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An Indian boy speaks 13 languages. | ||
Tags: Children | Multilingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| bluecollar Groupie United States Joined 5956 days ago 43 posts - 48 votes | Message 1 of 3 19 January 2008 at 4:54pm | IP Logged |
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Can you guys verify if he indeed speaks that many languages.Please go to youtube.com,then type child prodigy multilingual.There is also a Vietnamese little girl who speaks 11 languages.Just type wendy vo to watch her video's.I wonder how many languages a child can learn.
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 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6696 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 3 22 January 2008 at 12:06pm | IP Logged |
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From that video I saw it is hard to verify anything since he could just be parroting a very small number of set phrases that he has memorised. This was not done by a proficient speaker conversing with him in each of the languages, just an interviewer prompting him in English to parrot short samples of each one.
He might speak them or he might not. You just can't tell from the video whether he does or not and at what level he might be. His pronunciation in some of them sounded really good though. Apparently he is working as a street vendor and these phrases are what he is using as his sales pitches. Edited by Hencke on 22 January 2008 at 12:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6505 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 3 22 January 2008 at 1:41pm | IP Logged |
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Direct link: "Amazing kid 13 languages"
He doesn't claim that he can really speak all those languages, - as he says himself (around 1:33) he has just learned some phrases in a lot of languages in order to sell things to all the tourists that come by ("I'm selling all tourists that come here"). Of course it also takes some work to learn to rattle off a pre-learned sales pitch, but in the clip he only speaks English. In 1993 when I visited Nepal I met a boy in Bhaktapur who claimed that he could speak English, German, French, Italian and Spanish plus Hindi and Nepali. OK, I let him prove it by speaking to him in the five non-Asiatic languages, and he did indeed prove that he could speak freely in all those languages. So I went into a store with him and bought him a dictionary as some kind of on-the-spot development aid. Based on this case I would not be surprised to meet another young salesperson with a lot of languages on his CV, - but you have to speak to them to find out how much there really is behind the set phrases. The man who did the U-tube clip probably wasn't able to do this so he missed the chance to prove anything. Edited by Iversen on 22 January 2008 at 1:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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