The correct learning sequence is this: listen carefully to get the sound firmly planted in your ear; then gradually imitate it with your tongue. Do not use your eye till you have the pronunciation down pat.
Work with a Model
Pronunciation deteriorates easily, so the longer you go without checking yours against a native, the more likely you are to revert to English speech habits. Check your pronunciation often until good speech habits are firmly established in the new language.
Always practice sounds in a specific setting. The French r, reputedly a very difficult sound, is easier to pronounce in the word Paris than in rouge, and needs to be practiced in both. The Spanish r, too, is harder to pronounce at the beginning of a word (rojo, “red”) than in the middle (duro, “hard”), and in fact is slightly different in each of the following words, depending on the sounds that surround it: rio, por, para, padre, Francisco, tren.
Practice Whole Phrases, Not Words
The important thing in mastering a difficult sound is to listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality. Good pronunciation, as I have tried to explain, begins not in the mouth but in the ear.
Invite a Friend to Make Fun of You
When you have trouble hearing the difference between what you are saying and what you ought to say, ask an acquaintance who is a native (or who sounds like one) to imitate your pronunciation followed by the right one. Wrong-right, wrong-right, just like this: roo/rue . . . roo/rue . . . over and over. Just listen and try to seize where the difference lies. Don’t try saying it yourself prematurely; you risk becoming discouraged easily at this point. Keep listening until you feel the difference penetrating you, and the urge to say it yourself becomes strong.
A person’s minimal goals should be: (1) to learn all the sounds of the foreign language so as not to risk saying one word for another, and (2) to speak the language with an inoffensive accent. Beyond that, the desire to possess a perfect accent must be weighed against the amount of practice and attention needed to obtain it.
. If you insist on correct grammar from the outset, you may well give up out of sheer frustration.
The rather encouraging answer is that all the grammar a person ever needs to know is covered in a typical year-long college course (two years in high school). After that, further courses merely repeat the same grammar in more complex sentences—sentences that become more literary as you advance, that is, further and further from normal speech.
Grammar through the Ear
Pierre Delattre, commenting on an experiment he performed where one class learned French grammar by the rules while another learned it by listening to recordings, reported that “students who worked with recordings acquired grammatical habits with unexpected ease. They surmounted problems that looked very intricate in the light of linguistic analysis.
The students in the “experimental” group came to the language laboratory twice. Working with tape recordings, they first repeated about thirty French sentences containing pronouns. Then they did a variety of “pattern drills.” The tape would say, for example, Je reçois le paquet (I receive the package), and during a pause the student was to respond with Je le reçois (I receive it).
The practice sentences gradually grew more complex until the students could respond to a cue like Je donne le cadeau à Henri (I give the present to Henry) by saying, Je le lui donne (I give it to him). During the two thirty-minute sessions, they heard and said over a hundred French sentences containing pronouns in various configurations.
The outcome was that, when both groups were tested on their ability to say and write French sentences containing pronouns, the students who had spent only sixty minutes practicing in the lab did slightly better than those who had spent more than a week on it in class.
The reason for their advantage is simple. They had heard and said a large number of correct French sentences, and their ears had become so attuned that only a correct sentence “sounded right” to them. The conventional group, having to rely on the rules, was obliged to figure out each sentence with painstaking care. Not only did this take them longer, but they were much more apt to make trivial errors by slightly misapplying the rules, since they had no “sense of correctness” to fall back on.
The best arrangement of material for learning, one that many good teachers use instinctively, is: (1) pose a challenge, (2) let the students try to respond, and (3) provide the correct response.
It is novelty that sparks the mind to attention; we perk up our ears at the unexpected.
Obviously, the promotion of novelty rather than of repetition should become the primary law of learning.
To “program” your learning of grammar most efficiently, prepare your own exercises using the three-step formula. First, devise a series of cues in the foreign language that will elicit sentences containing the desired grammar. Next, record them on your cassette or tape recorder, leaving just enough pause after each cue so that, if you knew the grammar point thoroughly, you could give the answer in the time allowed. Then record the correct response after each pause.
As you progress, your drills will grow more complex, but that does not mean merely using longer sentences. The real secret of learning is gradually to mix together diverse points of grammar—to mix “to go” together with other verbs in the past tense, then with other verbs in other tenses—so that “to go” is elicited unexpectedly. The key feature is to have it pop up unexpectedly, thus providing the novelty that accelerates learning.
One has not really mastered the grammar point until one can use it aloud at something near conversational speed.
The dozen key verbal concepts are the following:
to be
to have
to be able
to come
to go
to know
to take
to want
to say or tell
to do or make
to see
to give
Make it one of your earliest jobs to find out how the language you are studying expresses these concepts. (Some of them, like “to be” in Spanish and “to know” in French, may be expressed by more than one verb.) Learn to recognize them in the present and past tenses.
LEARN VERBS HORIZONTALLY.
Reading across, line by line, we discover that each of the six “persons” has a characteristic ending, regardless of which “conjugation” the verb belongs to. The plural endings are identical in all conjugations (-ons, -ez, -ent), and so is the second person singular ending (-s). The -iss- inserted in the plural of -ir verbs is regular and easy to master. The only learning problems will be the first and third person singular endings, and even here the range of possibilities is very limited: the first person ends either in -e or in -s, and the third person in -e, -t, or in nothing.1
Learn the hardest thing first and the rest will then seem easy.
The simple-to-complex procedure is psychologically backward; one expends fresh energy on simple things and is fatigued by the time the complex ones arrive. The net result is often a sense of discouragement.
I believe good sense dictates that one should attack the hardest features at the beginning of each lesson, when one is most receptive. The simpler points then tend to fall into place by themselves, and the remainder of the lesson is like coasting downhill.
in practice it turns out that the sentence with several pronouns (“She gave it to him”) is as easy to learn as a sentence with only one pronoun. Perhaps easier.
Similarly, a sentence with two adverbs (“The horse ran exceptionally fast”) is hardly more difficult than a sentence with only one (“The horse ran fast”),
The same principle may help you. Try to inject a note of urgency into your attitude as you learn vocabulary. Even do it artificially. Later on, the emotional attitude you had at the time of learning may help you to remember.
What one hopes to accomplish in learning vocabulary is to strengthen the bond between stimulus and response—between some life situation that calls for a particular utterance and the utterance itself.
It is better to write a whole phrase on the flash cards than a single word, for a phrase is not much harder to learn and is very much more useful.
Phrases are more serviceable than single words because they are ready to go to work without further adaptation. If you are studying English, and you learn the phrase “Give me a menu, please,” you can use it as is when you go to a restaurant. You also may be able to combine parts of it with pieces of other phrases already learned. By substituting for the word “menu,” for instance, you can produce sentences like: “Give me a screwdriver, please,” or “Give me a timetable, please.” Or you can insert other phrases into the same slot, producing new utterances like: “Give me a bowl of soup, please,” or “Give me that pair of shoes, please.”
Write on your flash cards a phrase or sentence that shows a typical usage.
English Side
French Side
I never go out at night.
Je ne sors jamais la nuit.
Good night.
Bonne nuit.
I slept badly last night.
J’ai mal dormi cette nuit.
Mix those cards in with the others so they’ll come up in random order. Once you can deliver the French sentence in response to these three different stimuli, you “know” la nuit in a much richer sense than if you could say it only in response to the English word “night.”
A typical list of foreign language vocabulary to be learned looks like this:
night—la nuit
day—le jour
happy—heureux
question—la question
answer—la réponse
. . . and so on. However, this is not the way your flash cards should look, for at least two good reasons. You do not want to pair up French words with English words lest you be able to recall la nuit only when thinking “night.” Rather, you want la nuit to occur to you when you are “thinking in French,” without having to go through English to remember it. Secondly, you want to practice the word nuit in the very situations in which you might have to use it.
It was the teacher’s job to keep them from forgetting, not just warn them to remember.
I maintain that a student’s memory is largely the teacher’s responsibility.
(1) Learn the commonest words first because they will accelerate your guessing power; (2) begin reading as soon as you have learned five hundred to a thousand common words; (3) pick reading material that interests you strongly and continue to learn words following the natural frequencies.
The informants stopped the lesson, and for the first time said, “There. That was very, very good. That was authentic.”
Jerry had done something brave. He had cast off his own natural behavior—his identity—and taken on that of a Filipino. In doing so, he had risked sounding and looking ridiculous.
That is the kind of risk you should be prepared to take if your objective is to learn a language really well. Letting yourself play the role of a foreigner will improve your performance. It may help you to hurdle pronunciation problems that had been getting you down before. It also will enliven the class for you. During moments of boredom, you may gradually imagine your new, foreign self in more detail: your job, your family, your boyfriend or girlfriend.
One should arm oneself, too, with an attitude—that one will remain in command of the situation and not succumb to embarrassment despite the psychological disadvantage of being a stuttering foreigner.
When a strange reaction follows something you have said, always track down the reason. Never let a chance go by to correct a wrong habit; these mistakes are finite in number and it is possible to correct them all.
August 4, 2020
it's a short book (2 sitings) and although its references has aged, the language learning methods are still quite relevant. I just started the Korean II Pimsleur audio course (although I'm struggling to keep it up tbh) and it's interesting to see the theory behind the course.
my notes:
-human attention is limited, short study sets are more efficient that long intensive ones + 3x 20 min throughout the day
-train the tongue by reputing again and again -> muscle + helps the ear and memorisation
- repeat after native speakers, even inaudibly while they speak to you
-350h or 40 hours per week during 2 months -> can reach elementary proficiency
- ask yourself at the end of a lesson : what did I learn today and how would that help me if I were to go to TL country right now
- good teachers speak less, make students speak more while not stressing them out too much + use repetitive orders (e.g. open your books) in TL + directs question to the whole class and let them think about it before getting someone to answer
- a grammer point rule explanation is max 4 min, the rest is practice
-must have faith in the spoken word, instead of always firstly relying on the written, learn the sound first, then repeat (don't try to visualize how it's written), then only let you eye see the word
- learn pronunciation in the backward order of syllable, from the end
- record and compare your pronunciation with natives
-learn harder sentences first (e.g. with several adjectives/adv) and then the easy ones will just come along
-ppl have not issues murdering the grammar but are mortified to get the gender wrong...
-create a sense of urgency in the word to be learn, as word learnt so get remembered easily due to the emotion attached
-flashcard: whole sentence better than simple word and use this word in different sentences/contexts on different flashcards + entertaining or stricking sentences are more easily remembered/ + flashwards are good bc they teach us in random order
-best way to pick vocab is through reading
-1 000 German words = 80% of most reading matter in German. 2 000 brings you to 90%
-1 learn most common words, 2 start reading as soon as you hit the 500 words mark 3 keep on reading things that interest you and continue learning words so using the natural frequency
my notes:
-human attention is limited, short study sets are more efficient that long intensive ones + 3x 20 min throughout the day
-train the tongue by reputing again and again -> muscle + helps the ear and memorisation
- repeat after native speakers, even inaudibly while they speak to you
-350h or 40 hours per week during 2 months -> can reach elementary proficiency
- ask yourself at the end of a lesson : what did I learn today and how would that help me if I were to go to TL country right now
- good teachers speak less, make students speak more while not stressing them out too much + use repetitive orders (e.g. open your books) in TL + directs question to the whole class and let them think about it before getting someone to answer
- a grammer point rule explanation is max 4 min, the rest is practice
-must have faith in the spoken word, instead of always firstly relying on the written, learn the sound first, then repeat (don't try to visualize how it's written), then only let you eye see the word
- learn pronunciation in the backward order of syllable, from the end
- record and compare your pronunciation with natives
-learn harder sentences first (e.g. with several adjectives/adv) and then the easy ones will just come along
-ppl have not issues murdering the grammar but are mortified to get the gender wrong...
-create a sense of urgency in the word to be learn, as word learnt so get remembered easily due to the emotion attached
-flashcard: whole sentence better than simple word and use this word in different sentences/contexts on different flashcards + entertaining or stricking sentences are more easily remembered/ + flashwards are good bc they teach us in random order
-best way to pick vocab is through reading
-1 000 German words = 80% of most reading matter in German. 2 000 brings you to 90%
-1 learn most common words, 2 start reading as soon as you hit the 500 words mark 3 keep on reading things that interest you and continue learning words so using the natural frequency
February 28, 2014
This book makes me want to pursue a new foreign language immediately. This book is not teaching you how to master foreign languages, but rather gives optimism and encouragement that learning them is not difficult as we all thought. Dr. Pimsleur gives lots of easy-to-digest and sensible tips and tricks throughout the book. What makes it different is, I guess, that he tells you how to differentiate between good or bad language teacher. The book is fun, and never boring. A great starter book for language student
September 1, 2024
Dr. Pimsleur created this book because he saw as a teacher and realized many had problems learning a new language. He walks us through a straightforward method, aptly named The Pimsleur Method and language learning system to help people learn a language with ease. This book is the 50th edition republished in 2013. In the beginning, he talks about how in high school half the students taking another language class drop out halfway through first year because of the way they are taught. If the teacher mispronounces a word, we’ll repeat it forever wrong.
In this book, Pimsleur states every language has three components: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary – with vocabulary being most difficult. He adds that humans are limited to the speech sounds they can produce despite all having lips, tongues, and vocal cords. He also adds that pronunciation poses the least challenge than the other two. Did you know it takes approximately 1500 words to achieve a basic command of a language, and closer to 5000 words to become fluent? It’s also easier to learn another language if one has already mastered two languages.
The author uses examples to demonstrate that the average American who knows no French can guess 15-17 words correctly. He also states that the same could be said for learning Spanish, Italian or German because most people can begin learning easier with this knowledge to continue on learning the words that glue the language together. We’ll learn what the most easiest to most difficult languages are to learn, as per the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department for training diplomats for overseas. We will also learn approximations of how long it should take one to learn a new language, depending on what we want to learn from it – conversational or reading. Learning is best in chunks of time as cramming too much in on one session can become counter-productive. We are also instructed to listen to pronunciation, and repeating words is easier than looking at a word or visualizing spelling of the word while trying to speak it. And speaking out loud using repitition is key, as is learning out of order, and phrases that are more serviceable than single words.
This book doesn’t focus on any one particular language, but, important key facts to help learn any language and develop fluency. We will learn a language by using it or practising it often, much better than cramming in a whole bunch of vocabulary content. And don’t be fooled at the number of pages in this book (123), it’s straight to the point with great information.
In this book, Pimsleur states every language has three components: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary – with vocabulary being most difficult. He adds that humans are limited to the speech sounds they can produce despite all having lips, tongues, and vocal cords. He also adds that pronunciation poses the least challenge than the other two. Did you know it takes approximately 1500 words to achieve a basic command of a language, and closer to 5000 words to become fluent? It’s also easier to learn another language if one has already mastered two languages.
The author uses examples to demonstrate that the average American who knows no French can guess 15-17 words correctly. He also states that the same could be said for learning Spanish, Italian or German because most people can begin learning easier with this knowledge to continue on learning the words that glue the language together. We’ll learn what the most easiest to most difficult languages are to learn, as per the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department for training diplomats for overseas. We will also learn approximations of how long it should take one to learn a new language, depending on what we want to learn from it – conversational or reading. Learning is best in chunks of time as cramming too much in on one session can become counter-productive. We are also instructed to listen to pronunciation, and repeating words is easier than looking at a word or visualizing spelling of the word while trying to speak it. And speaking out loud using repitition is key, as is learning out of order, and phrases that are more serviceable than single words.
This book doesn’t focus on any one particular language, but, important key facts to help learn any language and develop fluency. We will learn a language by using it or practising it often, much better than cramming in a whole bunch of vocabulary content. And don’t be fooled at the number of pages in this book (123), it’s straight to the point with great information.
June 4, 2025
my personal notes from the book:
Organic Learning & Core Strategy
- Organic learning. Learn that that is essential, me, you, and comonly used verbs, give me, I am, and then don’t give me
- We should concentrate on quality before quantity.
- Learn the Hardest Thing First
- Letting yourself play the role of a foreigner will improve your performance.
Listening & Pronunciation
- The correct learning sequence is this: listen carefully to get the sound firmly planted in your ear; then gradually imitate it with your tongue. Do not use your eye till you have the pronunciation down pat.
- Start learning the word from the back to the front
- In practicing pronunciation, it is best to think in terms of word-clusters and to practice the language that way.
- The important thing in mastering a difficult sound is to listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality. Good pronunciation, as I have tried to explain, begins not in the mouth but in the ear.
- Record what you say and ask a native to record it too then compare
Grammar & Verb Patterns
- Grammar is best learned by using it, not by talking about it.
- Record the audios this way to learn the grammar: CUE—PAUSE—RESPONSE
- Approximately ten such sets of cues and responses make up a “pattern drill,” and one or two such drills would impress the past tense of “to go” on you in a matter of a few minutes.
Cue: Are you going to the movies today? (PAUSE)
Response: No, I went yesterday.
Cue: Is your sister going to Europe this year? (PAUSE)
Response: No, she went last year.
- The dozen key verbal concepts are the following,Make it one of your earliest jobs to find out how the language you are studying expresses these concepts: to be, to have, to be able, to come, to go, to know, to take, to want, to say or tell, to do or make, to see, to give
- LEARN VERBS HORIZONTALLY.
Reading across, line by line, we discover that each of the six “persons” has a characteristic ending, regardless of which “conjugation” the verb belongs to. The plural endings are identical in all conjugations (-ons, -ez, -ent), and so is the second person singular ending (-s). The -iss- inserted in the plural of -ir verbs is regular and easy to master. The only learning problems will be the first and third person singular endings, and even here the range of possibilities is very limited: the first person ends either in -e or in -s, and the third person in -e, -t, or in nothing.
Vocabulary Building & Memory Aids
- Sometimes the emotion surrounding a word helps impress it on our memories, especially in a foreign country where all contacts seem to be heightened by newness. Try to inject a note of urgency into your attitude as you learn vocabulary. Even do it artificially. Later on, the emotional attitude you had at the time of learning may help you to remember.
- Flash cards:
It is better to write a whole phrase on the flash cards than a single word, for a phrase is not much harder to learn and is very much more useful. Write on your flash cards a phrase or sentence that shows a typical usage. If you are studying French and want to learn the word for wine, make up a flash card with a phrase like du vin blanc (some white wine) or Je préfère le vin rouge (I prefer red wine). Similarly, if you wish to learn a grammatical expression—let’s say jusqu’à (until)—put it down on a flash card in a sentence like Il est resté jusqu’au matin (He stayed until morning). The more striking or entertaining your sentence is, the better you are apt to recall it.
- Vocabulary :
(1) Learn the commonest words first because they will accelerate your guessing power; (2) begin reading as soon as you have learned five hundred to a thousand common words; (3) pick reading material that interests you strongly and continue to learn words following the natural frequencies.
Organic Learning & Core Strategy
- Organic learning. Learn that that is essential, me, you, and comonly used verbs, give me, I am, and then don’t give me
- We should concentrate on quality before quantity.
- Learn the Hardest Thing First
- Letting yourself play the role of a foreigner will improve your performance.
Listening & Pronunciation
- The correct learning sequence is this: listen carefully to get the sound firmly planted in your ear; then gradually imitate it with your tongue. Do not use your eye till you have the pronunciation down pat.
- Start learning the word from the back to the front
- In practicing pronunciation, it is best to think in terms of word-clusters and to practice the language that way.
- The important thing in mastering a difficult sound is to listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality. Good pronunciation, as I have tried to explain, begins not in the mouth but in the ear.
- Record what you say and ask a native to record it too then compare
Grammar & Verb Patterns
- Grammar is best learned by using it, not by talking about it.
- Record the audios this way to learn the grammar: CUE—PAUSE—RESPONSE
- Approximately ten such sets of cues and responses make up a “pattern drill,” and one or two such drills would impress the past tense of “to go” on you in a matter of a few minutes.
Cue: Are you going to the movies today? (PAUSE)
Response: No, I went yesterday.
Cue: Is your sister going to Europe this year? (PAUSE)
Response: No, she went last year.
- The dozen key verbal concepts are the following,Make it one of your earliest jobs to find out how the language you are studying expresses these concepts: to be, to have, to be able, to come, to go, to know, to take, to want, to say or tell, to do or make, to see, to give
- LEARN VERBS HORIZONTALLY.
Reading across, line by line, we discover that each of the six “persons” has a characteristic ending, regardless of which “conjugation” the verb belongs to. The plural endings are identical in all conjugations (-ons, -ez, -ent), and so is the second person singular ending (-s). The -iss- inserted in the plural of -ir verbs is regular and easy to master. The only learning problems will be the first and third person singular endings, and even here the range of possibilities is very limited: the first person ends either in -e or in -s, and the third person in -e, -t, or in nothing.
Vocabulary Building & Memory Aids
- Sometimes the emotion surrounding a word helps impress it on our memories, especially in a foreign country where all contacts seem to be heightened by newness. Try to inject a note of urgency into your attitude as you learn vocabulary. Even do it artificially. Later on, the emotional attitude you had at the time of learning may help you to remember.
- Flash cards:
It is better to write a whole phrase on the flash cards than a single word, for a phrase is not much harder to learn and is very much more useful. Write on your flash cards a phrase or sentence that shows a typical usage. If you are studying French and want to learn the word for wine, make up a flash card with a phrase like du vin blanc (some white wine) or Je préfère le vin rouge (I prefer red wine). Similarly, if you wish to learn a grammatical expression—let’s say jusqu’à (until)—put it down on a flash card in a sentence like Il est resté jusqu’au matin (He stayed until morning). The more striking or entertaining your sentence is, the better you are apt to recall it.
- Vocabulary :
(1) Learn the commonest words first because they will accelerate your guessing power; (2) begin reading as soon as you have learned five hundred to a thousand common words; (3) pick reading material that interests you strongly and continue to learn words following the natural frequencies.
September 25, 2018
If I've read this back in the day, I'd be astounded by how credible the knowledge tunes towards my passion for learning a new language. So overall, the book is good. But given the times we're living at, most of what is mentioned in the book are what online language websites and apps offer. I guess the best way to learn about something is not to read about learning it, but rather delve in whatever you want to learn and practice. I think the book requires a major revamp.
March 5, 2020
There are some out-of-date references (Soviet Union, cassette tape recorders), but I think there's some good tips for language learning. If you've ever tried out a Pimsleur course you'll recognize some of their implementations in the programs, like
1. don't picture how words are written when saying them
2. try sounding out new words from the end
3. work with correct pronunciation models, etc
There are also some tips for choosing teachers that I think will come in handy.
1. don't picture how words are written when saying them
2. try sounding out new words from the end
3. work with correct pronunciation models, etc
There are also some tips for choosing teachers that I think will come in handy.
April 5, 2020
Some of the theories have been supplanted
Paul Pimsleur was a pioneer in his field and this book was very readable. His spaced repetition method works. However, I think he didn’t give enough time to reading in the target language. Also, since this book is a few decades old much of the geopolitical information is out of date. All that said it was an interesting, easy and quick read.
Paul Pimsleur was a pioneer in his field and this book was very readable. His spaced repetition method works. However, I think he didn’t give enough time to reading in the target language. Also, since this book is a few decades old much of the geopolitical information is out of date. All that said it was an interesting, easy and quick read.
July 10, 2020
Skip this book unless you are a fan of Paul Pimsleur. This is not a beginner’s dive into his Pimsleur App. It is instead a book that is too long filled with analogies of his life and how he tried to emphasize teaching languages. He also said how it was easy to seem like you know a language but don’t. THERE ARE BETTER LANGUAGE resources out there this one is not practical at all.
March 8, 2020
Good contextual information for language learners unfamiliar with the Pimsleur method. Even for those already learning Pimsleur as a pedagogy, I still think it is good information to understand how Paul was able to synthesize his praxis. The approach is still relevant today.
March 20, 2022
A good personality wrote this informative book. Some method mentioned in the book can be found in many language learning programs, either online or class, maybe similar if not same. Anyone who wants to learn new language should read this book. It is really insightful.
June 6, 2022
Language tips are great! The anecdotal stories used were not. Often very stereotypical in nature, they seemed to make caricatures of the people and culture that they were talking about. So fair warning, this book was written in 1980, and it shows.
March 2, 2024
This was a fascinating read. Though some of the statistics may be outdated, I believe the majority of the content is timeless and insightful. I am hoping to learn French, and this book provides some interesting tips on how to accomplish learning a second language.
April 9, 2024
É um livro bem curto e bastante direto. O autor conta algumas histórias interessantes, estatísticas curiosas e relevantes e também traz dicas gerais úteis. Não é uma grande coleção de dicas. Na verdade, eu esperava mais.
July 15, 2024
Synopsis: A book about how best to learn a foreign language quicklyReview: Short and interesting, with some helpful tips on how to speed up the language learning process. For example, learning the rules by speaking are more likely to stick than by trying to learn the rules via book
May 23, 2019
Some good advice but little you haven't heard before probably, except maybe if this is the first book on foreign languages you read.
August 29, 2019
Great read!
Thank you Paul Pimsleur for all your hard work and sharing it with the world. This is a great read.
Thank you Paul Pimsleur for all your hard work and sharing it with the world. This is a great read.
July 14, 2020
A concise book with some great tips on language learning. A bit outdated in places, but overall very informative.
August 26, 2020
Refreshing and inspiring read on how anyone can learn a new language
Read
January 16, 2021A good read for someone looking for a basic sort of blue print to start their foray into learning a new language.
Read
April 9, 2022Although Pimsleur is deas for more than 40 years, he wrote not so bad book about a language learnig. I know new technologies change everything but...
January 17, 2023
Nice short book that encapsulates Pimsleur's philosophy on language acquisition. I have benefitted greatly from his approach
January 23, 2023
Words of Wisdom, tightly packed.
May 15, 2023
Really interesting
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