 Anyone who has tried to learn another language knows how much time, energy, and brain power it takes, but some people pick up languages very easily. How do they do it? At the Portland Public Library's Brown Bag lecture, Brian Knoblock talked with the author, Michael Earhard, about his new book, Babble No More, in which he introduces us to these language super learners and helps us make sense of their linguistic abilities. Michael, tell us a little bit about your search for these linguistic super learners. Well, you know, they don't pop up and immediately identify themselves. There were a number of really interesting historical cases, though, so finding them in the historical books and archives was interesting. Looking for them, you know, all over the world, I went to Germany and Belgium to try to meet some people, also to Mexico and to California. What's interesting is that, you know, being in Portland, you know, I had gone to all these places looking for, you know, doing this research, not only for people who are these massive language learners, but also to communities where multilingualism is very common, you know, on the order of five to six languages, where everyone speaks. Do these people know that they have a special gift or do they not sort of recognize that? I mean, the people, it's not easy work to do what they do, so it may be that there are a lot of people who have the neurological gifts that they have and who never have access to the resources or who live in places or in cultures or in times where learning foreign languages is not something that you do or that's valued, but yeah, the people, you know, undertaking the study of a dozen, two dozen, three dozen languages, you really have to put yourself in the way of native speakers, of dictionaries, of grammars and, you know, all sorts of materials, so they're very much aware, yeah. Is there a trick or a technique that anybody can learn or are their brains just wired differently? Yeah, because so many of them seem to be Belgian, I often say that we should, people should just drink more Belgian beer that maybe that would solve it, but there's really no single secret or trick or method, unfortunately. They do have methods that work for them individually and so part of what makes them special is what makes them special as learners. They know how they learn, they know what works for them and works for them uniquely and they take that thing and they just run with it and so the rest of us, you know, we're in classrooms where teaching methods maybe presume a uniform sort of brain or a uniform set of goals and the hyperpolyglots are people who have a lot of goals and they kind of strike out on their own and really find success that way. Is this a modern phenomenon or have there been people like this as long as there's been language? So we're talking 150,000 years probably, that's an interesting question but I suspect that there have always been multilingual people, people who spoke a lot of different varieties of languages as for people who kind of undertook foreign language study for fun not because they necessarily needed it in their communities, but it doesn't really date all that far back necessarily maybe, you know, three, four hundred years although there are tested sort of mythological cases that go back much further. It does also seem to be largely a phenomenon that's confined to the West, interestingly. I talked to some Chinese, some experts of ancient China and that was a very literate, very cultured civilization and there's no record there of people learning massive numbers of languages in the same way that there were Europeans. Is there a maximum number that people can learn? What's the most number of languages that you've found that someone person speaks? Yeah, so what I wanted to do was to find someone who had been tested, someone who had been tested in the same period of time, someone whose oral skills had been tested, someone who had been interacting with native speakers and the person that I kind of hone in on is a Scottish gentleman who lives in the Shetland Islands named Derek Herning who won a contest in 1990 in Belgium to find the most multilingual European and he was scored speaking 22 languages. On a daily basis, people can live very easily with five to nine languages fully activated where they don't have to do any study or anything to activate those languages. The people who speak many more languages, 20 or 25 or even more than that, one would think that having that ability would be a bridge to the world but is it sometimes a barrier to the world if they have to spend so much time studying? Yeah, it's definitely, you know, you have to spend so much time just putting the language material into your brain that it doesn't leave a lot of time for other things. You know, they're quite fascinating people but you can't necessarily talk to them about baseball because a lot of them have narrowed their focus down quite a lot.