Autistic Man in the US is Fluent in 40 Languages

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https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/man-with-autism-has-learned-40-languages-video/

I hope I can reach one tenth of him.

Sigh. Foreign languages have always been a weakness of mine.

+=+In the 7^th grade I tried French. I did terribly.
+=+In the 9^th grade I tried Latin. The only class I ever failed.
+=+In the 10^th grade I tried Spanish. Through some fluke I barely did well enough that...
+=+In the 11^th grade I was allowed to take a 2^nd year of Spanish...where I did terribly.

I can only do English and computer languages (which have manuals!).

I would love to be able to speak several languages. My current goal is to learn at least one language well enough to confidently carry on a conversation. It's more difficult then it sounds. Will probably take years to accomplish.

Well, it says they "suspect that he is autistic to a degree", but we've had that conversation before and regardless of that the man is incredibly gifted and hard-working. Makes me feel I'm just making up excuses to not try harder ...

I have enough problems with my native language.

I flunked Spanish and had to take it over and still got only one point above a passing grade. Back in those days passing a Spanish(or another non-native language course) was automatic. Well almost automatic.

As for Vaughn Smith he should get assessed as he is employed and probably can afford it. If not that he should check out us, or some support group.

Great. Fueling already common stereotypes and feeding them to the already stupid public.

And I can't read the article because my antivirus/malware tells me it's dangerous, what 1986 says about it is worrying. Does he not have an actual diagnosis? I bet BS vibes from all this.

Did okay in high school Spanish. They taught us some French back in grade school.

There used to be a cute little store nearby that specialized in travel. Luggage, luggage tags, whatever. And it had a section of foriegn language dictionaries. Out of curiosity I flipped through the "English -to- Catalan" dictionary. I knew the Catalan language only as just a blob of color on language maps of Europe in northeastern Spain,and the Balearic Islands, and the city of Barcelona. About where the Kingdom of Aragon used to be before it united with Castile to become Spain. To my suprise Catalan was a lot more like my grade school French than it resembled my high school Spanish. Turns out that the experts agree with me...that Catalan is more akin to French than it is to Spanish (though all three are Romance languages). So that observation was... the pinnacle of my achievement in linguistics.

I used to be pen pals with a young lady on Wrongplanet who lived in the Netherlands. She was fluent in about six or eight languages including obviously English. I was stunned, but she was quite blasé about it. Apparently knowing several languages is common in the Netherlands. I told her that I had a theory that I wanted to test- my theory was that folks like her who speak modern Dutch would understand Beowulf in the original Old English Better than would speakers of modern English, like me. She told me that "no. I have tried reading things like Beowulf. Old English is like Welsh. Totally UN understandable". Oh well.

Learning a foreign language uses memory and attention, two things that I have difficulties with.

That man is amazing. He could get a job teaching languages or as a translator.

There are lots of careers where the knowledge would be useful/. Just a few off the top of my head:
-customs agent
-spy
-interpreter
-personal assistant to someone who travels a lot
-ambassador
-international sales
-airport concierge