Visitors occasionally appeared, whose knowledge he was enabled to turn to profitable account in extending his own store of languages. From an Armenian traveller who came to Bologna in 1818, he received his first initiation in that difficult and peculiar language, which he afterwards extended in a visit to the celebrated convent of San Lazzaro, at Venice.

He studied Georgian with the assistance of a young man from Teflis,who graduated in medicine at Bologna. And even from natives of those countries with the general language of which he was most familar, he seldom failed to learn some of the peculiarities of local or provincial dialects by which the several branches of each are distinguished.

In this way he learned Flemish from some Belgian students of the university.