Ziad Fazah
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Ziad Youssef Fazah (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a Lebanese polyglot who speaks at least 5 languages[1]. He claims to speak 59 languages[2] and maintains that he has proved this in several television shows, where he successfully has communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages.[3] He was considered the world's greatest polyglot (greatest living linguist) by the 1993 UK edition of the Guinness Book of Records.
Raised in Lebanon, he has lived in Brazil since the 1970s, where he works as a private teacher of languages in Rio de Janeiro.
In Viva el lunes, the only TV programme with Ziad Fazah that is publicly available, he fails to understand beginner level phrases in Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Farsi and Greek[1]. He also wrongly recognises Russian as Croatian[4]. Fazah does not use all of his languages on a regular basis. As can be expected, his fluency is higher in certain languages that he has more contact with (Portuguese, Arabic, German, French, English, Spanish, etc.) and limited in languages that he has hardly spoken in years (Cambodian, Dzongkha, Finnish, etc.).
List of Fazah's languages from the cover of one of his books:
- Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Cypriot[clarification needed], Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Singapore Colloquial English, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Wu.[5] [6]
[edit] References
- ^ a b Lewan, Magnus. "Ziad Fazah - a man who does not speak 59 languages". http://ardentagnostic.blogspot.com/2009/03/ziad-fazah-man-who-does-not-speak-59.html. Retrieved 2009-09-10. (English)
- ^ <http://thelinguistblogger.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/the-many-languages-of-ziad-fazah/]
- ^ Scapin, Rafael. "Ziad Youssef Fazah: o Maior Poliglota do Mundo". http://www.scapin.org/ziad_fazah.htm. Retrieved 2007-11-12. (Portuguese) - An article adapted from Fazah's Ensinando a Aprender Espanhol.
- ^ "Ziad Fazah - The Complete Video". http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16584&PN=0&TPN=3#180352. Retrieved 2009-09-10. (English) - A post on how-to-learn-any-language.com forum
- ^ See the cover of this book: Cover 1; 2
- ^ [1]
[edit] External links
- "World's Greatest Living Polyglot". Spidra's Vortex. http://www.spidra.com/fazah.html. Retrieved 2007-08-17.
- "Samples from some of Fazah's books". http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/guide/does-ziad-fazah-really-exist.html. Retrieved 2007-10-08.
- "First Person: Ziad Fazah". Financial Times. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5a6ab3b4-3c0d-11dd-9cb2-0000779fd2ac.html. Retrieved 2008-06-21.
- "Ziad Fazah in Viva el lunes in Chilean TV". Viva el lunes, Canal 13. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fUSuXHX5Kc&NR=1. Retrieved 2009-09-10. (Spanish)
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