WHAT’S ARABIC FOR ‘A SMART ALECK’?
Polyglot inspired by school visit
A STUDENT has learned to speak 19 languages after dedicating his life to his love of linguistics.
Georges Awaad’s hobby has seen him become fluent in nine languages and able to chat in 10 others.
The native French speaker used online resources and school classes to become fluent in English, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian and Portuguese.
Polyglot Georges, 20, can also speak Russian, Cantonese, Korean, Romanian, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Georgian and Armenian at a conversational level.
He can even chat in Esperanto, the language devised in the 19th century to enable people to speak a common tongue.
Georges, who studies linguistics at McGill University in his home city of Montreal, has dedicated 35-40 hours a week of his spare time to learning for the last decade.
He said: “My grandparents speak Arabic and I was learning English in school. When I was 10, we had an improv event in school and I was exposed to these different languages.
“I just thought it was so beautiful and so cool. It was music to my ears.”
His ability and hard work have helped him make connections all over the world, including in Georgia.
Georges, whose favourite language is Mandarin Chinese, has been named Canada’s most polyglottic student and will travel to Berlin this summer to explore the city and visit the headquarters of translation firm Babbel.