SOME people are keen learners of many foreign languages: they find it enjoyable to rack up one, then another, then another, reading, practising, brushing up, seeking out any opportunity to use them. They are usually proud of this devotion. (Your columnist must admit to being a member of this odd tribe.)

But the longer a language-learner spends on the hobby, and the greater the numbers of languages studied, the harder a simple question becomes. Often asked, it is impossible to give an easy answer: “How many languages do you speak?” The more languages one has studied and the more experience one has, the more the answer feels like “none!” I have learned to give a numerical range and a lot of hemming and hawing.

Ken Hale, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was renowned among colleagues for picking up languages seemingly instantly. It is said, perhaps apocryphally, that he learned Finnish on a flight to Helsinki. But he insisted that he “spoke” only English, Spanish and Walpiri, an Australian aboriginal language. The rest he merely “talked in”. Tim Doner, an American teenage polyglot (see The Economist’s multilingual video interview with him here) is much the same. A video about Mr Doner has the title “Teen speaks over 20 languages”, but Mr Doner laughingly says only that he is “very comfortable” in four or five. More.

See: The Economist

Subscribe to the translation news daily digest here. See more translation news.