The Reality of Learning Multiple Languages: A Mathematical Study

The study reveals that even the most talented individuals cannot realistically learn over 100 languages to a high proficiency.

### The Realities of Language Learning: A Mathematical Exploration of Polyglots' Claims
* 📚 Many people are fascinated by claims of individuals speaking an **extraordinary number of languages**, sometimes reaching figures as high as **200**.
* 🤔 The speaker reflects on their own skepticism regarding these claims after realizing the **complexities involved in learning even one language**.
* They decided to calculate how long it would take a **highly talented person**, under ideal conditions, to learn **100 languages** to a **C1 proficiency level**.
* 📊 The study found that even under "borderline utopian" conditions, a person would need at least **91.7 years to learn 100 languages**, making the claims of some polyglots **mathematically impossible**.
* 🗣 The speaker emphasizes the broad interpretations of "knowing" or "speaking" a language, proposing that a **C1 proficiency level** is a more realistic standard for mastery.
* 💡 They also note that the difficulty of languages varies significantly, with **simple languages taking approximately three months to learn** and **difficult ones taking about three years**.
* 🕰 The calculations revealed that even the most acclaimed polyglots, like Cardinal Mezzofanti and others, would have required **decades longer than their lifetimes** to achieve their claimed proficiency levels.
* 🔍 Ultimately, the speaker concludes that a realistic number of languages a dedicated learner could master in their lifetime, under practical conditions, would likely be **between 25 to 30**.

hello everyone and welcome to another video. So, I'm sure some of you, maybe a lot of you, have previously seen or heard or read about someone who says or about whom it has been said that that person speaks a ridiculous amount of languages. Let's say 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 100, even 200. And I did that too. I mean, I've seen articles about Cardinal Mezzofanti. I've seen lists of historically most successful polyglots and the number of languages that were in those articles is just staggering. 70, 80, even really 200 plus languages. And when I was younger, I was like, Wow, you know, these people must have been extremely talented. I mean, to learn 200 languages is just something really incredible. And then I was learning all growing older and I learned more and more languages and I saw how difficult it was just to learn one, not to mention to sort of keep up with the language that we spoke, how time-consuming it was, how many just factors influenced your learning process.

and I was like, how in the world can these people learn, could have learned so many languages? And of course, I grew more and more skeptical. Not until maybe three or four days ago, I was just skeptical and did nothing about it. But three days ago, I had the idea to actually try to calculate how long it would take a super talented individual in the world today, with everything at their disposal, internet, the best of conditions you can think of, to learn 100 languages at the best possible, at the best conditions possible. And then compare it to a list that I found online of the historically most successful polyglots. So, people who speak, I think the lowest number of languages was 38, and the highest was 100 or 200, I think. So, yeah, I would like to show you the results of my study today. Very mine of my math is terrible, and I might not be the best language learner in the world, but I've distance, oh, what I'm about to show you with my friends from study mathematics and with a lot of very times.

the language learners and so hopefully this is going to be at least some sort of basic point of reference for you to see which claims are at least slightly realistically possible and which are straight-out just ridiculous. So let me just share my computer screen with you real quick, and I said I was trying to calculate how long it would take a super talented individual in the world today, under the most ideal of conditions, borderline utopian, with unlimited resources, to learn 100 languages. Now, I did this because from having this data, having that piece of information, would help us realize that that is the absolute mathematical minimum. Faster than that, it's just absolutely impossible. This is very important because you will see that if someone has claimed to have spoken 200 languages, it was just mathematically impossible to have learned them in their lifetime. But that person should have learned them in that lifetime because a super talented individual in the world today, with ideal conditions in the world today, would not be able to learn them today. So, 200, 300 years ago, it would have

been even more impossible than it is today. But let me just tell you what I plugged into my little formula, and again, I'm not the world's best mathematician, so if you see any problems, please let me know. There are several problems here that I wanted to address. The first one is that in these articles that I've read, it was almost always said that these people have known or spoke this and that number of languages, and the term to know or to speak is quite broad, and we don't really know what that means. However, in many of these articles, we said that these people have excelled in these languages, or they dominated these languages, or that they had an excellent knowledge, unparalleled in these languages. And therefore, I decided, after consulting this with my friends, and I'm going to use at a standard, the C1 level, and the international language proficiency scale. Maybe a lot of you are familiar with this scale. It's a scale which goes from A1 to C2, A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, with C2 being the highest.

one and a one being the lowest one doesn't might not say too much to you if I tell you if I say it like that, but a C1 level of proficiency in the language is about 80 percent or 75 percent of the level of my English now. So, it's a pretty high level. And again, you might say, Well, you're being too strict. Listen, it's impossible to speak 100 languages at a senior level, but that's exactly my point. It's not possible. And plus, in the articles that I've read, like I said, the word dominated these languages, mastered these languages, were fluent in these languages was used prolifically. So, for me, C1 is actually lower than the expression to master or to dominate a language because I don't think I'd dominate or master English. So, these people wouldn't need to speak better their languages at a level that is higher than the level of my English right now. The second problem that I had was that they said that they speak languages, but as we know, languages come

in different shapes and sizes. There are easy languages, there are difficult languages, so I couldn't just, you know, I couldn't decide on how long on average would take or this or that person to learn the language because they are very, very different. It is an American learning Chinese, and an American learning German would reach their C1 level at a completely different time. Chinese is much more difficult, German is much, much easier. So without going into too much detail, I just decided we'll have two languages, two language types. We'll have a simple one, and it would take a super talented person, and this after consulting this with a few friends of mine who are extremely talented language learners. We decided that in word for a super talented person in the world today with unlimited resources and the best conditions, it would take 3/4 a person three months to learn a simple language. That means if you are, for instance, German and you want to learn Dutch, it would take you three months to learn Dutch into a C1 level if you'd be a super talented language learner with the

best possible condition, and then on the other end of the spectrum, would have a difficult language. And again, to be a super talented person learning a difficult language, it would take you three years, and this is really borderline utopian, to get that language to a C1 level. Now we have a formula because this relates to language, the drug relativity of language learning, of the difficulty of learning a foreign language. Because yes, if you are learning Mandarin Chinese, there's going to be a difficult language for you. But as soon as you know it, every language in the Chinese language family, every next language, is going to be very easy for you, or relatively easy for you. So if you just look at, for instance, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese, and you pick either one, and you don't know any other language from that language family, these two languages are going to be roughly equally difficult. But if you learn Mandarin Chinese and after that start learning Cantonese, Cantonese is going to be much, much, much, much, much

easier. So, what I did, I made this little formula, which is that that person, our hypothetical person, would learn one difficult language and then followed by four languages from the same language family. So, that would be one difficult language, three years, and then for simple languages, three months each. Now, again, to cut even more slack to this person, I decided that that person would be a born trilingual, a fully functional trilingual person. It is very, very rare in the world, very rare. It is rare in the world today to have someone who grew up as a fully functional trilingual. Again, I said fully functional trilingual, which means that all three languages that this person speaks, all three languages equally well as a native language by the age of, I don't know, six. And then, again, to cut a lot of slack for this person, I decided that the next language after these three native languages that that person will start learning, that person will start learning at the age of six. Now, this is just learning these languages, and I hope it's

not too confusing, but I just want to lay down the simple rules and conditions that I set out for the study. Besides learning the foreign language, the person also would need to practice all languages that that person already knows. So again, cutting that person an enormous amount of flack, I decided that the bare, absolute bare minimum would be to practice one for each language that that person knows, one hour every two weeks. So for instance, that person would grow up as a trilingual and by the age of six would start to learn its fourth language. But apart from just learning this language, he would also need to practice the three languages that that person already speaks, and that would be at least one hour every two weeks. Clogging all of this into my super complicated calculations, which you can see over here, I came up with this list. Let me start from the last person on the list, so Cardinal Mezzofanti. A lot of people mentioned this person, saying that he is one of the most talented polyglots in history, and he was said to speak 39

languages. This is what Wikipedia says. Mehta Fonti was well known for being a hyperpolyglot who, according to Russell 1858, spoke at least 30 languages with rare excellence. But that said, that is at least he won. He was reported to have spoken nine other languages fluently. All right, so according to my study, right, he died at the age of 75. He spoke 39 languages according to Wikipedia and Russell in the 1858. According to my study, it would take him 28.75 years to learn these 39 languages and 2.2 years to practice. So if you add this up, and again I didn't know too well what to do with these two numbers, so I just added them up to have at least something. It would take him 30.9 years just to learn 39 languages under borderline utopian conditions in the world today. All right, we continue. Francis Burden. By the end of his life, Burton had mastered at least 25 languages or 40 if distinct dialects are

counted, so let's say he spoke 40 languages. It would take him, according to my study, 29 years to learn these languages and 2.32 practice. So, in total, 31.3 years. Now, you have to realize that this is he would go, he would be like a machine. He would be born a trilingual guy, started studying at six, and learn a language, a difficult one, in three years, and then every three months learn a new simple one. And he would go like this for 31.3 years. It's just, it's just, this is the absolute bare theoretical mathematical minimum, no job, nothing, just learning languages. All right, we continue. There's this sir gentleman, he was called WJ Situs, and it was said he entered Harvard at the age of eleven and as an adult was claimed to be conversant in over 40 languages and dialects. All right, so again 40, as we calculated, it would take him thirty one point three years or in other words he would be thirty one point three years old when he would learn or

when he would know 40 languages. The problem is he died at 46, so even this mathematical theoretical super improbable number is getting a little bit shady because you know he was 46 when he died. We can move on. Kenneth Hale, 50 languages. Hale didn't just study these languages, however, you all. He also learned them himself, becoming fluent in Tohono O'odham, I'm sorry, I'm round to read that, Comanche, Hopi, Navajo, or PV, and about 45 other languages. And one more thing I wanted to read about him. What's most amazing about Hale, however, is the rapidity with which he could learn a new language, often being able to have basic conversation after just 10 or 15 minutes of listening to a native speaker. It's absolute nonsense, of course, but you can see Wikipedia is just full of stuff like this. Anyway, to learn 40 languages, according to my calculations and the most utopian theoretical mathematical way in the world today, it would take him 40.6 years. We continue Xia huzzah.

probably a lot of you know who this person is. The Guinness Book of World Records up to the 1998 edition listed Fazekas being able to speak and read 58 languages. Cycling alive interview in Athens Greece and 19 and July 1991 probably maybe a lot of you have seen also his appearance in the Chilean TV show. I'm not going to comment on that. I'm just going to tell you how long they were taken to learn the 50 languages that he claims to speak really well. It would take him forty-nine point four years again theoretical utopian minimum. He is 62 now so very very very improbable ml clips. He mastered 68 languages in speech and writing and studied 120 other languages again the word mastered very important. This is why I chose those a c1 level and this is this is where it's really started getting really really interesting. So according to my study it would take this person fifty-nine point three years theoretical minimum to learn 68 languages. This person passed away when he was 62 so as you can see it

starts to get even with this absolute theoretical minimum. Just not realistic. And now we get to these people who were really good. The theoretical minimum is more than half the actual age of the person in question. So this person from the Gallants, the number of languages with which governments more or less thoroughly research, and which he was the first to have scientifically worked on, numbers over eighty [citation needed]. So eighty languages that this person claims to speak. It would take that person 70.5 years, according to my study, to learn all those languages. The person passed away in 67. So Sir John Bowring ranked with Josette Mezzofanti and Hans Kono Fandango balance among the world's greatest hyperpolyglots. His talent enabling him at least to say that he knew 200 languages. Let me continue. And could speak 100. All right. It would take this person 91.7 years, or I should say it would take a super talented individual in the world to date 91.7 years.

seven years under utopian conditions to learn 100 languages to AC one level and speak all of them at a c1 level. So clearly, this person passed away in 80. Just doesn't add up nearly Melanie cook. I don't want to. I didn't want to actually put this gentleman on this list because really Melanie cups. Some of you might know him. He is a Russian, I think, TV personality, I guess. And he had a head injury after which he started to say that he speaks a lot of languages and said that he speaks more than 100. But it's just not true because, yeah, it's just first of all, we've seen from the calculations that it's impossible. And second of all, I've seen the video where he said a sentence in 100 languages and 99 of them or 98 of them were invented sounds. So but anyway, I just want to show you how long it would take that person to learn 100 languages. Well, not that person, but how long it would take a super talented

person in the world today to learn 100 languages. It would be ninety-one point seven years. Really passed away when he was 54, unfortunately. And then we have the sort of the greatest number of languages claimed by one person, and that is this gentleman over here. He has claimed to speak 200 languages, and this is what Wikipedia says. By his death, he was set to speak or read more than 200 languages with varying degrees of fluency. Let's just for the—we don't know whether that was C1—but just for the sake of this whole thank you. See how ridiculous it would be if he would have said that he spoke these languages at a similar level. To learn 200 languages to a C1 level by a super talented individual in the world today, it would take that person two hundred and sixteen point one years. Clearly just impossible by any standard. Now, if you would cut this person some slack and say that only half of these languages that person knew to a C1 level, we can just go here and we

would see that that would take a ninety-one point seven years, and that person passed away when he was 88. So, as you can see, the numbers in my study, at least, speak for themselves. These are the numbers that I came up with; they are just for your reference. Again, my aim was to calculate how long it would take a super talented individual, under utopian conditions in the world today, to learn the number of languages deemed gentlemen have claimed to speak to a C1 level and speak all of them at the C, give the at the C1 level at the same time. Yeah, just just to have a sort of basic point of reference. Of course, there are many, many things in this study that you could argue are incorrect. You could say that that person could study languages in parallel. I argue at that point that speech that it would take them twice, twice as long. So, what happened is basically the same thing if you learn two languages consecutively or in parallel; the time would be the same. But there are mother many her mother but

There are many other things in the study that could be improved. However, it is at least the basic point of reference to show you that if you want to learn 200 languages, it might take you 216 years, right? Because a lot of people, they sort of, they don't say, they don't talk about how technically impossible it would be at times to learn 200 languages. You just do not have the time, clearly. Two hundred fifteen years. This person passed away in '88. All right, so as you can see from this little math experiment alone, it is quite evident that most of these people just could have not spoken these languages at a C1 level at the same time. The last question that I asked myself is, what do I think, how many, what is the limit in the world today with all the was just a real realistic life? What would having a job, having a family, having commitments, or just, you know, life going its life going into an own way? What would be the limits? How many languages a very time that person, let's say the

number one best language learner in the world with all the resources and respectively everything that is a really good language learner would need, including a very well-wired brain for language learning. How many languages could that Christian learn in their lifetime? And I think, and again, like I said, it depends on what kind of languages they are. So, we can, we can, we have to have a really healthy mix of difficult and simple languages and so on. So, all of this is factored in. I would say no more than twenty-five, thirty would be the maximum, again, she one level at the same time, and that person would have to be dedicated to language studies their entire life, doing nothing else or very little, having very good support, financial-wise, and so on. So, tell me what you think, tell me what you think about the little study that I did. If you see any mistakes or blind spots in it, please do tell me. Like I said, I'm not the greatest mathematician in the world. And please do tell me what do you think, how many languages would a super-talented

language learner under ideal conditions be able to learn during their lifetime. Let's say by the time they're 80 or 90. So that's it. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.

Is it possible to speak 100 languages?

Vladimir Skultety

The Feasibility of Learning Multiple Languages

The speaker reflects on the common claims of individuals speaking an extraordinary number of languages, ranging from 40 to 200.

They express skepticism about the feasibility of such claims and decide to calculate the time it would take a super talented person, under ideal conditions, to learn 100 languages.

The speaker aims to use this data to determine the realistic possibility of these language-learning claims and sets a standard of C1 level proficiency for evaluating language dominance.

Achieving a C1 level in a language is still considered high, and mastering multiple languages at a senior level is unrealistic.

Language difficulty varies, making it hard to determine how long it takes to reach proficiency.

A super talented learner could take three months for a simple language and three years for a difficult one, with subsequent languages from the same family becoming easier to learn.

The Study of Language Learning and Polyglots

The study sets a minimum requirement of practicing one hour every two weeks for each language a person knows, in addition to learning a new language.

Cardinal Mezzofanti is noted for speaking 39 languages, with the study estimating it would take him 30.

9 years to learn and practice them under ideal conditions.

Francis Burden and WJ Situs are also highlighted for their language mastery, with both requiring around 31.

The Improbable Lives of Language Superpolyglots

Kenneth Hale was known for learning 50 languages, becoming fluent in several Native American languages, and being able to hold a basic conversation after just 10-15 minutes with a native speaker.

Fazekas claimed to speak and read 68 languages, with a theoretical minimum of 59.

3 years to learn them, while another individual claimed to know 200 languages, with a theoretical minimum of 91.

The Impossibility of Learning 100+ Languages

Learning 100 languages to a C1 level would take a super talented individual 91.

7 years, while claiming to speak 200 languages would require 216.

The calculations highlight the absurdity of such claims, especially when considering the varying degrees of fluency.

The study aimed to provide a reference for the unrealistic timeframes associated with mastering multiple languages.

Learning 200 languages could take 216 years, making it technically impossible for most people to achieve fluency in all of them simultaneously.

The ideal language learner, with perfect conditions and resources, could realistically manage to learn 25 to 30 languages at a C1 level over their lifetime.

The study highlights the challenges and limitations of language learning, emphasizing the need for a mix of difficult and simple languages.