It’s not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Meši? is not your typical polyglot. He can communicate fluently in 56 different languages and claims to understand over 70 of them.
現(xiàn)在的小年輕們會(huì)說不止一種語言,可不是什么新鮮事兒。但是對(duì)于32歲的穆罕默德•梅希奇可不是一般的多語言能力者。他可以用56種不同的語言流利地交流,并且聲稱能夠理解70多種語言。
Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Tuzla, an industrial city in the former Yugoslavia (currently in Bosnia Herzegovina), Muhamed Meši? was fascinated by languages. His exceptional talent for quickly learning to communicate in different languages was discovered by chance, when he was just 5-years-old. He was on vacation with his family, in Greece, and recalls being able to listen to their local neighbor speaking Greek and figuring out what he was saying from the situation they were in.
梅希奇在前南斯拉夫(目前的波黑共和國(guó))的工業(yè)城市圖茲拉長(zhǎng)大,當(dāng)他還是小男孩時(shí),就對(duì)語言極為著迷。當(dāng)他那快速學(xué)習(xí)以不同語言溝通的卓越才華被偶然間發(fā)現(xiàn)時(shí),他才只有5歲。那時(shí)他和家人正在希臘度假,他能夠回憶起當(dāng)?shù)剜従铀f的希臘語,并根據(jù)現(xiàn)場(chǎng)情景理解他們?cè)谡f什么。
But that was only the beginning of his journey to mastering as many languages as he could. When he was nine, he picked up Swedish from the Swedish soldiers stationed in his town during the Bosnian Civil War, and after the conflict he went on a trip to Hungary and managed to learn Hungarian as well.
但這還只是他語言精通之旅的開始。當(dāng)他九歲時(shí),他通過波斯尼亞內(nèi)戰(zhàn)期間駐扎在該地的瑞典士兵學(xué)會(huì)了瑞典語。沖突結(jié)束后,他又前去匈牙利旅行,并設(shè)法學(xué)會(huì)了匈牙利語。
Before long, his family realized that there was something special about Muhamed. The doctors who examined him concluded that it was his Asperger’s Syndrome (a light form of Autism) that allowed him to pick up new foreign languages so easily, sometimes unintentionally. He recalls that one time, a friend asked him to learn Latvian so he could accompany him on a business trip, and he was able to become fluent in the Baltic language in just 2 weeks, with the help of YouTube, two books and 43 cartoons.
不久之后,他的家人覺察到了他的天賦。醫(yī)生檢查后得出結(jié)論,他患上了阿斯伯格綜合征(輕度自閉癥),這種疾病使得他能夠輕松地、有時(shí)無意識(shí)地掌握新的外語。他回憶說,有一次一位朋友希望他學(xué)習(xí)拉脫維亞語,以便陪其一同出差。于是在YouTube、2本書、以及43本卡通的幫助下,他在短短2周內(nèi)就掌握了一口流利的波羅的語。
But despite his remarkable ability to pick up foreign languages with ease, Muhamed Meši? is also 100% dedicated to his passion for languages and dedicates almost all of his time to studying and practicing them. Muhammed says that he hardly has any free time, which is tough for a 32-year-old, but at the same time, dedicating himself to his passion makes him feel happy and fulfilled.
不過,盡管梅希奇具有輕松學(xué)習(xí)外語的卓越能力,他還是100%身心投入于語言學(xué)習(xí)當(dāng)中,并奉獻(xiàn)出幾乎所有的時(shí)間用于學(xué)習(xí)與實(shí)踐。他幾乎沒有任何空閑時(shí)間,這對(duì)于一個(gè)32歲的人來可不容易,但與此同時(shí),能夠投身于自己的熱枕,也使他感到快樂與滿足。
Today, Muhamed Meši? speaks an impressive 56 different languages, from common ones like English or Portuguese, to Japanese and Georgian, and even tongues that most of us have never even heard of, like Kinyarwanda (official language of Rwanda) or Quechua (the language of the indigenous people of the central Andes of South America). Some of them he rarely gets to practice in real life, but that doesn’t make them any less important.
如今,梅希奇會(huì)講56種不同的語言,從大眾語言如英語或葡萄牙語,到日語和格魯吉亞語,甚至還有我們大多數(shù)人從來沒有聽說過的語言,例如盧旺達(dá)語和蓋丘亞語(南美洲中部安第斯山脈的土著語)。其中一些語言他在現(xiàn)實(shí)生活中很少用到,但這并不代表它們不那么重要。
56 sounds like an awful lot, but Muhamed claims that the more languages you speak, the easier it is to learn new ones, because many of them have quite a lot of similarities.
56種語言聽起來似乎多得嚇人,但梅希奇解釋道,你會(huì)說的語言越多,就越容易學(xué)習(xí)新的語言,因?yàn)槠渲杏性S多相似之處。