Polyglots

Polyglots know more languages than other people. They know them better. And they keep adding to them. The Hofsö MethodTM is a description of how they do it, often without being aware of it until after the fact.

Karl Hofsö, inventor of The Hofsö MethodTM, is a member of the Paris-based Polyglot Club. When Mr Hofsö one day sat back and reflected on his journey to becoming a polyglot, he realised that it was the same journey that he had taken to codify his learning method. The Hofsö MethodTM is something of an innate, universal truth.

Tale of a polyglot

Somewhat late in the day I have become aware of the fact that I meet the criteria of being a polyglot. My mother tongue is Norwegian, North Norwegian to be exact.

In retrospect language proficiency was something that evolved naturally from an early age, beginning with an urge to understand the words in an Elvis Presley song. I played his records over and over again in small bits and pieces and learned to catch words and phrases well enough to find them in a small pocket dictionary that I had gotten hold of. That evolved into a lifelong hobby. More about that here.

By the age of 19 I was taken for a US citizen at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, when people could not quite make out my dialect and asked which state I was from.

At 23 I could pass as a native in Germany and Austria. On the first day of work as an AIESEC student at Mobil Oil’s Austrian headquarters in Vienna my boss greeted me with the words: “Wenn alle so gut Deutsch sprachen wie Sie, Herr Hofsö, dann wäre es kein Problem.” Four years later I could speak for hours in French without anybody suspecting it was not my mother tongue.

In school I had learned English for eight years, German for five years and French for four years plus two years of university-level French at the Oslo School of Business Administration. German came really easily.

I travelled the European continent for eight summers mostly by hitchhiking on my own. I was a sailor for about a year on a ship with a varying crew of ten to fifteen nationalities, where I started to pick up some Spanish and Portuguese from two of my shipmates. I kept making small talk at all times. In between I had a spell as a farmhand deep in rural France.

I started work as a business manager of an import company in Tunisia at the age of 26. The business language was French, but doing day-to-day business with Arabs required some knowledge of their language. I did a year and a half at a university course in Arabic for foreigners. Business talk in the interior of the country, where little French was understood, soon evolved into Arabic with interspersed French words. Numbers were exclusively in Arabic. No misunderstandings were excused where money was concerned!

I had picked up some Italian on my travels. That language got a boost during another AIESEC job, this time in the capital of Sicily, Palermo where I worked for two months in a government institution called “Istituto per il sviluppo del Mezzagiorno”. Only the boss spoke some English. He lent me an Italian dictionary, and I bought a book on verbs. One day he gave me a newspaper with a full-page article on a famous mafioso being brought to trial. He encouraged me to try to read it – loud and clear when possible. I did my best. The story was interesting and quite typical according to my boss. Later I read the book “Il gattopardo” in Italian.

In subsequent jobs language proficiency was often a key factor. In a position as “National Credit Control Manager” of a large company in Saudi Arabia it became crucial for success.

I kept adding bits of new languages to my internal library. I learned the phonetics of Slavonic languages and how to read them so that for example Serbians or Russians would understand what I read. I did the same with Greek some years later. But I never got as far as breaking the sound barrier in those languages.

I did, though, in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. In Tunisia I had watched the international news in broadcasts from Sicily, and chatted with my customers of Italian extraction, mostly about Italian football. Now in Italy, Spain and Portugal I can manage without a third language and people rarely need to ask me to repeat what I say.

I have lived in Sweden for many years and have even taught Swedish to immigrants in school. I am not asked if I am of a different nationality.

At the age of 60 I added the standard Oslo dialect to my native Norwegian.

At one point in time, I realized that learning a new language well and fast from traditional self-study material was not possible. I tried and mapped the flaws and made another model based on a recapitulation of what I had done myself.

Thirty years of course design and classroom teaching have shown that an efficient path to proficiency can be crafted.

This is how:

Phase one:

  • Imitate target language sound files by ear, no reading.
  • Practice pronunciation.
  • Do rote learning of sentences with complete grammar.
  • Work on this with some intensity for three months.
  • Try to reach one thousand words of vocabulary.

Phase two:

  • Speak with as many as possible as often as possible.
  • Read and write, first by dictation, then by any way you choose.
  • Read with a strong voice.
  • Record your reading on the phone, play back and listen.
  • When reading, look up every new word you cannot translate immediately, every time until they stick.
  • Never stop building new vocabulary. Practice new words as soon as you have come across them.
  • Never stop doing dictations for sound files and films alike.

The natives understand weather forecasts on TV automatically. Become like them.

Karl Hofsö
June 2026