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Is this Ziad Fazah or another polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6548 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 17 of 24 31 January 2008 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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It seems the video has been pulled.
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| Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6940 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German | Message 18 of 24 31 January 2008 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||
You can see the hosts flipping through the Brazilian Guinness Book of Records, where Fazah's languages are stated as a world record. I guess this is as far as their research went. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| translipcorsia Diglot Newbie ColombiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5416 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English, Spanish* Studies: Dutch, Latin Studies: Italian | Message 19 of 24 06 February 2011 at 8:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can watch his You Tube videos here:http://www.youtube.com/user/srcforeignlanguages#p/u
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 20 of 24 07 February 2011 at 12:38am | IP Logged | ||
It is kind of you to defend him, it shows you have a good heart. However, I guess the point is that if you are not too good in the major languages, which have a lot of resources, and where many people can see if your claim is justified, then why should we believe that you are good at speaking the languages with few resources which very few can evaluate? I have seen a number of polyglot videos. Most of the people behind them are really good at the languages I know, and I am then willing to believe their claims in languages I do not know. Others are really, really bad at the languages I know, and claim to have learned the more obscure ones in days, and that they are fluent in them. You will forgive me for being a bit more reluctant to take that at face value. In the last video I saw of Ziadh,he said that he taught 59 languages, not only that he spoke them. In my book you should know a language you teach quite well. Forgotten glimpses of languages you learned 30 years ago and forgot 20 years ago doesn't really cut it. And again, I marvel at the insistence of speaking 59 languages when a realistic estimation might be 15 or 10 or 5. Even speaking 5 foreign languages well has a lot of merit, not to mention if you speak 10 or 15. So why this blind will to claim to speak languages you dont't speak anymore, or at the best are really bad at? And as for your example, noone is judging him for not speaking any given language on the planet. If he is being judged it is for claiming to have divine talents, and to speak languages that it has been proved that he does not speak well. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 07 February 2011 at 3:21pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mcjon77 Senior Member United States Joined 6609 days ago 193 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Egyptian), French | Message 21 of 24 07 February 2011 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
Because that may have been the greatest accomplishment of his life (Guinness Book of World Records) and he wants to hold on to it. Since, after his original listing, they removed the category of "World's Greatest Living Polyglot", he can continue to make the claim that he is the "World's Greatest Living Polyglot" so long as he continues to claim that he speaks all of those languages. Guinness will not "certify" anyone else, because the category was closed, so no one else can take the title from him. If he says "I only speak 15 languages now, I have forgotten a lot", then he is no longer the "World's Greatest Living Polyglot." With these world records, some people covet them more than their own children. There is documentary on Youtube called "King of Kong." It is all about one guy trying to break the world record for Donkey Kong, and the current title holder trying to hold on to that title. People go to extremes for these world records. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Polyglot0613 Newbie United States Joined 5893 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English | Message 23 of 24 16 February 2011 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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On Ziad's wikipedia page, it is said that he knows these languages:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Armenian, Aymara, Azeri, Babylonian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Cypriot, Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Greenlandic, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Inuktitut, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin, Māori, Marathi, Mayan, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Old Church Slavonic, Old French Sign Language, Old Norse, Old Nubian language, Páez, Palaic, Palauan, Pali, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Proto-Indo-European, Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbo-Croatian, Singapore Colloquial English, Sinhalese, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Wolof, Wu, Xhosa, ǃXóõ, Yiddish, and Zulu. I never know that he knew Proto-Indo-European, Old Norse, Old French Sign Language, and ǃXóõ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziad_Fazah Edited by Polyglot0613 on 16 February 2011 at 7:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6866 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 24 of 24 17 February 2011 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
He doesn't. He never claimed to know several of those languages, to my knowledge. And when I've corresponded with him, he never acted like he'd give several of those languages, such as Mayan or Babylonian, a second glance since there is no money in them. I've gotten the impression that Mr. Fazah's goals were never out of a true love for linguistics, but more like those of an entrepreneur. Besides, this is an example of Wikipedia doing an exceptionally shoddy research job. First, they stated that Mr. Fazah speaks 58 languages, which is according to Mr. Fazah himself (sometimes he says 59, actually). But if you count the list, there are in fact 86 languages given. If you check the source listed, you get the cover of a book Ziad wrote and several of those languages which make up the other 20+ languages are not even listed. I wonder if the author of this article was satirizing Mr. Fazah. EDIT: Typos Edited by Journeyer on 17 February 2011 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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