An episode in London comes to mind. At the age of 19 I found myself at Hyde Park Corner together with a bunch of backpackers of different nationalities. In a break between two speakers, we chatted and wondered where we all came from. When my turn came, I said “Norway” whereupon the Canadian guy who had asked burst out: “No way”. I insisted – and so did he. He said: “Nobody can speak English like that and claim to be from Norway – of all places.” I insisted again and he repeated his “no way” and the other youths came nearer. I was somewhat of two minds. On the one hand I did not like that people did not believe what I said. On the other hand, I was flattered. So, I dug out my
passport and let it circulate among the group until the Canadian guy handed it back to me with one word: “Amazing”. Then he added: “How come”? I did not have a short answer and shrugged my shoulders saying that it just came out that way.
It was some years later that the answer dawned on me. The accent part was easy. That was the product of countless hours of taking down the lyrics of heaps of pop songs over several years.
The fluency part was different, though related. In junior high school the curriculum in English was crammed with new words that I was unable to learn by any known method. At midterm I got bored and gave up. Instead, I started to read sections of the homework pages in a high and clear voice. I looked up the new words, every one of them, but I did not write them down. Then I read the section again and looked up the words I had forgotten, one more time. This developed into a routine of ten readings per section. By the tenth repetition every word had been memorized. It took far less time than rote learning of single words and – I did not realize this at the time – I got the grammar and the sentence structure for free. I practiced the same procedure with French later. It worked equally well. I even tried it with Arabic some years after that again, but this time it was not so easy, as Arabic script does not include short vowels, so that one cannot know fully what a word sounds like unless one has heard it before. That set me back a bit. For example, the city name “Tunis” is written without the /i/ (تونس.) So, unless you have already heard it, it may easily be Tunas or Tunos as well as Tunis.
/Karl Hofsö
The Hofsö Method 