We all wish we knew the fastest track to help our learners become competent in English. In Scott Thornbury’s How to Teach Vocabulary, he uses an example of the incredible language acquisition of nineteen-century explorer Sir Richard Burton who claimed to have mastered 30 languages and also asserted that he could learn a language in two months!

Here is an excerpt from Burton’s account of his method of language learning:

I got a simple grammar and vocabulary, marked out the forms and words which 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 book-work (one of the Gospels is the most come-atable), and I underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read over my pencillings at least once a day…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…whenever I conversed with anybody in a language I was learning, I took the trouble to repeat their words inaudibly after them, and so to learn the trick of pronunciation and emphasis.

Burton had stumbled upon many principles that research validates in vocabulary acquisition such as concentrating on what is necessary at first; using memorization at early stages rather than learning rules; reviewing frequently but only in short intervals; acquiring […]