mentecuerpo wrote:he ate little, never drank wine, and slept only three hours at night.
That pretty much rules him out as a role model for most people. Is a brain that's able to survive on three hours of sleep possibly running routines and subroutines that most people would find impossible to emulate?
"The late Cardinal Mezzofanti, indisputably the greatest linguist that ever lived, has passed away from among us, leaving his plan of learning languages unrevealed. But there is good reason to doubt whether he had any fixed principle of action, because none of his admirers could ever discover one, and there was great inequality in the results of his various efforts. His biographer relates that he possessed a retentive memory, a quick ear, and an incredible flexibility of the organs of speech. He constantly filled his head with new words; he learned every new grammar, and applied himself to every strange dictionary, but he vaguely described his talent as a "mere physical endowment, a thing of instinct, almost of routine."
Some think that he was too vain of his preminence to divulge his secret, and others that he had none to reveal. At all events, his labours have been fruitless; and we have obtained no useful suggestions either from him, or from any other great linguist, to indicate the true method of beginning to learn foreign tongues."
Thomas Pendergast
1864
