Are You a Hyperpolyglot? The Secrets of Language Superlearners
The author of Babel No More explains what it takes to become
super-multilingual.    • Share   • Read Later  When God put the
kibosh on the Tower of Babel, 72 languages were said to have
been created from the one that unified those hubristic humans.
In his new book, Babel No More, linguist Michael Erard seeks out
the people who have put those pieces back together:
hyperpolyglots, i.e., the most fluent mamma-jammas on the
planet. TIME spoke to Erard about phenoms who can speak more
languages than they have fingers, whether anyone can do it and
where the upper limits of human potential lie.  At what point
does someone stop being a polyglot and start being a
hyperpolyglot?  The hyperpolyglot is someone who is both a
gifted and massive language accumulator. They possess a
particular neurology that’s well-suited for learning languages
very quickly and being able to use them. When I started the
project, I was using the number of six [as a cutoff] becaus