Dr. Pimsleur devoted his life to language teaching and making language learning easier. He was one of the world's leading experts in applied linguistics. After obtaining his Ph.D. in French from Columbia University, he taught French Phonetics and Phonemics, and supervised the language laboratory at UCLA. He went on to become Professor of Romance Languages and Language Education, and Director of The Listening Center at Ohio State University; Professor of Education and Romance Languages at the State University of New York at Albany; and a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Heidelberg.

Dr. Pimsleur was a member of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), American Educational Research Association (AERA), Modern Language Association (MLA), and a founding member of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). His many books and articles revolutionized theories of language learning and teaching.

Dr. Pimsleur made several critical discoveries during his research:

• The mechanism in the brain that converts unintelligible human sound into language.
• How the brain naturally stores the language in long term memory (recall).
• How the brain flawlessly recreates the language as speech (articulation).
• How the words spoken by others are recognized and understood (comprehension).

Dr. Pimsleur used his knowledge to develope new method of foreign language learning that is based on two key principles: the Principle of Anticipation and a scientific principle of memory that he called Graduated Interval Recall.

All Pimsleur programs incorporate both of these principles to provide you with the most advanced yet simple and effective learning method possible.