In the year 2000 I wrote to the University of Tromsø in northern Norway.
I asked for a meeting to discuss the possibility of cooperating on a scientific research project.
The topic was a phenomenon that I thought I had observed over a period of several years. Having recently taught Norwegian to a group of about forty refugees from Kosovo in the hamlet of Karasjok in Norway’s Finnmark county, two points about this phenomenon now seemed to be more apparent to me.
The first point was that a majority of the members of the group became fluent in Norwegian in a matter of just a few months, typically three months to be exact.
I had shown before that it takes 10 to 12 weeks to learn to master the phonology of a new language. It requires between one and two hours of dedicated practice per day. The training needs to include systematic practice, hearing and speaking, of single phonemes, single words, phrases, short sentences and long sentences. And translation. The student needs to understand the spoken words instantly, both word by word and the idiomatic meaning of sentences. One should aim for a vocabulary of some 2000 words during this initial period.
As I said, this process takes three months; no more, no less.
The second point was what seemed like a bonus, a sort of free ride: By undergoing a learning program as described above, the brain seems to emulate the grammar of the new language simultaneously. This is maybe by some evolutionary design developed during thousands of years of human history.
Students emerge speaking the new language fluently and correctly.
Unfortunately, my project proposal to the University of Tromsø, and a subsequent one, went unanswered.
Although this learning phenomenon has been observed repeatedly in my work ever since, no university or other educational institution has answered my proposals for scientific research into the matter.
That’s where it stands today; decades of strong anecdotal evidence, but no rigorous scientific studies to support the theory.
The Hofsö Method 