It’s not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Mešić is not your typical polyglot. He can communicate fluently in 56 different languages and claims to understand over 70 of them.

　　现在的小年轻们会说不止一种语言，可不是什么新鲜事儿。但是对于32岁的穆罕默德•梅希奇可不是一般的多语言能力者。他可以用56种不同的语言流利地交流，并且声称能够理解70多种语言。

　　Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Tuzla, an industrial city in the former Yugoslavia (currently in Bosnia Herzegovina), Muhamed Mešić was fascinated by languages. His exceptional talent for quickly learning to communicate in different languages was discovered by chance, when he was just 5-years-old. He was on vacation with his family, in Greece, and recalls being able to listen to their local neighbor speaking Greek and figuring out what he was saying from the situation they were in.

　　梅希奇在前南斯拉夫(目前的波黑共和国)的工业城市图兹拉长大，当他还是小男孩时，就对语言极为着迷。当他那快速学习以不同语言沟通的卓越才华被偶然间发现时，他才只有5岁。那时他和家人正在希腊度假，他能够回忆起当地邻居所说的希腊语，并根据现场情景理解他们在说什么。

　　But that was only the beginning of his journey to mastering as many languages as he could. When he was nine, he picked up Swedish from the Swedish soldiers stationed in his town during the Bosnian Civil War, and after the conflict he went on a trip to Hungary and managed to learn Hungarian as well.

　　但这还只是他语言精通之旅的开始。当他九岁时，他通过波斯尼亚内战期间驻扎在该地的瑞典士兵学会了瑞典语。冲突结束后，他又前去匈牙利旅行，并设法学会了匈牙利语。

　　Before long, his family realized that there was something special about Muhamed. The doctors who examined him concluded that it was his Asperger’s Syndrome (a light form of Autism) that allowed him to pick up new foreign languages so easily, sometimes unintentionally. He recalls that one time, a friend asked him to learn Latvian so he could accompany him on a business trip, and he was able to become fluent in the Baltic language in just 2 weeks, with the help of YouTube, two books and 43 cartoons.

　　不久之后，他的家人觉察到了他的天赋。医生检查后得出结论，他患上了阿斯伯格综合征(轻度自闭症)，这种疾病使得他能够轻松地、有时无意识地掌握新的外语。他回忆说，有一次一位朋友希望他学习拉脱维亚语，以便陪其一同出差。于是在YouTube、2本书、以及43本卡通的帮助下，他在短短2周内就掌握了一口流利的波罗的语。

　　But despite his remarkable ability to pick up foreign languages with ease, Muhamed Mešić is also 100% dedicated to his passion for languages and dedicates almost all of his time to studying and practicing them. Muhammed says that he hardly has any free time, which is tough for a 32-year-old, but at the same time, dedicating himself to his passion makes him feel happy and fulfilled.

　　不过，尽管梅希奇具有轻松学习外语的卓越能力，他还是100%身心投入于语言学习当中，并奉献出几乎所有的时间用于学习与实践。他几乎没有任何空闲时间，这对于一个32岁的人来可不容易，但与此同时，能够投身于自己的热枕，也使他感到快乐与满足。

　　Today, Muhamed Mešić speaks an impressive 56 different languages, from common ones like English or Portuguese, to Japanese and Georgian, and even tongues that most of us have never even heard of, like Kinyarwanda (official language of Rwanda) or Quechua (the language of the indigenous people of the central Andes of South America). Some of them he rarely gets to practice in real life, but that doesn’t make them any less important.

　　如今，梅希奇会讲56种不同的语言，从大众语言如英语或葡萄牙语，到日语和格鲁吉亚语，甚至还有我们大多数人从来没有听说过的语言，例如卢旺达语和盖丘亚语(南美洲中部安第斯山脉的土著语)。其中一些语言他在现实生活中很少用到，但这并不代表它们不那么重要。

　　56 sounds like an awful lot, but Muhamed claims that the more languages you speak, the easier it is to learn new ones, because many of them have quite a lot of similarities.

　　56种语言听起来似乎多得吓人，但梅希奇解释道，你会说的语言越多，就越容易学习新的语言，因为其中有许多相似之处。

（编辑：何莹莹）