Timothy Donner is a sixteen-year-old boy living in Manhattan. He’s a hyperpolyglot – someone who can speak six or more languages fluently. It started after his Bar Mitzvah, when he decided to keep learning the Hebrew he was studying for the ceremony. From there he learned Arabic, then he delved into Pashto which snowballed into Farsi and Hindi and Kurdish.
Tim also speaks Russian, Italian, Swahili, Indonesian, Ojibwe, Turkish, Hausa, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian, Mandarin and German. He teaches himself mostly through grammar books, iPhone apps and soap-operas. Last year, Tim started posting videos of himself online in hopes of getting feedback from native speakers.
Hear Tim’s entire repertoire at his Youtube page.