Alphonse Chérel
French linguist
Alphonse Chérel (3 June 1882 – 7 September 1956) was a French polyglot, author and entrepreneur. He founded Assimil, 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, 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, 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. Because of his mastery of the English, Russian and German languages, he became an interpreter, thus avoiding being put on the frontlines.
“Alphonse Chérel” enters the record as french linguist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alphonse, Chérel and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alphonse Chérel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.