The language genius Heinrich Schliemann learned 20 languages autodidactically during his life, for which he developed his own method. According to his own accounts, it took him only six weeks to learn a language. But he only succeeded in this because he was highly motivated and systematically trained his amazing memory. In the first years, it was business that drove him to learn languages; later it was his passion for traveling. In a letter to his aunt Magdalena in 1856, he wrote that he could speak and write 15 languages fluently. In the second half of his life, he devoted himself to the ancient languages. It was important to him to be able to read the sources of antiquity, like his beloved Homer, in the original.
Language instruction
1832 Private lessons in Latin
1833 Secondary school education in English, French, and Latin
1841 Deepening of the English language skills in an trading institute Self-study
1842 Dutch
1843 Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
1844 Russian
1854 Swedish, Danish, Polish, and Slovenian
1856 Modern Greek
1857 Ancient Greek
1859 Arabic
1864 Hindustani
1866 Persian and Sanskrit
1870 Turkish
1886 Hebrew
"The hardship made me find a method which makes the learning of any language much easier. [...] to read a lot in a loud voice, not to do translations, to take an hour every day, always to write down papers about objects of interest to us, to improve them under the supervision of the teacher, to learn them by heart and to recite in the next lesson what was improved days before ..." H.S., "Ithaca" IX