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.

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.

“This was the first time I met people whose language I couldn’t recognize,” Muhamed remembers. “I could listen to our neighbors talking and then figure out the meaning from the situation. At the end of the vacation, I was able to help my father to communicate with a local mechanic who repaired our car. My parents were shocked.”

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. “In my first trip after the war to Hungary, my Grandmother demanded from me not to learn Hungarian, she said I didn’t need it. When I came back, I was afraid to tell her the truth,” he told The Jewish Journal.

Muhamed 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.

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