ᐅᓪᓛᓯᐊᑦᓯᐊᕆᑦ! That’s “Good morning!” in one of the most obscure languages I could find on the Google Translate list: Inukitut. It probably wouldn’t have been a problem for Emil Krebs, though. He was born November 15, 1867 in Germany, and was (to put it mildly) an excellent student of languages. He learned to write and speak 68 languages, and studied 120 others. Reportedly he was able to speak many of them as fluently as a native speaker.
As a boy, Krebs attended a school (or gymnasium, which was the term for what we would call a secondary or high school) with an unusual number of languages on the curriculum: Latin, French, Hebrew, Greek (both classical and modern), English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Arabic, and Turkish. He must have slacked off somewhere, because when he enrolled at the University of Breslau he could “only” speak 12 languages.
He transferred to the University of Berlin, apparently because they offered more language courses, and started on Mandarin Chinese because he’d been told it was the most difficult. He mastered in in two years, while at the same time studying law. He passed an interpreter’s exam in Chinese in 1890, and the next year passed his law exams. He became a “junior lawyer” at the Berlin Court of Appeal, and was soon sent (not sure by whom) to Beijing to become an interpreter.
Krebs lived in Beijing until World War I intervened and German citizens were ejected from China. By then he’d become locally famous for his fluency. While he was working, he spent his spare time learning more languages, and in China he had access to more Asian languages than he’d had in Germay. He learned Mongolian, Manchu, and Tibetan. According to a coworker, he was able to learn a language in only about nine weeks.
Krebs had an unusual approach to learning some languages — when he learned one, he would use that to learn more. For example, he learned English from his native German, and then learned Pashto, Hindi, and others through English. After his death his brain was preserved (and still is) as an “elite brain” in the Institute for Brain Research in Dusseldorf. His personal library comprised thousands of books in hundreds of languages, and is now part of the collection of the US Library of Congress. Dunqu’! (that’s “Amazing!” in a language Krebs did not learn: Klingon.)
