Powell Janulus: World's most fluent speaker

As I was looking at the Wikipedia article called ‘List of Polyglots’, I stumbled upon a man who the Guinness book of World Records calls the most ‘fluent’ man around. Powell Janulus passed a 2 hour fluency test for each of 42 languages! And he lives in my (and LingQ’s) hometown of Vancouver. See the wikipedia article here:

here is a video of him speaking a few languages. I have to say I could not understand most of his Japanese due to his thick accent. But his French was fine.

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Thanks for posting this! Really interesting.

He may have the record, but it’s hard to tell from that video, because he speaks maybe 10-15 seconds, and most are basic.

I don’t speak a few of the languages in the video, but I knew what he was saying because it was all generally the same.

Similar approach to Moses it seems to me.

Good post!

Well you do have Guinness to guarantee it, I do not see why they would give it to him without him really earning it. It is not as if he is a marketable persona. Too bad he seems unwell recently, I would love to see Steve and him interview since they are both in Vancouver.

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Well yes, I don’t mean any discredit or disrepect by my comment. Just seems, in that video (which seems he is fairly older (20+ years since the test), that he may have degraded. It would be nice to see a video with him and Steve, or perhaps multiple polyglots conversing in several languages.

Impressive!

Actually I stumble upon the list of polyglots after I noticed that LingQ STILL has no Wikipedia page, despite similar businesses having one.