What does it take to learn three languages?.. six... twenty? Michael Erard's inquisitive interest takes us into a real investigation in search of hyperpolyglots of different times and peoples: from the Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who spoke seventy-two languages, to our multilingual contemporary Lomb Kato from Hungary, who learned Russian by reading novels. Through the study of questions about , what a language is, what place it occupies in the human brain, how polyglots master it, are these people different from you and me, the author is trying to determine the upper limit of a person’s ability to learn and use languages. He believes that examples of outstanding linguistic achievements allow us to look into the depths of the human brain and evaluate its abilities. For those who want to understand how to learn foreign languages.