Incredibile- Incroyable- Incredivel- Amazing!!!!

Extracts: 

[...] 

The famous 19th-century German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), who pursued a life-long dream of excavating the remains of Homeric Troy, no doubt had a genius for language. Within the space of two years, he taught himself fluent Dutch, English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, and later went on to learn seven more, including both modern and ancient Greek.

 [...] 

"In order to acquire quickly the Greek vocabulary," Schliemann wrote, "I procured a modern Greek translation of 'Paul et Virginie' [a French novel; Schliemann already knew French], and read it through, comparing every word with its equivalent in the French original. When I had finished this task I knew at least one half the Greek words the book contained; and after repeating the operation I knew them all, or nearly so, without having lost a single minute by being obliged to use a dictionary. Of the Greek grammar I learned only the declensions and the verbs, and never lost my precious time in studying its rules; for as I saw that boys, after being troubled and tormented for eight years and more in school with the tedious rules of grammar, can nevertheless none of them write a letter in ancient Greek without making hundreds of atrocious blunders, I thought the method pursued by the schoolmasters must be altogether wrong... I learned ancient Greek as I would have learned a living language."

This reminds me somehow of the Rosetta stone
To bad it is not working for arabic, chinese,or japanese...
One friend of mine's excellent idea is to do the same method with a nice song.

Sources: http://www.language-learning-tips.com/17_Schliemanns_method.htm
http://www.google.fr/imgres?um=1&hl=fr&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&biw=1280&bih=921&tbm=isch&tbnid=jMX0Y2y5rq67sM:&imgrefurl=http://lancelot.pecquet.org/history/rosetta-stone/%3Flang%3Dfr&docid=G-Nt9ytyPpxi-M&imgurl=http://lancelot.pecquet.org/img/history/rosette.gif&w=1562&h=1982&ei=b89ST_KcO-jS0QXCo7nTCw&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=627&vpy=175&dur=479&hovh=253&hovw=199&tx=133&ty=165&sig=102264774011963203133&page=1&tbnh=173&tbnw=136&start=0&ndsp=26&ved=1t:429,r:3,s:0