The language of learning: Fluency Fast accelerates second-language study.

• Author: Peterson, Eric

"I've only been in this class for three days, and I can speak Spanish."

Such comments come surprisingly often to Karen Rowan, director and co-founder of Colorado Springs-based Fluency Fast.

Fluency Fast offers about 15 foreign-language multi-day workshops a year, enrolling more than 1,000 students in all. Rowan says the initial focus is on the 100 most common words in Spanish (or Arabic, Mandarin, French, Russian or German), "words that come up all the time in everyday conversation," rather than the status-quo overkill.

"In a typical high school program we teach 10,000 words--it's more than ever could be retained," she says. "Even if you have only 100 words, you can talk around anything. You can make what you need to make clear. To be able to get to complete fluency--native-speaker proficiency--you only need an 1,800-word vocabulary."

Statistics back Rowan's point: In 2005, the American Council on the Teaching of Languages and Cultures said just 9 percent of high school students become fluent in a second language through coursework, ranking the U.S. with the world's worst in terms of teaching second languages.

So how can Fluency Fast cultivate fluency in days of study, instead of years? Answers Rowan: "The method we use is completely upside-down. It's backwards from most methodologies."

Traditional foreign-language classes "were trying to put a second language in a part of your brain that's not designed to work that way," Rowan says. "Vocabulary was put into short-term memory to be regurgitated for a test at the end of the week."

Conversely, Fluency Fast's workshops use a method called TPR Storytelling. Blaine Ray, a high school Spanish teacher in California, came up with the concept in the late 1980s and started offering workshops to other foreign-language teachers. Ray is now retired and a partner with Rowan, also a former high school Spanish teacher, in Fluency Fast.

With traditional methodologies, "the students aren't hearing it enough, they're not reading it enough, they're not immersed in it enough," Rowan says. TPR Storytelling "is really similar to an immersion program. You're immersed in a language you don't understand. The only difference is we make sure you...