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I certainly couldn’t read Shakespeare without a dictionary, and I’d be equally helpless in a room with Jamaicans or Cajuns.
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When I listen to my father, a lawyer, talk to other lawyers, his words sound as foreign to me as Finnish. English is my first language, but what I really spoke was a hybrid of teenage slang and Manhattan-ese. But then I realized that you can be nominally fluent in a language and still struggle to understand parts of it. When I was beginning to discover languages, I had a romanticized view of words like “speak” and “fluency”. 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.
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Language became an obsession, one that I pursued in summer classes, school, web forums and language meet-ups around the city.īy March of 2012, media outlets such as the BBC and The New York Timesfeatured 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.Īfter a while, though, my media “moments” felt more like gruesome chores than opportunities to spread the word. 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. After that it was Persian, then Russian, then Mandarin … and about fifteen others. I moved on to Arabic, which I’d study every morning by reading news headlines with a dictionary and by talking to street vendors. 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. I spent hours walking around my New York City neighborhood, visiting Israeli cafés to eavesdrop on people’s conversations. 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. 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. 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. I became interested in the Middle East and started studying Hebrew on my own. I began my language education at age thirteen. 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.īut 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. 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.