Meet the incredible teenager who taught himself 23 languages - including Swahili, Pashto and the African dialect of Wolof - mastering each one in just a few WEEKS

New York is known for its multi-cultural makeup, but one native son took his exposure to people from across the globe as a reason for him to learn some of the many languages present.

Now teenager Timothy Doner is a proven polyglot, having learned 23 different languages.

Doner is only 17-years-old but he has a grasp on languages that are only spoken in lands far from the East Village apartment that he shares with his parents.


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American hoping to communicate: Timothy Doner learned Pashto and Farsi, which are both spoken in Afghanistan







The American teen speaks 23 languages


In addition to the expected European languages- French, Spanish, Italian, German- he has linguistically into some much more remote territories, mastering a number of African dialects.

THE FULL LIST OF 23 LANGUAGES



English French
Hausa Wolof
Russian German
Yiddish Hebrew
Arabic Pashto
Farsi Mandarin
Italian Turkish
Indonesian Dutch
isiXhosa Swahili
Hindi Ojibwe
Persian Croatian Spanish


isiXhosa, an official language of South Africa, is one of the more unexpected tongues in his vast vocabulary, as is Wolof (spoken in Gambia), Swahili, and the Native American language of Ojibwe.

Doner began receiving attention from language enthusiasts across the globe when he started posting videos of himself speaking in the different dialects on YouTube.

Urged on by enthusiastic commenters, he continued his work, largely teaching himself new languages in either a few weeks or months with the help of instructional books and flashcard apps on his iPhone.


In one video where he speaks from 20 consecutive languages, he also mentions how he meets with an Iraqi language partner to perfect his Arabic and watched WWII movies to help him learn German.


He was the subject of a profile in The New York Times in 2012, where experts included the then-16-year-old in a small and scattered group of language fiends who are deemed 'hyperpolyglots' because of their ability to pick up and master languages so quickly.



Truly different: The clicking noises that are a part of the South African language of isiXhosa really distinguishes the language from the other two-dozen that he has learned






Faraway: The African languages of Wolof and Swahili are not typically on high school curriculum lists

While his voracity for languages doesn't seem to be slowing down, Timothy, who is a junior at the prestigious Dalton prep school in Manhattan sees the lighter side of his skill.

He's been able to quip back at people insulting him in different languages- like one group of diners at an Israeli restaurant who said that Doner and his father were trying to be cultural by eating at the establishment. He then politely told them that he spoke fluent Hebrew as they left the restaurant.

'Learning a serious number of languages kind of helps you become a bit of an eavesdropper. I find most of the time that I accidentally follow people perhaps for a little bit longer than I should,' he told ITN.

Timothy has no plans of stopping soon, as he talked about how 'now I want to learn to speak Sudanese or Malay'.


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