...британский путешественник, писатель, поэт, переводчик, этнограф, лингвист, гипнотизёр, фехтовальщик и дипломат. Прославился своими исследованиями Азии и Африки, а также своим исключительным знанием различных языков и культур. По некоторым оценкам, он владел двадцатью девятью языками, относящимися к различным языковым семьям.

Так начинается статья в Wikipedia о капитане сэре Ричарде Фрэнсисе Бёртоне (англ. Richard Francis Burton; 19 марта 1821— 20 октября 1890)...

Личность, действительно, extraordinary...

Меня очень заинтересовали его записки о том, как он овладевал новыми языками. Я нашла их на английском языке (для всех изучающих - хорошая практика :)

"My system of learning a language in two months was purely my own invention, and thoroughly suited myself.

I got a simple grammar and vocabulary, marked out the forms and words which I knew were absolutely necessary, and learnt them by heart by carrying them in my pocket and looking over them at spare moments during the day. I never worked for more than a quarter of an hour at a time, for after that the brain lost its freshness. After learning some three hundred words, easily done in a week, I stumbled through some easy bookwork...and underlined every word that I wished to recollect, in order to read over my pencillings at least once a day. Having finished my volume, I then carefully worked up the grammar minutiae, and I then chose some other book whose subject most interested me. The neck of the language was now broken, and progress was rapid.

If I came across a new sound, like the Arabic Ghayn, I trained my tongue to it by repeating it so many thousand times a day. When I read, I invariably read out loud, so that the ear might aid memory.

I was delighted with the most difficult characters, Chinese and Cuneiform, because I felt that they impressed themselves more strongly upon the eye than the eternal Roman letters. This, by-and-by, made me resolutely stand aloof from the hundred schemes for transliterating Eastern languages, such as Arabic, Sanscrit, Hebrew and Syriac, into Latin letters, and whenever I conversed with anybody in a language that I was learning, I took the trouble to repeat their words inaudibly after them, and so to learn the trick of pronunciation and emphasis.”