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. 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 
*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. 
