IT WAS AN EXPERIMENT in how long the human brain could continue to learn a foreign language at one stretch.
Two journalists volunteered as guinea pigs and walked into a hospital clinic in Montreal for 48 hours of non-stop Italian instruction by a team of teachers. The lesson went on night and day, broken only for cups of espresso, meals, and trips to the loo, all of which had to be conducted in Italian.
Doctors stood by to take the journalists' pulses and look out for signs of nervous collapse and, after 45 hours, the experiment was halted because the guinea pigs were suffering from fatigue.
But tests showed they had already achieved a basic knowledge of Italian - as well as greater fluency and more vocabulary than students given the same tuition on a normal schedule.
Thus the Total Immersion language teaching method was born. Berlitz, which jointly held the trial with McGill University, took out a trademark on the term and its Montreal school began offering lessons to the public, initially for 10 hours a day.
Today Berlitz offers Total Immersion courses in every major language and 64 countries across the globe. But does it work for the westerner learning Cantonese, who faces a baffling array of tones and an impenetrable written script?
Expatriates who come to work in Hong Kong quickly learn they can get by with English only. Then comes the argument about what language to learn. Isn't Putonghua far more useful to the foreigner? As one fluent Putonghua-speaking expatriate put it: 'The trouble with learning Cantonese is that it is like trying to learn Cockney when you don't speak English.'