LEARNING FOREIGN LANGUAGES 567 



named who uses Spanish, French, Mandarin, Chinese, Japanese, Italian 

 and English. Of another it is said that he preaches in Burmese, Ger- 

 man, English, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Danish, French and 

 Quechua. When one visits an auction-room on the continent of Europe 

 at a point where several languages are spoken and prospective buyers 

 arrive from all parts of the world, he may hear the auctioneer drop one 

 language and take up another until all present have heard in their own 

 tongue what the goods are and the bids. One also meets on the trains 

 traveling salesmen who speak several languages with almost equal flu- 

 ency. Cardinal Mezzofanti, who died in 1849, spoke fifty-eight lan- 

 guages and knew fairly well about fifty more. He was a man of very 

 ordinary ability except that he had a singularly tenacious memory of 

 an unusual kind, so that when he once heard a speech-sound he never 

 forgot it. About twenty years ago there was an employee in one of 

 the London offices who was able to receive and to send telegrams in 

 twelve different languages. But he soon gave himself up to drink and 

 became so unreliable that the company felt obliged to discharge him. 

 The testimony regarding fluent speakers in several languages must 

 be received with great caution. It is almost always exaggerated, usu- 

 ally very much exaggerated. While there is virtually no limit to the 

 number of languages one may learn to read rapidly and intelligently, 

 their oral use is almost infinitely more difficult. I have taken careful 

 notes for many years and am convinced that not half a dozen men in a 

 generation can speak even three languages simultaneously with native 

 purity. Some years ago a lady informed me that a friend of hers spoke 

 eight languages as well as if each one was his native tongue. I hap- 

 pened to know that the man himself makes no such preposterous claim. 

 I once made the acquaintance of a young Swiss whom I asked what his 

 native dialect was. He replied that he did not know, since he had been 

 brought up to speak German, French, and Italian. As his English was 

 correct and fluent, although he had been in this country only a few 

 years, he probably told the truth. But his pronunciation betrayed the 

 foreigner in every sentence. 1 Many years ago I was making a foot- 

 tour through the Black Forest with a fellow American. Among other 

 things he informed me that he spoke German like a native. Presently 

 we came to a farmhouse at which he asked for some milk. But he gave 

 the word a wrong gender. An ignorant native might have made a mis- 

 take in the grammatical structure of his sentence, or he might have had 

 a local pronunciation, but no native would have made a blunder in the 

 gender of this word, since it is not one of those of which the spoken 

 and the written gender differ. It needs to be remarked, however, that 

 the local dialects vary so widely from each other and from the language 



1 It may be stated in this connection that there are districts in Switzerland 

 in which German is the language of every-day life; Italian the language of the 

 school, and French the language of the church. 



