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. What is more difficult is to maintain that level, and it gets progressively harder as one adds languages. But even that, if somebody treats it as their job, ok, it's within the realm of the possible. I can conceive of putting languages in a sort of rotation that keeps them just refreshed enough to maintain that basic level.
I do seriously doubt that somebody can reach advanced, native level fluency in 42 languages. Let's posit that one could manage each in 1 year, which is remotely possible if one lives immersed and is above-average dedicated. That'd be 42 years, more years than he could conceivably have spent by the time he got into the GBoWR. Maybe one can compress it a bit more, if one starts on the next language while one is still polishing the previous one. But one cannot maintain that level either, if one doesn't refresh it regularly (I am my own proof of that one can even lose fluency in one's native language if one neglects it for decades, and non-native ones rust a bit faster). And if Janulus worked most of his life in Canada as a court interpreter, then he's not gotten immersion in a lot of the languages he learned. Wendic = Wendish = Sorbian? Wonder how the GBoWR found a handy native speaker; they've got to be mighty thin on the ground. This whole testing thing strikes me as an expensive proposal on everybody's part.
The
Geneva Language Institute in Vancouver seems legit; I found 84 people on Linked-in who claim to have been educated there, and they all look like real people. It doesn't have a website, alas, and I couldn't find any reviews for it either.
Here's a short piece about Janulus in Portuguese:
http://www.possibilidades.com.br/aprend ... anulus.asp -- that looks like an excerpt from the book
Dynamic Learning by Dilts & Epstein, which seems an NLP type book. It talks about how Janulus supposedly learned his first language, "Pakistani" -- umm, well, that's what the article says. It might be Punjabi.
Here's a newspaper article from 1998 that makes several questionable claims, but also has some more info on Janulus -- I wonder how it jives with a Pakistani language supposedly being his first language when his Polish-born mother spoke six languages and his Lithuanian-born father four. But hey, maybe he got the Wendish from his mother.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/MULTILING ... a083809089I'm not saying anyone is lying here per se. My first guess would be that there have been some misunderstandings along the way. Maybe the GBoWR didn't test for native-level fluency, but for basic conversational fluency, and the native speakers were only asked to assess whether Mr Janulus reached that goal, whether they could understand him, and whether he could answer their questions reliably, not whether he sounded like a native speaker. It'd be nice if one could contact somebody at the GBoWR who could explain their verification procedures; it doesn't sound like Mr Gossens did that -- maybe he tried and couldn't reach anyone.
I live just across the strait from Vancouver (*waves to @marpole*), and would be willing to chat with Mr Janulus, but I sure couldn't "test" anything more than the three languages I speak well enough myself, and one of them is his native one, so that leaves two. I could probably tell how good his French and Swedish are, since I've heard a lot of native speakers when I was immersed for a time myself. But I also wouldn't want to be hostile about this; the man isn't profiting from any sort of scam, and I am rather more interested in talking with an amazing polyglot (who is bound to be a language lover) about techniques than in proving him wrong.
Paul, the book you co-authored, does it also use NLP techniques like modeling? Welcome, btw.
astromule wrote:Actually, it does.We have a source now.
