Foreign languages
And how to learn to speak one in eight weeks
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Some of the world's most effective learning breakthroughs have
come in the field of language learning.
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As examples:
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- One Sydney (Australia) high school class has learned to speak
fluent French in under eight weeks.
- In a U.S. army trial, using new methods of study, soldiers
learned German at a rate 662 percent more efficiently than a
control group taught with standard methods.
- And in similar trials in a British high school, more than ten
times as many students achieved a 50 percent pass park in German
than students taught with traditional methods.
Details of the new methods are covered extensively in the world's
biggest-selling nonfiction book in 1999, The Learning
Revolution, by Gordon Dryden and Dr. Jeannette Vos.
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Many of the new language-training methods are based on methods
developed by the Bulgarian psychologist Dr. Georgi Lozanov during
the 1950's. He studied, in particular, the impact of
"brainwaves", music and yoga on learning abilities. He
concluded that we each have an "optimum learning state"
where "heartbeat, breathing and brainwaves are synchronized and
the body is relaxed but the mind concentrated and ready to receive
new information."
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In putting that research into practice, Lozanov achieved some
amazing results, particularly in foreign language learning. By the
early 1960s, Berlitz, then the world's largest language-training
school, promised that students could learn 200 words after several
days' training–a total of 30 hours.
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Many others have built on this research.
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The Learning Revolution covers the new methods of learning in
several chapters, but particularly in their chapter called True
learning: the fun-fast way.
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