What should be shocking to us monocultural North Americans is that 7 languages is not even particularly uncommon among Russians and other Eastern Europeans.
I spend a couple of summers working on Polish fishing ships. Almost everyone spoke at least four languages - Polish, Russian, German, and some combination of Latvian, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Spanish, English. Not just the officers (most of whom spoke at least 6 or 7, some of whom spoke 10 or more), but the fishermen were all multilingual.
Part of that was the legacy of the USSR etc, but it is also just a function of where they are.
Agreeing with your point entirely - yet from personal observation they generally don’t speak to Romanians and Ukrainians in their native language, instead using Russian, with condescension.
I agree it seems largely memorized –the conversations seem natural, though, and I mean, she’s four. Even that level of correct memorization in different languages is still really impressive. I speak five of these languages (only two at her age) and her accents and cadences are solid. Kid’s got a major talent for mimicry, and…well, I would know
German is way easier than any of those other languages except maybe Spanish, especially when you throw Hungarian and Finnish into the mix. Polish and Russian are weird languages with finicky little grammar rules, but they aren’t the madness that is Hungarian or Finnish.
I dunno, German’s declensions and roving prefixes are way more maddening than I expected, given that I already spoke English, Mandarin, French, Spanish, and a smattering of Italian when I started learning it. I understand others speaking German perfectly, but I find really internalizing and using the grammar a constant challenge.
The roving prefixes irritated me as well, but not as much as the three genders or the various plural forms. Even those things aren’t so bad. German grammatical cases are easier than Polish and easy easier than Hungarian or Finnish.
Yeah, but part of the reason is in Europe you can travel for 5 hours and find 5 different languages. My Polish MiL knew enough German and Russian to get her by. In the US, you can travel for days from one coast to the other and not need another language. And if you do need another language, odds are it is Spanish. And many people know some Spanish.
Combine this with the fact the Americans are generally the SOURCE of entertainment and culture like movies and music, that they don’t need to adapt to consume media from other countries.
So these two reasons are the biggest factors for why 15-20% of Americans are bilingual, vs 56% of Europeans (in the EU). In short, we don’t need it as much. We aren’t handicapped at all in our daily lives to live, work, and socialize with only one language. And other than Spanish, one would be hard pressed to find a use for any other language on a daily basis, unless you were dealing directly with say foreign media (like anime), a linguistics job (like translation or collaboration with people from another country), or an immigrant community (such as a church or charity organization).
I wouldn’t say that knowing 7 languages is “not uncommon” in Europe. Certainly more common than in the US, anyone who can speak 7 languages fairly fluently is an rarity - especially at 4.
Sailors throughout human history have been this way. One could argue they’ve done the most to further human expansion and civilization than any other group.
Even if she lives in an area where it’s common to speak 7 languages and she has picked them, I still find it surprising the bit saying that she can read those languages, especially with at least two different alphabets to learn.
She must have a high IQ and I kind of pity her. Being too intelligent for your age sucks. You can’t relate well to your peers, people look at you like you are a circus attraction and you have an easy time with study despite all that delicious bullying your peers throw over you until you go to college and meet other high-achieving kids extremely competitive that hate your guts. But if you survive it really gets better! Having a video of when you were 4 year old in a TV show probably doesn’t help much with that
In the German part, the lady, whose first language is very likely not German, or she´s not been living in a German speaking country for a long time, asks her to do a “Knicksen”. This means a curtsy, which the girl proceeds to do. If she actually knew German though, she likely would not understand immediately what a “Knicksen” was supposed to be, because the word is actually “Knicks”. “Knicksen” sounds like made up German that a Nazi soldier in an American movie would use.
