20 ms·

The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages

177 points by NaOH 5y ago

sensitivefrost 5y ago
Interesting. The end implies he doesn't want to clean carpets any more. I hope he can find a job translating in a capacity that makes him happy to use his language skills he clearly finds so much joy from.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  I'd hope someone hires him. He probably doesn't have the skills for a traditional translating job, just as the average bilingual person hasn't. There are jobs for "unskilled" translators, not sure how much and in what contexts. Not sure if there is a job description out there for "hyper-polyglot genius". Niche-skill at best, unfortunately. Maybe as a tester for multilingual software?
dhosek 5y ago
My kids are natively bilingual, with their mother speaking to them in Spanish¹ and me in English from infancy. They're about to be 8 and are curious about other languages (my son wants to learn French, my daughter Japanese). It's interesting to see how they have fairly different personalities depending on their linguistic context. In English, my daughter is more extroverted, my son more introverted, the reverse is the case in Spanish. I don't think it's a matter of comfort in the languages—my son has had a strong attention to gradations of meaning between words in both languages. I’m looking forward to seeing how their linguistic skills develop as they get older. If it weren’t for Covid, they would have started French classes on weekends last year, but maybe we’ll get there in the next year or so. Otherwise, they may have to pick up French from visits with their Mexican/Belgian cousins. ⸻ 1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³ 2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time. 3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵ 4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian). 5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.
- paranoidrobot 5y ago
  Interesting. I've had an interest in other langauges, can understand a few words, but terrible at speaking it. > Her English is accentless I don't mean to pick on you, but every English speaker has an accent. It might be some kind of American accent, but it's still an accent.
  - numeri 5y ago
    This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
    - jhugo 5y ago
      Interesting. I've always been confused by "accentless", and since I had only heard the term used by Americans, had always interpreted it the same uncharitable way as GP. Your interpretation makes much more sense. TIL!
    - dhosek 5y ago
      This, exactly. If I would have to identify an accent it would be television news anchor, the sort of speech which lacks any distinctive regional indicators. I did student teaching at a high school a mile and a half away from the high school I attended just outside Chicago. I remember the students (mostly Mexican-American) mocking how I said “root” (and other oo-words) where I use the short o͝o sound rather than the long o͞o sound of, e.g., boot. Everyone I grew up with (except my Mom who was born in Western Pennsylvania), pronounces these words the same as I do, but the changes in the demographics of the area (from mostly Slavs, Italians and some Greeks and Serbs to mostly Latino) have also changed the micro-regional accent as well. It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, despite his cosmopolitan upbringing, has acquired the Chicago habit of truncating a lot of vowels to schwas so he will, for example, say “tuh” for “to.” Then again, I’ve picked up a lot of L.A. regionalisms in my own speech thanks to living there for 18 years of my life (the most notable is saying freeway rather than expressway).
to1y 5y ago
My experience with these guys(usually kids) is they speak English well and can say a couple of phrases out of the other languages. The trick is they confidently copy the intonation of the language they're "speaking" in to fool those who dont speak it.
charcircuit 5y ago
Languages need a lot of upkeep in order to be fluent. For a single language you are talking about over 10000 vocabulary words and hundreds of grammatical patterns not to mention learning the normal way to say things like what verbs typically go with a noun. And then there's also deeper learning the correct way to pronounce everything let alone the mannerism and body language you should use while speaking it. You have to do all of this without losing competency with any of the other languages you know and without mixing up anything between them. In order to reach these crazy high number of languages you will have to make compromises.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  Roughly 2000 words are enough for a basic level. Because some of these languages are related, their vocabulary and grammatical patterns overlap. You are underestimating the capability of some people to memorize certain information. Sometimes it is called "eidetic" memory. The best chess players just don't forget any chess position they ever see. Similar reports in music. Most of them are useless when memorizing any other form of "data". The carpet cleaner in question probably has that facility for words, phonemes and grammar. He just doesn't forget that stuff.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
I thought I'm quite good with my about 7 foreign languages with basic competency. I only ever became really fluent in English though. My latest addition was Arabic, and the Duolingo course wasn't exactly deep.
pcthrowaway 5y ago
I wonder if he'd have a natural aptitude for programming languages also
- threatofrain 5y ago
  They should be related at least due to the association of both programming and language acquisition to general mental ability.
- Ferrotin 5y ago
  No, he wouldn’t. Programming languages have virtually no vocabulary, compared to natural languages. The differences between two programming languages aren’t the same kind of thing as the differences between two natural languages. Developers already pick up new programming languages easily, and talent there comes from being able to absorb its documentation rapidly. If we know he has a good memory and doesn’t forget stuff, that is generally an advantage, but the connection that it is a “language” is not the reason.
  - Arwill 5y ago
    I agree, someone speaking multiple languages will not suddenly become good at programming. But there is a study that showed, that talent for languages matters more for programming skills than talent for mathematics.
    - Ferrotin 5y ago
      But all the best programmers are good at maths. Did that study do anything beyond intro programming materials? Did that study really show anything?
- dismantlethesun 5y ago
  My natural aptitude for reading programming languages has never helped me out speaking languages. After 20 years, I still only speak 3 words of French. Inability to pronounce or hear certain phonemes is a real phenomenon.
Ir0nMan 5y ago
https://archive.ph/fRyEl https://archive.ph/fRyEl
ars 5y ago
"but after a bout of depression" And now I know why he's not working another job. Depression is the life killer.
- blunte 5y ago
  It sounds in several places in the article like he has a severe case of impostor syndrome. Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
  - astrange 5y ago
    Well, he seems to have diagnosed himself with autism as well, possibly accurately.
    - HappyDreamer 5y ago
      Yes, I think he has a bit executive dysfunction -- a bit unable to set and follow up on long term goals. That'd make it hard for him to join a uni or find ways to make use of his abilities. I wonder if he'd be more happy, working as a language teacher assistant (why assistant? see the 1st sentence above), for all languages they teach at some university nearby :-)
  - neovive 5y ago
    Amazing! Almost like a real-life "Good Will Hunting" story.
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    Heartwarming story
dvh 5y ago
First 5 languages are the hardest ;)
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  Meh. Can hack my way out of a wet paperbag in 5 or 6 european languages, puzzle out Greek/Cyrillic if desperate. Once knew a few katakana characters. Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, whatever. No prospects of improvement.
  - astrange 5y ago
    I assume those 5 or 6 are all PIE variants and you don't know Basque/Finnish/Hungarian?
- sshine 5y ago
  Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;) As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation. As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-for-a-native-Chinese-speaker?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...) Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one. Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > As a native Scandinavian... > As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese. Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.
rectang 5y ago
> The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand. Giant caudate nucleus at work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpTCZ-hO6iI&t=700s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpTCZ-hO6iI&t=700s
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Can we grow it?
bradhe 5y ago
[flagged]
- masturbayeser 5y ago
  how brave of you
  - more_corn 5y ago
regpertom 5y ago
This could be done with a few people eg: “The remarkable brain of a nightclub bouncer with the worlds highest IQ.” The article talks of him like he’s a child. Bouncing around at all the attention. Thrilled to make new friends. Bordering on mockery. Hidden behind wonder, the call goes out: look at you, who are not one of us. A carnival ride for the writer, gather ‘round everyone! Smart enough to do anything he wants, not smart enough to be normal. “There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.“
- rob74 5y ago
  Is it "normal" for Americans to not only not be able to speak a foreign language, but to not even know what the word "polyglot" means, and look at one like you would look at an alien (one from outer space, I mean, not one from another country)?
  - VincentEvans 5y ago
    Is that an attempt at a thinly veiled insult in a form of a question? Or do you really think that one of the most powerful countries in the world is “normally” somehow full of ignorants? I’ll answer - not any more than where you are from.
    - rob74 5y ago
      Sorry if it sounds that way! But if a Washington Post journalist is not embarrassed to not know the word "polyglot", and then describes polyglots as people she has only seen on YouTube, you might jump to that conclusion. Or, from her Spanish-sounding name, you might suspect that she does in fact speak at least two languages, but is trying to hide it in order to appear "normal"? And I'm not saying that the US has a higher percentage of ignorants than other countries, but being one of the most powerful countries in the world, they are also one of the most (if not the most) self-centered. So, not a higher percentage of ignorance in general, but maybe a higher percentage of ignorance of other languages, cultures etc.

177 points by NaOH 5y ago

Interesting. The end implies he doesn't want to clean carpets any more. I hope he can find a job translating in a capacity that makes him happy to use his language skills he clearly finds so much joy from.

bayesian_horse 5y ago
I'd hope someone hires him. He probably doesn't have the skills for a traditional translating job, just as the average bilingual person hasn't. There are jobs for "unskilled" translators, not sure how much and in what contexts. Not sure if there is a job description out there for "hyper-polyglot genius". Niche-skill at best, unfortunately. Maybe as a tester for multilingual software?

dhosek 5y ago

My kids are natively bilingual, with their mother speaking to them in Spanish¹ and me in English from infancy. They're about to be 8 and are curious about other languages (my son wants to learn French, my daughter Japanese). It's interesting to see how they have fairly different personalities depending on their linguistic context. In English, my daughter is more extroverted, my son more introverted, the reverse is the case in Spanish. I don't think it's a matter of comfort in the languages—my son has had a strong attention to gradations of meaning between words in both languages. I’m looking forward to seeing how their linguistic skills develop as they get older. If it weren’t for Covid, they would have started French classes on weekends last year, but maybe we’ll get there in the next year or so. Otherwise, they may have to pick up French from visits with their Mexican/Belgian cousins. ⸻ 1. My wife is a native speaker of Spanish. Her English is accentless² and she has above-average reading/speaking/writing skills in English. She also speaks French.³ 2. Mostly. Schwas still trip her up from time to time. 3. Most of her family is at least trilingual, speaking English, Spanish and one other language. I think her cousin with the most languages has five: English, Spanish, French, German and Arabic. At his sister's wedding, he gave a toast in French with a flawless accent⁴ that blew me away. I often joke that I almost speak one language, but I haven't learned all the words in English yet. I'm semi-functional in Spanish, but my kids are quick to point out that my accent is “horrible” and with my hearing loss, it’s a challenge to participate in conversations. There are a few languages I can read with a dictionary, but I don’t know that I can claim any facility in them.⁵ 4. I suspected that his accent was good, but I verified it with the francophones at his sister’s wedding (she married a quadrilingual Belgian). 5. One thing I’ve found is that in general, Americans tend to overestimate their linguistic abilities and non-Americans to underestimate their skills. It’s typical that someone who took a couple years of French in high school ten years ago and hasn’t used it since will claim that they speak French. A European who says that they speak “a little” Italian will be able to function just fine in a conversation with an Italian.

paranoidrobot 5y ago
Interesting. I've had an interest in other langauges, can understand a few words, but terrible at speaking it. > Her English is accentless I don't mean to pick on you, but every English speaker has an accent. It might be some kind of American accent, but it's still an accent.
- numeri 5y ago
  This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
  - jhugo 5y ago
    Interesting. I've always been confused by "accentless", and since I had only heard the term used by Americans, had always interpreted it the same uncharitable way as GP. Your interpretation makes much more sense. TIL!
  - dhosek 5y ago
    This, exactly. If I would have to identify an accent it would be television news anchor, the sort of speech which lacks any distinctive regional indicators. I did student teaching at a high school a mile and a half away from the high school I attended just outside Chicago. I remember the students (mostly Mexican-American) mocking how I said “root” (and other oo-words) where I use the short o͝o sound rather than the long o͞o sound of, e.g., boot. Everyone I grew up with (except my Mom who was born in Western Pennsylvania), pronounces these words the same as I do, but the changes in the demographics of the area (from mostly Slavs, Italians and some Greeks and Serbs to mostly Latino) have also changed the micro-regional accent as well. It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, despite his cosmopolitan upbringing, has acquired the Chicago habit of truncating a lot of vowels to schwas so he will, for example, say “tuh” for “to.” Then again, I’ve picked up a lot of L.A. regionalisms in my own speech thanks to living there for 18 years of my life (the most notable is saying freeway rather than expressway).

to1y 5y ago

My experience with these guys(usually kids) is they speak English well and can say a couple of phrases out of the other languages. The trick is they confidently copy the intonation of the language they're "speaking" in to fool those who dont speak it.

charcircuit 5y ago

Languages need a lot of upkeep in order to be fluent. For a single language you are talking about over 10000 vocabulary words and hundreds of grammatical patterns not to mention learning the normal way to say things like what verbs typically go with a noun. And then there's also deeper learning the correct way to pronounce everything let alone the mannerism and body language you should use while speaking it. You have to do all of this without losing competency with any of the other languages you know and without mixing up anything between them. In order to reach these crazy high number of languages you will have to make compromises.

bayesian_horse 5y ago
Roughly 2000 words are enough for a basic level. Because some of these languages are related, their vocabulary and grammatical patterns overlap. You are underestimating the capability of some people to memorize certain information. Sometimes it is called "eidetic" memory. The best chess players just don't forget any chess position they ever see. Similar reports in music. Most of them are useless when memorizing any other form of "data". The carpet cleaner in question probably has that facility for words, phonemes and grammar. He just doesn't forget that stuff.

bayesian_horse 5y ago

I thought I'm quite good with my about 7 foreign languages with basic competency. I only ever became really fluent in English though. My latest addition was Arabic, and the Duolingo course wasn't exactly deep.

pcthrowaway 5y ago

I wonder if he'd have a natural aptitude for programming languages also

threatofrain 5y ago
They should be related at least due to the association of both programming and language acquisition to general mental ability.
Ferrotin 5y ago
No, he wouldn’t. Programming languages have virtually no vocabulary, compared to natural languages. The differences between two programming languages aren’t the same kind of thing as the differences between two natural languages. Developers already pick up new programming languages easily, and talent there comes from being able to absorb its documentation rapidly. If we know he has a good memory and doesn’t forget stuff, that is generally an advantage, but the connection that it is a “language” is not the reason.
- Arwill 5y ago
  I agree, someone speaking multiple languages will not suddenly become good at programming. But there is a study that showed, that talent for languages matters more for programming skills than talent for mathematics.
  - Ferrotin 5y ago
    But all the best programmers are good at maths. Did that study do anything beyond intro programming materials? Did that study really show anything?
dismantlethesun 5y ago
My natural aptitude for reading programming languages has never helped me out speaking languages. After 20 years, I still only speak 3 words of French. Inability to pronounce or hear certain phonemes is a real phenomenon.

Ir0nMan 5y ago

https://archive.ph/fRyEl https://archive.ph/fRyEl

ars 5y ago

"but after a bout of depression" And now I know why he's not working another job. Depression is the life killer.

blunte 5y ago
It sounds in several places in the article like he has a severe case of impostor syndrome. Fortunately (spoiler) at the end of the article, after his time at the MIT research lab, he sees that some traditionally super smart people value him and see him as intellectually special.
- astrange 5y ago
  Well, he seems to have diagnosed himself with autism as well, possibly accurately.
  - HappyDreamer 5y ago
    Yes, I think he has a bit executive dysfunction -- a bit unable to set and follow up on long term goals. That'd make it hard for him to join a uni or find ways to make use of his abilities. I wonder if he'd be more happy, working as a language teacher assistant (why assistant? see the 1st sentence above), for all languages they teach at some university nearby :-)
- neovive 5y ago
  Amazing! Almost like a real-life "Good Will Hunting" story.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Heartwarming story

dvh 5y ago

First 5 languages are the hardest ;)

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
Meh. Can hack my way out of a wet paperbag in 5 or 6 european languages, puzzle out Greek/Cyrillic if desperate. Once knew a few katakana characters. Totally dumb and illiterate in Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Thai, whatever. No prospects of improvement.
- astrange 5y ago
  I assume those 5 or 6 are all PIE variants and you don't know Basque/Finnish/Hungarian?
sshine 5y ago
Rather, as with programming languages, the first five paradigms are the hardest. ;) As a native Scandinavian, I understand most Scandinavian (except Finnish) without having spent more than fifty hours with various Scandinavians, and without having attempted to learn much. (It's mostly deciphering dialects, remapping certain words.) Having unwillingly learned German as a child, I can enjoy German television and navigate German cities as a confident, talkative tourist. Having learned fluent Esperanto, I can decipher a bunch of words in French and Italian, but can't follow conversation. As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. (https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-for-a-native-Chinese-speaker?share=1 https://www.quora.com/How-difficult-is-is-to-learn-Japanese-...) Learning Ruby if you know Python is kind of learning another European language, if you already know one. Learning Haskell or Prolog is kind of learning Chinese if you only know imperative languages.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > As a native Scandinavian... > As for Chinese, 1.5 years in, I can form sentences like a shy 1.5-year-old: Anything above 3 characters is probably grammatically incorrect, or "you could say that... but a native speaker wouldn't." Different paradigm altogether. But a Chinese can pick up decent Japanese in less time. That's not a statement about how difficult it is to learn Japanese. It's a statement about your approach to learning Chinese. Japanese is no more closely related to Chinese than Chinese is to Swedish.

rectang 5y ago

> The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand. Giant caudate nucleus at work? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpTCZ-hO6iI&t=700s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpTCZ-hO6iI&t=700s

radicaldreamer 5y ago
Can we grow it?

bradhe 5y ago

[flagged]

masturbayeser 5y ago
how brave of you
- more_corn 5y ago

regpertom 5y ago

This could be done with a few people eg: “The remarkable brain of a nightclub bouncer with the worlds highest IQ.” The article talks of him like he’s a child. Bouncing around at all the attention. Thrilled to make new friends. Bordering on mockery. Hidden behind wonder, the call goes out: look at you, who are not one of us. A carnival ride for the writer, gather ‘round everyone! Smart enough to do anything he wants, not smart enough to be normal. “There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.“

rob74 5y ago
Is it "normal" for Americans to not only not be able to speak a foreign language, but to not even know what the word "polyglot" means, and look at one like you would look at an alien (one from outer space, I mean, not one from another country)?
- VincentEvans 5y ago
  Is that an attempt at a thinly veiled insult in a form of a question? Or do you really think that one of the most powerful countries in the world is “normally” somehow full of ignorants? I’ll answer - not any more than where you are from.
  - rob74 5y ago
    Sorry if it sounds that way! But if a Washington Post journalist is not embarrassed to not know the word "polyglot", and then describes polyglots as people she has only seen on YouTube, you might jump to that conclusion. Or, from her Spanish-sounding name, you might suspect that she does in fact speak at least two languages, but is trying to hide it in order to appear "normal"? And I'm not saying that the US has a higher percentage of ignorants than other countries, but being one of the most powerful countries in the world, they are also one of the most (if not the most) self-centered. So, not a higher percentage of ignorance in general, but maybe a higher percentage of ignorance of other languages, cultures etc.