How to Learn a Foreign Language - Paul Pimsleur Ph.D.

Last updated Sep 22, 2024

• Author: Paul Pimsleur Ph.D.
• Full Title: How to Learn a Foreign Language
• Category: #books

Paul Pimsleur died of a heart attack while he was teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris. His wife, Beverly Pimsleur, brought the manuscript of this book to Charles Heinle, the original publisher, and he published it in 1980. (Location 46)

in the 1960s he was responsible for developing the first computerized language laboratory at Ohio State University, where he set up a venture with Ohio Bell Telephone Company that enabled students to learn at their own pace, dialing in directly to hear preprogrammed tapes. (Location 51)

But even his success with Russian was not enough to offset his belief that he was poor at French— incapable of learning a language that he knew to be easier than Russian. (Location 119)

Doing well in languages, like doing well at business, politics, or love, calls for more than the type of intelligence that makes you successful in school. It demands qualities like persuasiveness, sensitivity, gaiety, and perseverance, (Location 137)

Too easily, when the teacher becomes unreasonable in his demands, the student feels incompetent. He decides that the fault is with his own ability and gives up. (Location 151)

Discouragement, frustration, and fatigue produce a tremendous impulse to give up before one gets far enough for competence to bring its own reward. (Location 163)

That languages take time to learn becomes a plus instead of a drawback when one considers how such a long-range commitment gives focus and continuity to a period of one’s life. (Location 176)

A language— any language— has three distinct components: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. (Location 181)

Anthropologists working in the remotest corners of the world have been amazed to discover that all people, however “primitive” they may appear from our point of view, possess a language whose grammar is systematic, internally consistent, and well adapted to their life needs. (Location 201)

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. (Location 213)

It takes about fifteen hundred of them for a “basic” command of a language and perhaps five thousand to be really fluent. (Location 215)

languages closely related to one’s own are easiest to learn, (Location 217)

English is a Teutonic language. (Location 222)

In the years following the Norman conquest, about ten thousand French words entered the English language. Some 75 percent of them are still in common use. (Location 225)

knowing even a little of it will make an enormous difference in his trip. (Location 322)

Human attention is limited. No one can absorb knowledge steadily for six hours a day, week after week; (Location 368)

things that seem confusing one day sometimes clear up by the next, after they have settled into place in one’s mind. This “incubation” factor favors a non-intensive learning schedule. (Location 370)

If you set out learning to read the foreign language, and forgo the effort to speak or write it, then in 100 to 150 hours you will be able to read material related to your line of work with ease. (Location 385)

Speaking and reading are two very different activities, and though reading builds vocabulary, it may actually damage pronunciation. (Location 388)

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. (Location 390)

If your objective is to master the language fully in speech and writing, then you may have to devote at least a year and a half, most of it spent in the foreign country, to reaching this objective. 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. (Location 393)

one year from today they will be one year older whether they undertake this learning task or not. (Location 400)

German vocabulary seems hard at first, but becomes easier when you reach the plateau where word-roots begin to reappear. You soon find yourself able to correctly guess the meaning of words you have never seen or heard before. (Location 421)

The pronunciation of Spanish is a little harder than Italian or German, but not so hard as that of French. (Location 431)

People often are frightened of the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet, which turns out in practice to be easy to master. (Location 436)

Sir Richard Burton (Location 470)

I got a simple grammar and vocabulary, marked out the forms and words that I knew were absolutely necessary, and learnt them by heart by carrying them in my pocket and looking over them at spare moments during the day. I never worked for more than a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness. After learning some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy workbook (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read over my pencillings at least once a day. Having finished my volume, I then carefully worked up the grammar minutiae, and I then chose some other book whose subject most interested me. The neck of the language was now broken, and progress was rapid. If I came across a new sound like the Arabic Ghayn, I trained my tongue to it by repeating it so many thousand times a day. When I read, I invariably read out loud, so that the ear might aid memory. (Location 475)

But reputations are often overdone. (Location 488)

In all probability, the people speaking expect too much of themselves, and then become discouraged when they cannot live up to their self-imposed expectations. Like Burton, many people work better in short, concentrated spurts. (Location 515)

There are good and bad times to study, and people often fail to take advantage of the good ones. Early in the morning: by rising fifteen minutes earlier, you can read a page of Russian a day. (Location 519)

If you let the “need to know” be your guide, studying will retain its freshness longer. (Location 531)

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in his Autobiography, (Location 539)

“Perfect co-relation is the first principle of growth. Integration, or even the very word ‘organic’ itself, means that nothing is of value except as it is naturally related to the whole in the direction of some living purpose.” (Location 540)

If 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. (Location 547)

Search until you find one. You may have to try out several teachers before you find the especially gifted one you are seeking, but the effort will be worth your while. (Location 550)

calculate the ratio of teacher-talk to student-talk. With a good teacher, it will be heavily in favor of student-talk. (Location 581)

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. (Location 586)

Grammar is best learned by using it, not by talking about it. (Location 588)

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. (Location 598)

Every language has its own music, its rise and fall, its smoothness or choppiness. (Location 604)

A foreign accent is merely the transfer of speech habits from one language to another, (Location 614)

But you cannot always carry it about with you; and when you want the word, you have not the dictionary. It is like a man who has a sword that will not draw. (Location 628)

A person studying a language has got to trust the spoken word, insubstantial and evanescent though it is. (Location 639)

Pierre Delattre, (Location 643)

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. (Location 647)

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. (Location 659)

A good teacher will break the language down into manageable tasks, help you to accomplish them, and reward you when you do. (Location 660)

skilled teachers, I say, prefer to present new material themselves, in class, so they can provide instant correction during the first few crucial stages of learning. (Location 668)

Start from the End Instead of saying na-, then -cio-, and so on, you should begin at the end instead. Say -dad, then -lidad, etc. You will retain the natural intonation of the word this way, and won’t risk swallowing the ending. (Location 694)

Check your pronunciation often until good speech habits are firmly established in the new language. (Location 698)

alike as they may seem to a foreigner, each sound is totally different from every other sound to a native speaker of the language; (Location 735)

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. (Location 754)

One must practice the glide as well as the sounds. (Location 762)

In practicing pronunciation, it is best to think in terms of word-clusters and to practice the language that way. (Location 767)

The important thing in mastering a difficult sound is to listen very intently, trying to discover what gives it its distinctive quality. (Location 784)

Keep listening until you feel the difference penetrating you, and the urge to say it yourself becomes strong. (Location 790)

one becomes transfixed and temporarily unable to go on. If this happens, stop at once and resume your practice at a later time, after a complete change of activity. (Location 795)

speech problems are not endless, as they often seem, but actually quite few in number, and definitely fixable. (Location 802)

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. (Location 808)

one should concentrate on communicating. (Location 817)

organically, as part of full interpersonal communication that includes facial expressions, gestures, social conventions, and many other components that may outweigh grammar in importance. (Location 822)

The grammarian is mainly concerned with the orderliness and internal consistency of his analysis— not its teachableness. (Location 829)

Noam Chomsky, (Location 833)

unconsciously, intuitively. Like bike-riding or roller-skating, one way to master grammar is by “feel,” with very little verbalization of rules. This is a viable alternative (or adjunct) to learning grammar by rules and examples, (Location 839)

“Learning grammar from the rules is like learning the interpretation of a melody second-hand from the explanations of someone who has heard it sung. (Location 845)

One of the hardest features of French grammar to teach is the use of pronouns. They are not difficult in themselves, but the rules about them are complicated to express. (Location 850)

A person learning a foreign language needs to develop this same sense, and extensive oral practice is the most direct route to obtaining it. (Location 876)

the learner must anticipate the correct response; he must say it himself before the tape says it. This principle, which I believe to be absolutely basic to learning, (Location 881)

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. (Location 883)

repetition may have a lulling, dulling effect, which, when carried to extremes, becomes hypnotic. (Location 891)

neurophysiologist, H. W. Magoun, (Location 894)

repetition is the first law, not of learning, but of habituation, whose influence upon learning is a negative rather than a positive one. (Location 894)

have it pop up unexpectedly, thus providing the novelty that accelerates learning. (Location 911)

If well conceived and carried out at a smart tempo, pattern drills can be a language student’s chief tool for learning grammar. (Location 918)

I prefer to assume instead, like Zorba the Greek, that “life has no exceptions.” A living language, like a living person, must be accepted as is, without prejudging how it is going to behave. (Location 938)

A DOZEN KEY VERBAL CONCEPTS. (Location 941)

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. After that, through the power of analogy, other “irregular” verbs will fall into place in your mind easily. Meanwhile, knowing these few verbs, you can begin reading the foreign language virtually at once. (Location 950)

Your eventual goal, after all, is to have in your mind a grammatical schema that will enable you to “generate” utterances in the foreign language. Mistakes are inevitable and unimportant, for this schema is a living, growing organism, and will be fleshed out, modified, and improved as you gain further knowledge of the language. (Location 989)

in learning a language one should often do quite the opposite. My principle is this: Learn the hardest thing first and the rest will then seem easy. (Location 995)

Jules and Jim, (Location 1005)

In the Romance languages, gender is not truly difficult. Most words in Spanish and Italian carry their gender with them, in the final vowel (-o for masculine, -a for feminine). In French there is no such simple sign, but one quickly acquires a “feel” for gender, and learns helpful rules— for (Location 1011)

When one forgets the gender of a word, one takes a guess at it. (Location 1014)

Later on, when one knows the language better, one generally finds that one’s “feel” for gender has improved along with other progress; the number of errors becomes tolerably small. (Location 1021)

One must guard against the tendency to amplify an occasional lapse out of all proportion to its real importance. (Location 1028)

Sometimes the emotion surrounding a word helps impress it on our memories, (Location 1039)

Later on, the emotional attitude you had at the time of learning may help you to remember. (Location 1045)

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. (Location 1057)

Knowledge is best when it is free-floating in the mind, available to be recalled at any time, in any order. (Location 1068)

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. (Location 1078)

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. (Location 1098)

Suppose, however, that instead of depending on chance, you could “program” the cards so that each word came up at just the right moment to ensure the longest retention with the fewest exposures? Such a program would be worth a lot, (Location 1115)

When you feel that you have seen a certain word before and are tired of skipping over it without knowing its meaning, then it is time to look it up. (Location 1135)

The “hump,” where new words grow “guessable,” is reached more quickly in some languages (Location 1164)

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. (Location 1169)

The “hump” in German is passed when one knows fifteen hundred to two thousand words; (Location 1176)

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. (Location 1186)

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. (Location 1190)

general conclusions about learning vocabulary in the Teutonic and Romance languages: (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. (Location 1192)

If you are willing to make the initial thrust to learn a few hundred common words, you can be reading the foreign language, though slowly, within two to three months, and reading with reasonable fluency within six. (Location 1194)

When sitting with Moslems, do not extend the soles of your feet (or shoes) in the direction of others. It is very impolite. (Location 1202)

Latin Americans like to talk up close, about a foot from nose to nose, while any distance less than two feet makes a North American think he is about to be kissed. (Location 1203)

E. T. Hall (Location 1206)

When you are conversing with native speakers, such non-verbal means of communication are often vitally important. (Location 1207)

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. (Location 1225)

book Freedom to Learn, (Location 1228)

Saying no is a rich ceremony in Greek, with a set of hand and eye movements that are inimitable and highly expressive. When a Greek person says no, he rolls his eyeballs skyward, raises his eyebrows, clicks his tongue, and lifts both hands, palms up. (Location 1241)

How had she gotten the power to do all this? Evidently, they gave it to her. By believing that they had to order quickly and dare not keep her waiting, they had allowed her to tyrannize them though that was not her intention in the least. (Location 1292)

When a strange reaction follows something you have said, always track down the reason. (Location 1312)

One reason, perhaps the biggest, why people travel to foreign countries is that they want to understand themselves better though understanding others. (Location 1314)

a person who goes abroad should be prepared to try out different modes of behavior in interacting with native people. (Location 1332)

When we left the hotel, the porter and I shook hands with sincere affection. We had shared an experience. (Location 1365)