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             “Are you going to the movies today?”
             You will be asked to respond:
             “No, I went yesterday.”
             The tape will then confirm your answer:
             “No, I went yesterday.”
         
           Before Dr. Pimsleur’s Principle of Anticipation, language courses were based
         instead on the principle of “repetition.” Teachers drummed words into the students’
         minds over and over as if the mind were a record whose grooves wore deeper with
         repetition. But neurophysiologists tell us that, to the contrary, simple unchallenging
         repetition has a dulling, even hypnotic effect. Eventually the words being repeated
         lose complete meaning. Dr. Pimsleur discovered instead that learning accelerates
         when there is an input / output” system of interaction, in which students are allowed
         to receive information, then retrieve it and use it.
         
         Principle 2: Graduated Interval Recall
           The second Pimsleur principle, Graduated Interval Recall, is a complex name for
         a very simple theory about memory. No aspect of learning a foreign language is more
         important than memory, yet before Dr. Pimsleur, no one had explored more effective
         ways for building language memory. Most teachers did little to guarantee that
         students would remember—they introduced new words, then let them fade away until
         exam time. Even those who tried to review new words lacked the training to do it in
         any way that took advantage of the way language acquisition and memory work
         together.
           In his research, Dr. Pimsleur discovered how long students remembered new
         information and at what intervals they needed to be reminded of it. If reminded too
         soon or too late, they failed to retain the information. So he created a schedule of when
         and how the information should be reintroduced.
           Let’s suppose you have learned a new word. You tell yourself to remember it.
         However, after five minutes you’re unable to recall it. Yet if you’d been reminded
         of it after five seconds, you probably would have remembered it. You would
         remember it for maybe a minute and a half, at which time you would need another