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Notes -
I heard him speak English and French fluently; fluency in Italian would be a prerequisite of his level of influence within the church; his life would be extremely implausible if he didn’t speak Lithuanian, German, Russian, and Kazakh all extremely well and over a broad range of topics. I suppose it’s possible that his literacy in Latin used a dictionary or other translation assistance, but I heard attestations that he didn’t need it.
As far as JPII goes, I have no direct knowledge, but the consensus seems to be that he really was fluent in eight languages, although granted that’s partly by counting Spanish and Portuguese separately.
Bully for him. But I just don't think people can actually keep that many disparate grammar models rattling around in the old braincase at the same time +vocab. Maybe he WAS ok at some of those languages 30 years ago when he spoke them every day or something, but there is no way for someone to be "fluent" in that many at the same time.
I just spent a bit of time googling about and there seems to be a general consensus that most youtube polyglots are faking it for the most part. Other more honest polyglots know a core of 2, or rarely 3 "unique" languages and are at a conversational in a few more, they still need a few weeks to refresh their skills before traveling to another country. There is no doubt about it, trying to maintain many languages runs into maintenance problems well before you hit fluency in 8 languages as disparate as those listed. It just isn't possible in the way some people claim it is.
I suppose it depends to some extent what fluency is, exactly. I'd be very impressed by anyone not a native speaker knowing English as well as I do (and, to be honest, a bit impressed even by native speakers when they know sufficiently obscure words).
I would imagine generating the right word on the spot would be significantly harder than grammar—native speakers can fail to do so, on occasion.
That people would know at most 2 or 3 languages well seems unlikely to me. My guess would be that there would be hundreds of millions of people who are natively bilingual, so surely higher numbers have occurred a bunch of times.
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