Powell Janulus

Last updated
Powell Janulus
Born
Powell Alexander Janulus

1939 (age 8485)
Alma mater University of British Columbia
Known forFluency in 42 languages

Powell Alexander Janulus (born 1939) is a Canadian polyglot who lives in White Rock, British Columbia, and entered the Guinness World Records in 1985 for fluency in 42 languages. [1] To qualify, he had to pass a two-hour conversational fluency test with a native speaker of each of the 42 languages he spoke at that time.

Contents

Early life

Powell Janulus was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was exposed to many Slavic languages as a child. His Polish mother spoke six languages while his Lithuanian father spoke at least four. He could speak 13 languages fluently at the age of 18. He attended Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia where he attempted to learn Mandarin. In an interview, he stated that he struggled with the academic teaching style. [2] He became curious about the process of language learning and in the way that children learn languages so easily. [3] He attempted to learn Chinese by having conversations and talking with as many Mandarin speakers as possible. [4]

When Janulus was in his early 20s, he began to develop his methodology for fast language acquisition. In his 30s, he became a court translator and was paid for each language he could translate. He worked to learn two or three languages per year, as each language allowed him to earn more. He was authorized by the Provincial Court of British Columbia, as a court translator in 28 languages. He later became interested in language variations and could quickly learn related languages such as Spanish and Portuguese. In his 40s, he learned less common languages such as Tibetan, Romani, Inuit and Swahili. Later in life, he opened the Geneva Language Institute, a language school in Vancouver.[ citation needed ]

World record holder for fluency

In 1985, Janulus entered into the Guinness World Records for spoken fluency in 42 languages. To qualify, he took a two-hour conversational fluency test with a native speaker of each language he spoke at that time. This testing took place over one month. Powell said that he considers himself skilled in 64 languages and that he had studied at least 80. He said that the Canadian actor John Candy hired him to help him speak Punjabi for the 1989 film Who's Harry Crumb? . He appeared on The Tonight Show where talk show host Johnny Carson invited speakers of 48 languages to test Janulus. [5]

It was reported that Powell speaks the following 42 languages (excluding English, which is his native language), and the many other languages in which he has some proficiency: [5]

  1. Armenian
  2. Belarusian
  3. Bulgarian
  4. Cantonese
  5. Croatian
  6. Czech
  7. Danish
  8. Dutch
  9. Finnish
  10. French
  11. Frisian
  12. German
  13. Greek
  14. Hindi
  15. Icelandic
  16. Italian
  17. Japanese
  18. Kashubian
  19. Korean
  20. Kurdish
  21. Lusatian
  22. Macedonian
  23. Norwegian
  24. Persian
  25. Polish
  26. Portuguese
  27. Punjabi
  28. Romanian
  29. Russian
  30. Serbian
  31. Sinhala
  32. Slovak
  33. Slovenian
  34. Wendish
  35. Spanish
  36. Chinese
  37. Tibetan
  38. Swedish
  39. Turkish
  40. Ukrainian
  41. Urdu

Recent years

Powell was reported to have died in 2006, but this was inaccurate. In an interview, he stated that his disappearance was due to a stroke he suffered at that time. He reported that he lost his ability to speak English, due to brain damage. He claimed to have regained his English spoken ability by speaking Dutch with a nurse. He is currently retired and living in White Rock, British Columbia. [4] In August 2013, he was again the subject of a language testing event during which he spoke at least 20 languages and modeled the learning process with Korean and Tagalog.

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References

  1. Boehm, David A.; and Maris Cakars, Cyd Smith, Jim Benagh (1984). Guinness Book of World Records 1985. Sterling Publishing Co. ISBN   978-0806902647
  2. Nikulicheva, D.B. (2009). How to Find your Way to Foreign Languages. Flinta. ISBN   978-5976508279
  3. Dilts, Robert (1998). Modeling with NLP. Meta Publications. Capitola, CA. ISBN   978-0916990466
  4. 1 2 Atkinson, Marilyn; and Paul Gossen (2015). Velocity Instant Fluency. Velocity Learning. ISBN   978-0978375515
  5. 1 2 Brown, Stacy (January 26, 1998). "Multilingual Speaker to Give Area Seminar". Daily News (Los Angeles). Archived from the original on October 5, 2015.

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