Want a good college hook? How about speaking 20 languages?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Given my shaky grasp of English, I’m awestruck at people like this, which will certainly get an admission office’s attention:</p>

<p>ADVENTURES OF A TEENAGE POLYGLOT</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/nyregion/a-teenage-master-of-languages-finds-online-fellowship.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/nyregion/a-teenage-master-of-languages-finds-online-fellowship.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>"SOME people pick up a little Hebrew before their bar mitzvahs, or learn Spanish from their mothers, or can speak some Japanese from a semester abroad.</p>

<p>"Timothy Doner, 16, is not one of those people. In the fall of 2009, after studying for his bar mitzvah, he decided he wanted to learn modern Hebrew, so he continued with his tutor, engaging in long dialogues about Israeli politics. Then he felt drawn to learn Arabic, so after eighth grade he attended a summer program for college students at Brigham Young University. It took him four days to learn the alphabet, he said, a week to read fluidly.</p>

<p>"Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore.</p>

<p>“Then last March, during spring break, Timothy did something that changed the metabolism of his language study. In his family’s apartment in the East Village, he made a video of himself speaking in Arabic and uploaded it onto YouTube, with subtitles in English. The response was sparse but enthusiastic, mainly from people in the Middle East: Way to go, Tim! He followed with more videos, each adding viewers, until his Pashto video, posted on Dec. 21, had 10,000 views in two days.”</p>

<p>the article has links to videos of him in action</p>

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<p>“Then he felt drawn to learn Arabic, so after eighth grade he attended a summer program for college students at Brigham Young University. It took him four days to learn the alphabet, he said, a week to read fluidly.”</p>

<p>That’s about right for Arabic which is written phonetically. What he doesn’t indicate is how long it took him to learn to read it with comprehension - a completely different thing entirely.</p>

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<p>If h ends up studying Intl Relations in college, he’ll probably get recruited by the CIA/FBI</p>

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<p>To me, it doesn’t seem like he’s fluent in these languages. It sounds like he just gets the basic grammar down and then moves on.</p>

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<p>^Right on. The author said so in the third to last paragraph.</p>

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<p>As my dad was ‘one of those people’ it is a different skill than learning one language well and exclusively, though those folks usually have a language or two that they speak very well. After a time, you understand the basic structure of a certain language family, figure out the nuanced differences of a particular adaptation in that family, say Norwegian, if you speak German well. Then it becomes easier to fill in the blanks in Danish, Dutch and Swedish. But Finnish, the unrelated outlier, becomes a fascination, so you study that to exclusion for a time. Which leads you to Hungarian and Estonian. </p>

<p>But faced with a train station in any of these countries in Europe, you can figure out how to order coffee and a pastry, and get to the proper train, though discussing philosophy will be beyond your ken in any but German. </p>

<p>This was my dad’s path. Apply that principle to the Slavic languages, and then the languages of E Asia, and then SE, Asia, you’ve got a lifetime project. Throw in a little basic Athabaskan, which leads you to Navaho, and Hindi, which leads to a multitude of languages, well, there’s a little spice added. </p>

<p>I’d say it is more than basic grammar, as if you have a good understanding of the nuances of one of the languages in the family, more complete understanding, (though perhaps not speaking) comes fairly easily. All sorts of threads and ties become apparent as well.</p>

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<p>GLM, Great description. I totally agree. I can read and/or speak and/or understand English, French, Spanish, Latin, Italian, German and Japanese, to varying degrees. and studying a language is now a “proxy” or “template” activity for me.</p>

<p>Still, this young man must be very very gifted, as that is a a LOT of different languages in quite disparate families!!!</p>

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<p>“the article has links to videos of him in action”</p>

<p>No it doesn’t. Nor does youtube have anything on him. The NYT article has a video of him talking very limited languages. Seems like a promotion of someone trying to get into a top school.</p>

<p>I know a polyglot whose first language is Finnish. He speaks 18 languages. From the video it appears this is a kid who dabbles.</p>

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<p>My favorite fact from the recent biography of Cleopatra was that she was reportedly fluent in 9 languages including Troglodyte, an Ethiopian language that sounded like the screeching of bats. How cool is that?!</p>

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<p>On youtube, search for polyglotpal to find his videos.</p>

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<p>OK, thanks:). Hope he is doing Troglodyte!</p>

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<p>I’m the author of Babel No More, the book about hyperpolyglots that was mentioned in the NYT article about Tim Doner. I did not interview him but I interviewed a lot of people like him–if you have a parent who spoke a lot of languages, or if you think that these people have only superficial proficiencies, you might the book interesting for an expanded account of all the issues involved. Thanks!</p>

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<p>I could only understand one of his language videos (I don’t speak any of the other languages), and his vocabulary seems pretty solid. However, he has a lot of trouble with intonation, which can sometimes lead to misunderstanding (for example, he meant to say ‘war’ but it came out as ‘something smelly’). He tends to speak too fast, to give the impression of fluency, but find a language student who’s never done that!</p>

<p>All in all, considering he devoted a small amount of time to studying the actual language, I was pretty impressed. A lot of people at my college wouldn’t be able to string together as much after the first semester.</p>

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<p>[List</a> of noted polyglots](<a href=“http://www.eddiedonovan.com/notablepolyglots.htm]List”>http://www.eddiedonovan.com/notablepolyglots.htm)</p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/polyglotism/home.htm]Hyperpolyglots[/url”&gt;http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/polyglotism/home.htm]Hyperpolyglots[/url</a>]</p>