Powell Alexander Janulus, do you know him?

[daegga]

Daniel Tammet maybe

[astromule]

The only one that I know is Daniel Tammet, who learnt Icelandic in one week: "Tammet is a polyglot. In Born On A Blue Day he writes that he 'knows' ten languages: English, Finnish, French, German, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Spanish, Romanian, Icelandic and Welsh.[13] In Embracing the Wide Sky, Tammet writes that he learned conversational Icelandic in a week and then appeared on an interview on Kastljós on RÚV speaking the language".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet

I wonder if there has ever been any language savants. People who may have some type of anamoly with their brain that they can pick up languages very fast and not forget them easily. I'm sure if this type of savant existed today, then people would know about them and scientists would want to speak with them for research, so I don't think any exist currently. But this could account for the possibility of famous language learners from older times, like Mezzofanti. Perhaps if the stories are true, he was some type of language savant.

Savants typically display skills with little training that other people simply can not do without hours upon hours of training, also they typically display lower mental skills in other areas. I watched a television show about musical savants once, one woman could sing any melody by only hearing it played on a piano, with no musical training. They showed her abilities with someone playing old Basque folk songs that she never heard and she could repeat the melody perfectly including the rhythm of the notes. Also, she could remember any song she had ever sung one time, she never forgot the melody. It was quite interesting and I'm sure I'm not explaining this as well as it should be. It is just an interesting thought whether there are or ever were language savants.

[dampingwire]

I don't doubt that somebody can achieve basic conversational fluency in many languages. Sure, 42, that's a lot, but I don't think it's impossible.

I was only questioning the "native level" part of the claim, which didn't seem to be borne out by the video.

To learn 42 languages to even basic conversational fluency (which is what I think the video showed for the languages I can understand) is a truly stunning achievement.

[robarb]

In addition to Tammet, there's a linguistic savant that scientists have studied named Christopher(his full name is withheld, I believe, for privacy). He has autism, and his general functioning is impaired, but he has an intense interest in languages and reportedly can communicate in about 20 of them.

Notably, neither of these two language savants are near the extreme of all-time polyglot achievement. I expect that's because they are extremely rare, and among the wider population there are just enough people with both a natural talent for languages and a tireless work ethic applied over many decades, who can achieve conversational fluency in 30+ languages without being a savant.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if you combined the savant abilities of someone like Tammet with the single-mindedness of someone like Christopher with the work ethic of someone like Alexander Arguelles and had them go at it for their entire lifetime. I guess that would be a once-in-a-billion kind of person, and they'd have to be born into the right environment, so we've never seen it happen. So we don't really know what is possible at the extreme.

Regarding Janulus's testing, I think it's pretty clear that he was never expected to be native-like. On this thread, that seems to originate from Paul Gossen's post, which was written from memory.

It's definitely not impossible that someone learned 42 languages to some unspecified level of conversational fluency, and it's very impressive assuming the required level wasn't frauduently low.

But did they really find a native speaker of Kashub, Lusatian, and Wendic to test him? If they really went to such an extreme to test him, didn't anyone ever think to record what kind of test it was?

[Dragon27]

There is a significant controversy about Daniel Tammet (talented as he may be) being really a savant (as he advertises himself to be).
More about this in an old thread on the Art of Memory Forum.

[dampingwire]

There is a significant controversy about Daniel Tammet (talented as he may be) being really a savant (as he advertises himself to be).
More about this in an old thread on the Art of Memory Forum.

What he is or isn't isn't the main point, so far as I am concerned. Did he really learn Icelandic in a week or did he have some prior knowledge and just fooled the BBC a little. If he really did achieve it, then it does seem incredible (which is probably why many people don't believe it).

[Dragon27]

What he is or isn't isn't the main point, so far as I am concerned. Did he really learn Icelandic in a week or did he have some prior knowledge and just fooled the BBC a little. If he really did achieve it, then it does seem incredible (which is probably why many people don't believe it).

It's hard to say. He already knew at least French and German and visited Scandinavia (according to the old archived page on his site).

[robarb]

Footage of Tammet speaking passable, but limited Icelandic in a favorable context is available for you to see on Youtube. What I don't know for sure is if he really knew nothing about it seven days before the video was taken. But, according to the standard story, he studied extremely intensely, had a personal teacher, is an elite memorizer of arbitrary information, and already knew German. To me, that makes it just possible that he really did do it.

It's not like he could sustain one language per week. Absolutely not. There are lots of people who speak more languages than he does.

[Jimjam]

I found this article talking about how Tammet "learned" German in a week.
It mainly talks about how he learns languages, more as child does intuitively, and methods he uses to remember vocabulary. I feel like i've seen a video to go along with this, but I am probably just imagining it.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/who-needs-berlitz-british-savant-learns-german-in-a-week-a-611381.html

And with the learning many languages to a conversational level, I feel like Moses McCormick fits the bill pretty well. He is conversational in many languages, how many I am not sure, but it would have to be somewhere around 25-40 or so, depending how lenient you are with your definition of conversational with some of his less used languages.

[pir]

I found this article talking about how Tammet "learned" German in a week.
It mainly talks about how he learns languages, more as child does intuitively, and methods he uses to remember vocabulary. I feel like i've seen a video to go along with this, but I am probably just imagining it.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/who-needs-berlitz-british-savant-learns-german-in-a-week-a-611381.html

There are various videos about this, and links to them can be found somewhere in the link @Dragon27 gave earlier.

That link has a long discussion which casts very serious doubt on that Spiegel article and several others in the same vein, and on just about anything else about how Tammet's supposed autism is responsible for his feats. That thread makes for fascinating reading because contrary to most people, those folks know all the memory tricks, and can assess public performances from that point of view.

And we're not just talking about potentially jealous people ragging on somebody who seems to have superior skills for some natural reason while they need to work hard on it -- there is a little of that at the very start -- but then the real ammunition comes to the fore. People are quoting Tammet's own words from his website in 2001 (now archived in the wayback machine), where he talks about mastering both French and German with the help of memory techniques, and there is not a word on that page about autism and synesthesia. How exactly does that jive with learning German in a week as a autistic savant with synesthesia in 2009? It doesn't. He used to sell memory training and claimed anyone could do it (which I believe to be true), but then he changed his story and now he is an autistic savant. Uh-huh.

The Spiegel article seems mostly like fawning nonsense to me. Tammet says "I learn new languages intuitively, like a child." But during his week allegedly learning German from scratch, he starts by reading from books -- that's not how children learn. "Most humans think in isolated categories, but for Tammet everything is networked." Really? Most of us think in isolated categories? I must be a savant too, cause I sure don't. I connect new words to other words I already know, in other categories, in other languages. I always look for patterns. This is not exceptional, it is common even for people who have not studied memory techniques.

If his story about German is a lie, why would the one about Icelandic be any more true? I don't have the time to dig into that, but fool me once, shame on you... etc.

The consensus on the Art of Memory site seems to be that Tammet is a trained mnemonist, and there is no actual evidence that he is a prodigious savant or has synesthesia, in fact there is MRI evidence that does not back up the synesthesia. The scientist who proclaimed Tammet a prodigious savant also believes people with ESP exist -- I am quite sure the Amazing Randi and his million dollars are still waiting for the evidence.

Everything about this smells fishy to me. But on the upside it's reminded me to look further into memory techniques -- I'm using some of them, but I could probably do a lot more reading and find out what other techniques might be applicable to learning languages.