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The Mystery of People Who Speak Languages
What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?
He is a hyperpolyglot, with a command of twenty-two living languages (Spanish, Italian, Piedmontese, English, Mandarin, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Shawi, Aymara, German, Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Guarani, Farsi, and Serbian), thirteen of which he speaks fluently. But his gifts were certified by an Irish scholar and a British philologist, Charles William Russell and Thomas Watts, who set a standard for fluency that is still useful in vetting the claims of modern Mezzofantis: Can they speak with an unstilted freedom that transcends rote mimicry? Erard, in his survey for “Babel No More,” queried his subjects on their learning protocols, and, while some were vague (“I accept mistakes and uncertainty; I listen and read a lot”), others gave elaborate accounts of drawing “mind maps” and of building “memory anchors,” or of creating an architectural model for each new language, to be furnished with vocabulary as they progressed.
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