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Kim Ung-Yong, highest IQ & polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4691 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes  Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 23 03 February 2012 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would like to write to this man in South Korea (where I am living) and ask him for advice about how to learn languages, Korean in particular.
This man, reported to have the world's highest IQ, was a polyglot (well, at least able to read these languages, am not sure whether he could speak them fluently) by his second birthday. He appeared on Japanese TV when he was four and displayed his extraordinary language skills. (I would love to see this clip if it is still around.) If he was able to read Japanese he must have known Kanja when he was two years old. Where did a two-year old find the resources to learn foreign languages? These language books must have already been in his home or he got them from a library or his parents must have bought them to feed his voracious brain. I also read elsewhere that he knew Indonesian or Tagalog by the time he was four.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Ung-yong It takes him A MONTH to learn a foreign language. I wonder what that would be like. "Hmmm, what shall I learn this month? Catalan? Tibetan? Bulgarian? I'm running out of languages to learn at this rate. Well, I'm going to Norway next month to see the fjords. I think I will learn Norwegian ..." He said in a recent interview (I can't find the link) that his English and other languages have gotten rusty from lack of use, but that with some practice, he would probably be able to communicate in them again. I suppose even if I did get the information I wanted from him, it probably wouldn't do me much good. His brain is obviously different to normal people's brains so ordinary people most likely wouldn't be able to use his methods even if they wanted to. For example, he probably has photographic memory for words. My memory is like a sieve and I don't think anything will improve it. Perhaps he can give me some tips or some broad guidelines for studying languages to make my language-studying more efficient.  Edited by Balliballi on 03 February 2012 at 9:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5417 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 2 of 23 03 February 2012 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here is a link to the interview you mentioned. If he learned these languages when he was a very young child he probably spent little time thinking about the process and he hasn't worked on learning any other languages since, so I doubt he has much, if any advice at all. A little sceptical of him starting to speak at two months old and conversing fluently by six months to be honest. The only reference wiki uses for that is from an old Time article which is behind a pay wall. By two months, most babies are only just beginning to have their senses tuned enough to be able to do things like follow objects, let alone have any understanding of language. It takes around 10 months or so for most babies to even react to their own name. I expect these figures are somewhat exaggerated. He is extraordinary but I doubt he is THAT much of a neurological marvel. Edited by jazzboy.bebop on 03 February 2012 at 9:46pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4691 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 23 03 February 2012 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not skeptical about it because he DID appear on Japanese TV when he was four showing off his language skills. (And remember he knew Kanji when he was two years old.) If he knew a second language well enough to appear on a foreign TV station when he was four (and he knew other foreign languages as well), he probably knew his native language, Korean, long before that. And his Korean language skills must have been acquired at a very young age because he was able to use Korean to learn other subjects and excel at them at young ages. For example, we see the photo of him as a young boy writing complicated mathematical equations on a board, and he was a guest student of physics at a Korean university starting from when he was only four years old. If he was still learning Korean when he was two or three, it wouldn't have been possible for him to have mastered physics to a university level when he was four years old, as concepts in physics require an adult's level of language to grasp them. 
He was a guest student of physics at Hanyang University in Korea, from when he was four, to the age of seven. He was also invited to work at NASA when he was eight. As I recall reading somewhere, he was writing in his diary when he was, I think, three years old, stuff like how he was getting visitors all the time to his home and that it annoyed him a bit. From the link you provided, here is the part I was talking about:
Edited by Balliballi on 03 February 2012 at 11:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4691 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 4 of 23 03 February 2012 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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His IQ is immeasurable. It says 210 but it's probably much much higher, like 2100 if it was possible to extrapolate that far. IQ scores aren't absolute measures of intelligence but age-related comparisons. So even when he was four, he was still far more intelligent than people ten times his age. Edited by Balliballi on 03 February 2012 at 10:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 23 03 February 2012 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I understand his dismay at being called a failure, but I'm sure he can understand ours. Can such giftedness be left unused for the greater good of society? Even if he were kind enough to devote a month per year to solving humanity's greater problems, we'd be better off for it.
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| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4691 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 23 03 February 2012 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is a bit off-topic but I agree with what he says in the interview. If he has lived life to its fullest and he's lived life for himself, on his own terms, and not for what others expect him to do, I think he's successful. If he had not dropped out of NASA or whatever he was doing when he decided to return to Korea, he would have been very unhappy and might have even killed himself, he says. So he did the right thing. He's happy he says. He is a private individual and should not be expected to live life according to others' expectations, regardless of whether he was gifted or not gifted. In fact, I think it was wrong that he was pulled out of Korea and sent to America at such a young age to work for NASA. A child should not be made to do something like no matter how intelligent they are.
Actually I am not sure what age he appeared on Japanese TV, but it says here in the link below that:
http://www.woosk.com/2009/04/kim-ung-yong-attended-universit y-at-age-4-phd-at-age-15-worlds-highest-iq.html So he knew Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, German, English when he was a child and he showed his proficiency in those languages on Japanese TV. He also later learned French because he mentions knowing that language in a later interview. NINE languages that he knows (there could be more, these are the ones I found listed in articles), most of them learned when he was a kid. I am still trying to learn ONE other language, Korean (which I used to know as a kid), and am struggling with it even though I have been exposed to it for seven years. So I really marvel at his ability. I can't even pretend to know how he managed to learn Chinese and Japanese, two very difficult languages with complicated writing systems, at a young age. Edited: He was 6 years old when he appeared on Japanese TV showing his proficiency in several languages according to this Korean article. http://www.sciencetimes.co.kr/article.do?atidx=0000012519 Edited by Balliballi on 04 February 2012 at 2:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6436 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 23 03 February 2012 at 11:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That's pretty good handwriting on that chalkboard. I bet he posed for that pic and someone else wrote it. Just saying.
I wonder if this guy can function normally. Extremely high IQ people often have trouble integrating into society. They are kind of socially "weird." Not everyone, but it's common enough that most people have noticed it. Think back to school when you were growing up. The super smart kids usually weren't the "cool" kids. Anyway, I'd never heard of this guy before. Thanks for posting the wikipedia link. edit - if you write him, tell him to join this forum! Edited by IronFist on 03 February 2012 at 11:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vientito Senior Member Canada Joined 6337 days ago 212 posts - 281 votes | Message 8 of 23 03 February 2012 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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His mom must have fed him a special kind of kimchi :)
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