Kid Is Disgustingly Good at Languages

Ugh, god, why can't I be a "Teenage Polyglot"? (Besides the fact that I'm old and lazy.)

 From the New York Times article last month:

"Timothy Doner, 16, is not one of those people. In the fall of 2009, after studying for his bar mitzvah, he decided he wanted to learn modern Hebrew, so he continued with his tutor, engaging in long dialogues about Israeli politics. Then he felt drawn to learn Arabic, so after eighth grade he attended a summer program for college students at Brigham Young University. It took him four days to learn the alphabet, he said, a week to read fluidly.

Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore."

 Elsewhere he is said to be fluent in 23 languages. I doubt that, but the fact that he's studied so many languages is impressive.

I'm gonna go curl up in a ball and cry about how talentless I am now.