Authors: Michael Erard
I checked on the remaining names on Gunnemark’s list of language superlearners: Czerniawski, Fazah,
Juutilainen, Kenrick, Krebs, Nurmekund. Maybe one of them would claim limitless powers. But Krebs, Lomb, and Nurmekund were dead. Contact info for Juutilainen and Czerniawski eluded me. Dan Gunnemark, Erik’s son, gave me an email address for Kenrick, who provided a phone number in England, but never picked up the phone when I called, so after a while I gave up.
Which left Ziad Fazah.
Chapter 8
M
y earliest research into Ziad Fazah turned up only a 1996 news report from Reuters with rudimentary details about his life: born in 1953 in Liberia, he was taken to Beirut as an infant. After graduating with a degree in philology from the American University in Beirut, he moved with his parents to Brazil, then married. He carried a business card stating that he “reads, writes and speaks
fifty-four languages fluently.” Up until 1998, he was listed in
The
Guinness Book of World Records
as speaking fifty-six languages—again, it was said, “fluently.” How this was determined was fuzzy—something about television, Greece, and a hyperpolyglot freak show. The footage has never been released.
Unfortunately, the poor Reuters journalist didn’t sift the truth from Fazah’s self-mythologizing.
“Aside from his mother tongue of Arabic, and French and English, which he learned at school, Fazah taught himself all the languages. He began with German and moved on to such Far Eastern tongues as Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Japanese,” goes the article. At forty, Fazah was apparently still picking up languages; most recently, he’d learned Papiamentu, a creole language that combines Dutch,
Portuguese, and Spanish and is spoken in certain Caribbean islands. “Fazah, who can learn three thousand words in two to three months,” the Reuters writer dutifully recorded, “said Mandarin
was the hardest language to learn because of the vast number of ideograms. Fazah claimed that in seven years he can learn the rest of the world’s estimated three thousand dialects.”
You could poke out an eye
reading such boasts. They seemed akin to medieval beliefs that diseases could be caused by the position of the planets. Learning three thousand dialects in seven years? That was clearly intended for a naïve journalist. There are more than three thousand languages on the planet—by one reckoning, the actual number is closer to seven thousand. And how was Fazah going learn the two-thirds of those
languages that have no dictionaries or textbooks since they’re not written down?
I resolved to treat Gunnemark’s skepticisms and his list of polyglots, as well as the journalist’s excited account, as folklore. I didn’t have to believe all of either to find something useful in them. I simply needed to press on with my own investigation.
The Internet has been a gift to those with the will to plasticity.
In the last five years or so, the online world has helped language learners escape the terrible gravity of the classroom by making available podcasts, classes, tutoring sessions, blogs, games, and forums of varying degrees of quality for different prices. One website that sprang up,
www.how-to-learn-any-language.com
—founded in 2005 by a multilingual Swiss businessman and quickly populated by thousands
of language learners from all over the globe—was a hotbed of debate over self-teaching methods. It also turned out to be a gathering place for hyperpolyglots themselves. For me, it was a treasure trove.
The moderator of one thread on the site went by the moniker Ardaschir.
*
In an autobiographical sketch, he said he grew up speaking English but that his first foreign language was French, which
he started in middle school, got to speak while traveling alone in France at thirteen, but almost flunked as a subject in high school. As a teenager, he fruitlessly attempted German on his own, was a good Latin student in high school, and by the time he graduated from Columbia University in
New York, he had a “very solid foundation” in French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. As a
doctoral student at the University of Chicago, he added Old French, Old English, Middle English, and Old High German. For his dissertation, he analyzed Old Norse dream sagas, and after graduating he spent two years in Germany, where he “consciously banned English from my brain” and set out “to master German, paying attention to everything I heard, writing down all new words and making a point of using
them actively myself until I knew them.”
In the early 1990s, he moved to Handong, Korea, for a university teaching job, and at thirty-two, far from home and probably lonely, turned the full force of his mind to learning as many languages as he could. For the next five years, he spent twelve hours a day trying to learn at least one language of each representative type or from each language family,
in order to read the world’s great books in their original languages. He worked on thirty different languages each day in fifteen-to twenty-minute chunks. Eventually he married a Korean woman and had a son. After ten years, he moved his family to Lebanon, to take a new job at a university, because he wanted exposure to Arabic. There, another son was born. In 2006, when Israel bombed and invaded
Lebanon, the family fled via a harrowing taxi ride into Syria, then evacuated to the United States. Despite these hardships, he’d become a guru on the forum for aspiring polyglots and hyperpolyglots, speaking with austere authority about learning matters and gathering biographical information about people like Fazah.
After Ardaschir posed the question “Ziad Fazah—does he exist?” a few new facts
about the Brazilian trickled in: He learns languages by getting up in the morning, closing the window blinds of the bedroom, and talking to himself in whatever he’s trying to learn. Or, he’s bored with languages. Or even, he had quit for a while during the 1990s.
Skeptics asked how a middle-class Brazilian could afford materials for exotic languages, especially before the advent of the Internet.
And if he’s so talented, why isn’t he richer?
Some disputed that Fazah could be fluent in so many languages.
“I’ve STUDIED an average of one language a year for the last thirty years so have some vague inkling of the amount of work involved to learn them and, more important, to keep each of them alive. For example
I’ve only read books in ten languages, and although I try to listen to radio broadcasts
I can only do this for a few languages each week,” wrote one poster. “I would not say I can ‘speak a language’ until I can understand at least 85–90 percent of what is being said on satellite television and movies and can readily engage in conversation with native speakers about a variety of topics with little or no difficulties or gaps in communication or knowledge,” wrote another. Doubts
about Fazah were building.
Then an American, Dave Maswary, joined the discussion. He had moved to Brazil to train as a no-holds fighter and learn Japanese, in preparation for a move to Japan. His Japanese teacher? Ziad Fazah. If you don’t believe what I’m telling you, and if you doubt his abilities, then call him yourself, Maswary said. An email address and a phone number appeared in his post.
One by one, forum members reported that they’d spoken with Fazah in Russian, or Cantonese, or Mandarin, or Spanish, claiming that he speaks with an accent in those languages, but he’s a nice guy and clearly passionate about languages. Someone said they were going to hire him to teach via Skype.
I watched all this unfold with bemusement—Fazah hadn’t shied from public performances in the past.
Why wasn’t he defending himself now? In this vacuum, his reputation took its final, fatal dive. In 1997, he’d appeared on a Chilean TV show,
Viva el lunes
. As with the tournament that Pope Gregory XVI had arranged for Mezzofanti, so much depended upon a single spectacle. This is even more true now, because with YouTube, where the Chilean video was eventually posted, everyone could see Fazah’s
spectacular failure.
A middle-aged bald man with a heavyset face sits in a TV studio, wearing a tan jacket and tie, in front of a studio audience. One by one, people stand up and ask him questions; they’re native speakers of Finnish, Russian, Farsi, Chinese, and Greek. He’s to translate each question for the audience and then answer it in the language. The Finnish speaker, a woman, says something
about how many people speak Finnish (5 million), and that Finnish, Swedish, and Saami are the official languages of Finland. Fazah looks blank, then says something. He’s not right. After he responds to the Farsi speaker, she says that Fazah hasn’t
actually answered his question, either; a boo rises from the audience. First blood.
“What day is it today?” the Russian asks him, in Russian.
“What?”
Fazah asks.
Then a Mandarin speaker asks what the only man-made structure visible from the moon is. Fazah should have said, “Nothing.” Or, to humor the speaker, “The Great Wall of China.” Instead, Fazah makes an odd gesture with his left hand on his head, running it from his temple over his ear to the back of his head, and says, in Spanish, “Where did you learn Chinese? And how did you learn
it so easily?” The Chinese speaker shakes his head, no. More boos. Fazah looks sweaty, and runs his finger across his head again, as if he means to dig into his skull for the answers. He’s speechless.
A blogger, Magnus Lewan, on his blog,
http://ardentagnostic.blogspot.com
, would later express a sensible conclusion shared by many, that “it is very likely that Ziad Fazah is one of billions of
people who are unable to speak fifty-nine languages.” On the forum, the response was speedy and scathing. Posters judged the Brazilian a fake; skeptics paraded their vindication.
Once the video came to light, Ardaschir shut down the thread immediately, writing, “It is very clear that the only person who can shed any light upon what Ziad Fazah really knows is Ziad Fazah. And as he is aware of
this forum and this discussion but does not care to elucidate, I think we should all just pass over him in respectful silence for the time being. The man exists, but the legend does not.”
Like everyone else on the forum, I now had Fazah’s email address and phone number. Calling him would be easy. As far as I knew, he might be a modern Mezzofanti within reach, but if I spooked him with the wrong
questions, he might slip away forever. I needed to test his proficiencies—how fluent was he in those fifty-nine languages?
I needed a guide to the hyperpolyglot mind. I contacted Ardaschir, who said sure, I could come to California to meet him.
Chapter 9
S
ummer in Berkeley, California. The $1 scoop ice cream store is open on Shattuck Avenue, the college girls are swinging down the hills, the San Francisco Giants are hitting home runs against the Oakland A’s. For Ardaschir, whose actual name is Alexander Arguelles, a typical day begins at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning with him at a desk in the spare bedroom, writing in a bound book with
lined pages. He writes a few pages in English to help him collect his thoughts. In his first language, he says, he’s the most expressive. Then he continues with his “scriptorium” exercise, writing two pages apiece in Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese, the languages he calls the “etymological source rivers.”
“If I begin the day by writing the three of those,” he said, “I know it’s going to be a good
day.”
A page of Turkish is followed by a page of Persian or Greek, then one of Hindi, Gaelic, or other languages. He works in fifteen-minute chunks, switching to a new language at the end of each period. In languages he knows less well, he writes out grammar exercises. His goal: to write twenty-four pages a day. How many books has he filled? He pointed to three tiers of them, black-spined, atop
a bookshelf. “I’m on volume forty-five now.” If he’s tired or distracted, the writing can drag on all day, but with focus, he can do it in four hours. When I first met
him, he averaged nine hours a day of study, noting with a bit of longing that before he had children, he could average fourteen.
“There’s absolutely no financial gain to knowing languages,” he told me once. “It’s a waste of time
and energy. If I took all the time and energy that I’ve put into expanding my mind, my linguistics horizons, and my literary horizons, if instead of that I had turned it to practical interests, like ‘I want to make money, I want a big house, I want some sort of success,’ there’s no question I could have done that.” There was no dearth of opportunities. Doing temp jobs in the summer as a college
student, he was often noticed (he said) by a boss who offered him a job. But tracking whether or not gynecologists in Utah and Nevada were accepting a certain type of credit card—one job he was offered—didn’t square with his intellectual self-image.
So he’s made his way here, an escape or a voyage, to a spare bedroom with bookcases filled with dictionaries, grammars, novels, workbooks, and textbooks
that tower over him on three sides. They are arranged by language family, 130 languages in all. “I honestly believe, where you are right now,” he said, gesturing to the shelves, “has a very good shot at being the—how shall I put this?—the world’s most condensed and most complete language laboratory.” The room was like a monk’s cell or a space capsule: the stillness of Alexander at work could
be deafening. His shelves were so full that he discovered things as we talked, like a Mandinka grammar he didn’t know he owned.
Tall and thin with brown hair, gentle eyes, and a voice like a priest, forty-four years old but so young-looking you’d wonder what seminary he attends.
So this is a hyperpolyglot,
I thought. I had expected someone boisterous and charismatic, who could talk about the
Giants’ season so far and, oh yeah, don’t you love Sino-Tibetan languages? I eat ’em like cashews. Someone debonair, not dweeby, whose life was thick with political and sexual intrigues that played out in a dozen languages—someone who could, at a moment’s notice, be one with all the world, on the world’s multivariate terms. A man of linguistic action. Someone fully
plugged in
.