Brent Van Arsdell

Brent Van Arsdell is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering.

Back in 2005, he was studying Russian using the Pimsleur language course, and it was working. What fun! he could actually communicate (a little) with these strange new sounds.

Unfortunately, every time he got done with a Pimsleur lesson, he ended up saying, “Wow, that was slow!” There had to be a better way to learn a language.

Next, he tried Rosetta Stone, but it didn’t work at all. Then he tried a lot of programs that they have probably never heard of, and they didn’t work either.

It was a good thing that he learned how to solve problems at the University of Illinois because now he had a big problem. He was having so much fun learning Russian that he was pretty sure he wanted to learn several other languages too, and because he was learning Russian so slowly with Pimsleur, he was going to grow old and die before he learned all the languages he wanted to learn.

In 2006, he started to think seriously about how to develop foreign-language learning software. In December of 2007, he hired his first programmer, and they started developing foreign language learning software.

Learning foreign languages and traveling the world has been the best thing that ever happened to him. He went from being a typical American who couldn’t speak any other language to being able to speak conversational Russian and Spanish.