Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The Multilinguist

 
I’m always thoroughly impressed by someone who can speak many languages fluently. After doing my best to learn Spanish in school and French in Switzerland, I can attest first-hand how difficult it is to (attempt to) master a second (or third) language.

While riding the train the other day, I sat across from a guy who definitely was linguistically gifted. Over the course of a 40-minute train ride, he switched effortlessly between English, Spanish, French, German and Italian while speaking with various people on the phone.

Typically, I would have been annoyed by someone talking on his mobile for a prolonged period while on the train, but in this case I was so impressed by what I was witnessing that I didn’t even care.

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