RT — Linguistic prodigy: 4yo Russian girl speaks 7 languages, incl Chinese & Arabic

Bella speaks languages belonging to three different groups: Indo-European (Russian, French, English, Spanish, German), Semitic (Arabic) and Sino-Tibetan (Chinese) – which in short means that they are very, very different to each other and lack structural similarities.

That doesn’t stop Bella from thinking clearly in each language, however, and she correctly answered age-appropriate questions on the show….

The specialist added that it’s too early to tell whether Bella is truly a polyglot or not, because it’s natural for children to pick languages up – it’s how they evolve with age that matters.

What is amazing is that we think this is amazing.

“In pre-revolutionary Russia, if a child from a noble family couldn’t speak three-four languages by the age of five or six, it was a shame to take him out. Then in school Latin and ancient Greek were added to those. So five-six languages were a standard package for an educated youth back in 19th-century Russia,” Semenovich said.

My grandfather, who lived in the 19th century Austrian-Hungarian Empire, spoke five languages. His first language was German but he knew Slavic languages, as well as English.

RT
Linguistic prodigy: 4yo Russian girl speaks 7 languages, incl Chinese & Arabic