I always wanted to know how it would be like to speak
several languages. Well, by ‘several’ I do not mean twenty, but that’s exactly
what this guys can do: he can spe…. Ops… speaks 20 languages. I mean, can he speak 20 languages?
This is the story of Timothy Doner, a Harvard freshman
who received notoriety for studying more than 20 languages.
He spends much of his time attempting to perfect his
linguistic skills in different neighborhoods of New York City.
His Youtube channel, PolyglotPal, has
received more than 5 million hits. He spoke at TEDxTeen in 2014.
Read on…
During the past few years, I’ve been referred to in
the media as “The World’s Youngest Hyperpolyglot” — a word that sounds like a
rare illness. In a way it is: it describes someone who speaks a particularly
large number of foreign languages, someone whose all-consuming passion for
words and systems can lead them to spend many long hours alone with a grammar
book.
But while it’s true that I can speak in 20 different
languages, including English, it took me a while to understand that there’s
more to language than bartering over kebabs in Arabic or ordering from a menu
in Hindi. Fluency is another craft altogether.
I began my language education at age thirteen. I
became interested in the Middle East and started studying Hebrew on my own. For
reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was soon hooked on the Israeli funk
group Hadag Nachash, and would listen to the same album every single morning.
At the end of a month, I had memorized about twenty of their songs by heart —
even though I had no clue what they meant. But once I learned the translations
it was almost as if I had downloaded a dictionary into my head; I now knew
several hundred Hebrew words and phrases — and I’d never had to open a
textbook.
I decided to experiment. I spent hours walking around
my New York City neighborhood, visiting Israeli cafés to eavesdrop on people’s
conversations. Sometimes, I would even get up the courage to introduce myself,
rearranging all of the song lyrics in my head into new, awkward and occasionally
correct sentences. As it turned out, I was on to something.
I moved on to Arabic, which I’d study every morning by
reading news headlines with a dictionary and by talking to street vendors.
After that it was Persian, then Russian, then Mandarin … and about fifteen
others. On an average day, I’d Skype with friends in French and Turkish, listen
to Hindi pop music for an hour and eat dinner with a Greek or Latin book on my
lap. Language became an obsession, one that I pursued in summer classes,
school, web forums and language meet-ups around the city.
By March of 2012, media outlets such as the BBC and
The New York Times featured stories about me, “The Teen Who Speaks 20
Languages!” For a while, it was a fantasy; it made what many thought of as a
bizarre hobby seem (almost) mainstream, and gave me a perfect opportunity to
promote language learning.
After a while, though, my media “moments” felt more
like gruesome chores than opportunities to spread the word. Most news shows
were interested only in the “dancing bear” act (“You wanna learn more about the
Middle East? Cool… Say ‘you’re watching Channel 2’ in Arabic!”) As lighthearted
as that might have been, it left me with an uncomfortably personal lesson in
modern media: when the goal is simply to get the viewers’ attention, the real
importance of a story often gets lost in translation.
When I was beginning to discover languages, I had a
romanticized view of words like “speak” and “fluency”. But then I realized that
you can be nominally fluent in a language and still struggle to understand
parts of it. English is my first language, but what I really spoke was a hybrid
of teenage slang and Manhattan-ese. When I listen to my father, a lawyer, talk
to other lawyers, his words sound as foreign to me as Finnish. I certainly
couldn’t read Shakespeare without a dictionary, and I’d be equally helpless in
a room with Jamaicans or Cajuns. Yet all of us “speak English.”
My linguistics teacher, a native of Poland, speaks
better English than I do and seems right at home peppering his speech with
terms like “epenthetic schwa” and “voiceless alveolar stops”. Yet the other
day, it came up that he’d never heard the word “tethered”. Does that mean he
doesn’t “speak” English? If the standard of speaking a language is to know
every word — to feel equally at home debating nuclear fission and classical
music — then hardly anyone is fluent in their own native tongues.
Reducing someone to the number of languages he or she
speaks trivializes the immense power that language imparts. After all, language
is the living testament to a culture’s history and world view, not a shiny
trophy to be dusted off for someone’s self-aggrandizement.
Language is a complex tapestry of trade, conquest and
culture to which we each add our own unique piece — whether that be a
Shakespearean sonnet or “Lol bae g2g ttyl.” As my time in the media spotlight
made me realize, saying you “speak” a language can mean a lot of different
things: it can mean memorizing verb charts, knowing the slang, even passing for
a native. But while I’ve come to realize I’ll never be fluent in 20 languages,
I’ve also understood that language is about being able to converse with people,
to see beyond cultural boundaries and find a shared humanity. And that’s a
lesson well worth learning.
PORTAL DA
LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the
persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites
referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such
websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some
instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here;
therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so.
Thank you very much.
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