The Economist
TIMOTHY DONER looks like an ordinary American teenager.
Medium-height and slight, he arrives in a grey T-shirt and jeans. As he
is being miked for his interview, our producer asks him a standard
question to get him talking, so that she can check his voice levels:
"What did you have for lunch?" He hasn't yet eaten today, having only
just got out of bed. It is a little after two.
He's entitled to a bit of sleep; he obviously puts in long hours. The breathless title of a YouTube video about him rocketing
around the internet tells why: "Teen Speaks 20 languages." When I ask
him how many languages he speaks, he offers a different answer, though.
One, really. That is, English. He is "very comfortable" in four or five
others, and "very serious" in studying two to four more at any time.
Others he "dabbles in".
He could be quite a bit more
boastful than he is. The videos going round the internet show
him chatting with a bookshop owner in Urdu, responding to a teacher in
his Mandarin class, discussing the similarities between Hebrew and Arabic in Arabic, and giving short monologues in languages from Indonesian to Swahili to Ojibwe (a
North American Indian language). The speed with which he learns, the
comfort with which he speaks, and of course his youth make this nothing
short of astonishing.
So we invited Mr Doner to our studio in New
York to talk with several native speakers in an unscripted conversation.
First in French, then in Russian and finally in Mandarin, he overcame
some initial nervousness to chat about French street slang ("verlan"),
his family roots in eastern Europe and Chinese food. My colleagues were
told to try to ask him a question he might not expect; he handled each
of them with ease, never once asking them to repeat themselves. Native
speakers will see tiny mistakes—a missed Russian case ending here or a
Mandarin tone there—but they stick out in a stream of otherwise relaxed
and easy conversation. And it should be stressed that we did not test
his best foreign languages, which are Arabic and Farsi. He has had
formal instruction only in Arabic, Farsi, French, Chinese and a bit of
Japanese, Hebrew and Swahili. Others (like Russian, a hard language he
speaks comfortably) are self-taught. He seeks out opportunities to
practice less common languages, like Ojibwe and Wolof, on Skype, and finds many a New York cab driver to speak Hausa.
Many
people want to know what makes a voracious language-learner tick, a
question Michael Erard set out to answer in his book "Babel No More",
reviewed here. Most
hyperpolyglots are male. Many have some combination of being gay,
left-handed or ambidextrous, and poor in visual-spatial skills. A
surprisingly large number are boorish anti-social types. A variant of
the theory has it that hyperpolyglots might have a highly "male" brain,
driven to systemising rather than empathising. (A subset of this theory
is that autism is the result of an "extreme male brain".)
Mr
Doner hardly fits the profile (except for being a left-handed male). He
has the will to sit and memorise verb tables, as one must do to come as
far as he has. But he is a sociable and confident teen with a ready
smile. He loves memorising pop lyrics and watching movies. He virtually
inhabits the languages he speaks; as a colleague said on seeing his
video, "he shrugs like a Frenchman and frowns like a Russian." Most of
all, it is obvious how much he enjoys speaking his languages with other
people, not just learning them for the purpose of translation or reading
(or boasting).
What else is he good at? He gets good grades in
maths, but finds it frustrating, and struggles with physics and
chemistry. He loves history, a big motivator in his language-learning.
His father was once a professional pianist, and the young Mr Doner says
that after a few years of lessons, he could "sight-read and accurately
play pieces in one go", though he is out of practice now. He can also
quickly learn things by ear. This is perhaps the most intriguing clue to
his ability—not just a "systemising" brain, but one highly adept at
processing and producing in a given compositional system (musical or
linguistic) on the fly, plus a world-beating auditory ability.
What's
next for a 17-year-old hyperpolyglot? He still has a year of high
school, and then university, where he plans to study linguistics. He has
already taken an interest in language science alongside all of the
languages themselves. In an e-mail to me, he recommended Mark Baker's
"The Atoms of Language", a fairly difficult work of Chomskyan theory
(though written for lay readers). In our video, he mentions skipping
over easy languages like Spanish, instead choosing new languages like
Ojibwe, because they pose novel challenges like agglutination or ergativity.
And
after college? Everyone, naturally, asks him if he will be a spy, which
he laughs off. In any case, he is by now too well-known to disappear
into the shadows. Diplomacy interests him, though. And America's foreign service would be lucky to have him.
The Economist
