How much time do we need to learn a foreign language?
According to Joshua Foer, an American journalist who learnt Lingala – a Bantu language spoken in the North West of the Democratic Republic of the Congo-, you just need 22 hours spread over a period of 10 weeks.
He used Memrise, a web app that teaches foreign languages through a game based on the repetition of words and their audio pronunciation. The trick is to assign to each word a “memo”, that can be an image, a sound, a rhyme, a video or just a note on the etymology of the word.
The idea behind Memrise is making the study of a foreign language a fun practice by using the internet as a social gaming and by exploiting the potential of our memory.
Read full article http://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/09/learn-language-in-three-months