What Exactly Is The Pimsleur Approach?

Paul Pimsleur, the man behind the popular Pimsleur language learning program (read my full Pimsleur Spanish review), spent his entire professional life studying how humans learn languages.  His major breakthrough is the graduated interval recall theory, published in 1967, which forms the basis of the Pimsleur approach.

Graduated Interval Recall

Graduated interval recall is merely the spaced repetition of a word of phrase in such a way to maximize future recall.  When a new word, phrase, or grammar concept is first introduced, it is repeated more often.  Over time, the interval between repetitions becomes further and further apart as the learning becomes more familiar with its use.  Pimsleur’s published intervals are 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, and 2 years.  That is, after initially learning a new phrase in the Pimsleur program, it will be repeated after 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, etc so on and so forth until you finish the entire 90 day course (obviously, intervals beyond that 90 day period are pretty much impossible to implement in real life).

The Pimsleur Approach

The pimsleur approach is merely a real-world application of this theory.  If you were to time the Pimsleur program with a stop watch, you would find the interval between repetitions to more-or-less (although not exactly, obviously) match the above intervals.  Since each lesson is only 30 minutes long, some liberty must be taken with how the longer intervals are managed in order to get an actual product out the door, but the basic theory is followed quite closely and hasn’t changed for many years.  In fact, competing products like Rosetta Stone Spanish use similar concepts in their products.  Although Rosetta Stone focuses more on images than audio, the basic concept of the Pimsleur interval remains.

Read my full Pimsleur Spanish Review or buy Pimsleur Spanish from Amazon today!