LUXEMBURG ——FRUSTRATED by his failure to learn English, Jacky Munger, a 50-year-old marketing consultant in Luxemburg, went to see his doctor, and ended up inventing a revolutionary new language software designed to work on students' ears.
Munger, who felt his career was suffering because of his lack of English language skills, was referred to a doctor, who diagnosed the problem as one of frequency registration. Munger's ears could not register sounds over 6,000 herz.
For a native French speaker, that's not a problem. That language is spoken at frequencies between 125 and 2,000 herz, but it causes difficulties when learning English, which is spoken at ranges between 2,000 and 100,000 herz.
On hearing the news, Munger set out to invent a programme to train learners' ears. With the help of engineers and an IT specialist from the University of Metz, he developed a programme, Speedlingua, which trains learners' ears by playing them music and dialogue at the frequencies of the target language. The theory is that repeated exposure to a certain frequency will lead learners brains to automatically adapt their pronunciation.
The software, available in US English, British English, German, French and Spanish, is already being sold in Belgium and Switzerland.
