Rather than the raw number, what amazed me was the variety of language families that he was proficient with. Just like you might be less impressed with someone

Rather than the raw number, what amazed me was the variety of language families that he was proficient with. Just like you might be less impressed with someone who can program in Java, C and C++ than someone who can program in C, Lisp, and Haskell, I know many people who can speak French, Italian, and Spanish...but does that even really count? Here's the breakdown by my count: * Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian -- pretty "core" Romance languages * Dutch, Afrikaans, German, English -- closely related Germanic (even I, knowing English and a bit of German can understand some Dutch) * Greek -- unique (and very impressive; I've been told by many multilingual individuals that Greek is unlike any other language and therefore a pain to learn) * Russian -- shares a few characters with Greek, but that's it * Hebrew -- a Semitic language, related to Arabic but distinct from the others he knows About all he is missing is an agglutinative language (the "Lisp"s of human languages) such as Turkish, Korean, Finnish, or Japanese, or something tonal like Mandarin. Still, a very impressive accomplishment!