On language learning

Graeme Wood reviews Michael Erard's Babel No More, which discusses hyperpolyglots, individuals with an extraordinary talent for learning multiple languages:

The most famous hyperpolyglot is Giuseppe Mezzofanti, the nineteenth-century Bolognese cardinal who was reputed to speak between thirty and seventy languages, ranging from Chaldaean to Algonquin. He spoke them so well, and with such a feather-light foreign accent, according to his Irish biographer, that English visitors mistook him for their countryman Cardinal Charles Acton. (They also said he spoke as if reading from The Spectator.) His ability to learn a language in a matter of days or hours was so devilishly impressive that one suspects Mezzofanti pursued the cardinalate in part to shelter himself from accusations that he had bought the talent from Satan himself.

Babel No More takes Erard (who has only modest linguistic ability of his own) to Mezzofanti's library in Bologna, and then on the trail of modern Mezzofantis. Not one can match the ability of the cardinal himself. Many alleged hyperpolyglots turn out to be braggarts -- one of them, Ziad Fazah, is now best known for appearing on a Chilean TV show and failing to respond coherently to speakers of half a dozen languages he claimed to know -- and the rest are impressive but tend to need practice to keep up their skills. Their languages recede with disuse, and no one succeeds in switching from Abkhaz to Quechua to Javanese in the way Mezzofanti was said to. 

(Video: "Michael Erard, researching his study of polyglots, films Alexander Arguelles describing his daily language-learning regimen.")