Schliemann’s Language Learning Method goes Online

A new collaborative service for language learners with the elements of social networking has now been launched in the form of correctmytext.com. Once registered, the user can submit a text and get it corrected for free by someone who speaks the desired language fluently. Besides, members can request a recorded version of the corrected text to practice pronunciation.

The site is the effort of Dmitry Lopatin, a young scientist and entrepreneur from Russia. As a child, he read a book about the famous 19th century German archeologist Heinrich Schliemann who is famous for finding the gold of Troy and inventing his own method of learning foreign languages. To master a new language, Schliemann would read a book written in a foreign language, comparing the text sentence by sentence with the translation in his mother tongue. Then he would write texts in a foreign language and pay to foreigners to get them corrected, sometimes spending all his money. Within two years, Schliemann taught himself 15 languages, including English, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese.