IT’S not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Mesic 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), Mesic has been 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 they were saying from the situation they were in.

    “This was the first time I met people whose language I couldn’t recognize,” Mesic 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 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 9, 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.

    Before long, his family realized that there was something special about Mesic. The doctors who examined him concluded that it was his Asperger’s Syndrome (a light form of Autism) that allowed him to pick up new foreign languages so easily, sometimes unintentionally. He 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 two weeks, with the help of YouTube, two books and 43 cartoons.

    But despite his remarkable ability to pick up foreign languages with ease, Mesic is also 100 percent dedicated to his passion for languages and dedicates almost all of his time to studying and practicing them. Mesic says that he hardly has any free time, which is tough for a 32-year-old, but at the same time, dedicating himself to his passion makes him feel happy and fulfilled.

    Today, Mesic speaks 56 different languages, from common ones like English or Portuguese, to Japanese and Georgian, and even tongues that most of us have never even heard of, like Kinyarwanda (official language of Rwanda) or Quechua (the language of the indigenous people of the central Andes of South America). (SD-Agencies)