Alphonse Chérel (3 June 1882 – 7 September 1956) was a French

polyglot Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

, author and entrepreneur. He founded

Assimil Assimil (often stylised as ASSiMiL) is a French company, founded by Alphonse Chérel in 1929. It creates and publishes foreign language courses, which began with their first book ''Anglais sans peine'' (''English Without Toil''). Since then, the ...

, a French language-learning enterprise, in 1929, as well as ''la méthode Assimil'' (the Assimil method) of learning foreign languages.

Biography

Alphonse Chérel was born in

Rennes Rennes (; ; Gallo language, Gallo: ''Resnn''; ) is a city in the east of Brittany in Northwestern France at the confluence of the rivers Ille and Vilaine. Rennes is the prefecture of the Brittany (administrative region), Brittany Regions of F ...

, France, in 1882. His father was a miller, and Alphonse Chérel grew up in Romazy, where his father's mill was located. He started learning English at a school in Rennes. He read many travel books, such as ''

Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants ''Le Tour de la France par deux enfants'' (1877 in literature, 1877) is a French novel/geography/travel/school book. It was written by Augustine Tuillerie, Augustine Fouillée (née Tuillerie) who used the pseudonym of G. Bruno. She was the wife o ...

'', which inspired him to travel to foreign countries. Since 1902, was a private tutor for about 3–4 years in London, England, and later in Berlin, Germany. In 1909, he joined his brother in Moscow, Russia, where the former worked as a tutor until 1914. He moved back to France in the spring of 1914, shortly before the emergence of the

First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. Because of his mastery of the English, Russian and German languages, he became an interpreter, thus avoiding being put on the frontlines. During this period, he translated intercepted messages of the German forces. He participated in the Dardanelles Campaign, where he acted as an interpreter between the British and French generals. He was likewise wounded during the same campaign. While he was wounded, Chérel was reported to have entered a delirium where he spoke only German for a few days, which made some assume he was guilty of espionage, though he was later found to be innocent. After the end of the First World War, he traveled to Spain and Italy, and again to Germany, finally settling in Paris in 1927. He founded Assimil in 1929, and published his first book, ''L'Anglais sans peine'' (English without toil), in the same year. After the founding of the company, he worked together with his brother. In 1933, Alphonse Chérel had the idea of using discs (which at that time had only recently appeared) to allow learners to listen to the voices of native speakers and naturally acquire the pronunciation of their target language. In the early stages of the company, Alphonse Chérel made bicycle deliveries to his clients, until he got into an accident where he injured his leg. He was then amputated below his hip, which made him unable to do deliveries; he thus dedicated his time to working on other language learning books (e.g. for Spanish, German, Russian and Italian). When he was 57 years old, he met an opera-singer, and married her in 1940. The couple later had two sons: Jean-Loup Chérel (born 1942) and Gil Chérel (born 1944). Chérel died in 1956 of a

cerebral hemorrhage Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), also known as hemorrhagic stroke, is a sudden bleeding into the tissues of the brain (i.e. the parenchyma), into its ventricles, or into both. An ICH is a type of bleeding within the skull and one kind of stro ...

. Eventually, the leadership of Assimil was taken over by Jean-Loup Chérel from 1968 to 2007, after which it ultimately passed to Yannick Chérel, the grandson of Alphonse.

Methodology

For Chérel, a naturalist approach to language learning was more important than that of pedantic grammarians that prioritized rote memorization of grammar rules. For that reason, his Assimil method utilized and emphasized daily exposure and assimilation (hence the name), as well as including humorous drawings (which were at first done by Pierre Soymier, who provisioned the sketches for the company until the 1970s).La Presse. 10 November 2010
Assimil: 80 ans à cultiver le don des langues
Retrieved July 25th, 2024.

References

External links

at publishinghistory.com * Alexander Arguelles
Assimil: Foreign Language Learning Series Reviews
at youtube.com
Alphonse Chérel
at babelio.com
Alphonse Chérel, Rennais et créateur de la méthode Assimil
at soundcloud.com
Assimil: 80 ans à cultiver le don des langues
at lapresse.ca
Assimil: a century dedicated to language learning
youtube.com, Polyglot Gathering, 2017
Alphonse Cherel: Les langues sans peine
at letelegramme.fr {{DEFAULTSORT:Cherel, Alphonse 1882 births 1956 deaths French book publishers (people) Book publishing company founders 20th-century French educators Language education Second-language acquisition

Biography

Methodology

References

Further reading

External links