As I was looking at the Wikipedia article called ‘List of Polyglots’, I stumbled upon a man who the Guinness book of World Records calls the most ‘fluent’ man around. Powell Janulus passed a 2 hour fluency test for each of 42 languages! And he lives in my (and LingQ’s) hometown of Vancouver. See the wikipedia article here:
here is a video of him speaking a few languages. I have to say I could not understand most of his Japanese due to his thick accent. But his French was fine.
Thanks for posting this! Really interesting.
He may have the record, but it’s hard to tell from that video, because he speaks maybe 10-15 seconds, and most are basic.
I don’t speak a few of the languages in the video, but I knew what he was saying because it was all generally the same.
Similar approach to Moses it seems to me.
Good post!
Well you do have Guinness to guarantee it, I do not see why they would give it to him without him really earning it. It is not as if he is a marketable persona. Too bad he seems unwell recently, I would love to see Steve and him interview since they are both in Vancouver.
Well yes, I don’t mean any discredit or disrepect by my comment. Just seems, in that video (which seems he is fairly older (20+ years since the test), that he may have degraded. It would be nice to see a video with him and Steve, or perhaps multiple polyglots conversing in several languages.
Impressive!
Actually I stumble upon the list of polyglots after I noticed that LingQ STILL has no Wikipedia page, despite similar businesses having one.