Multilingual?!?

My younger brother Eric, who’s 18, has Autism and he never ceases to amaze me. His level of intelligence is astonishing, especially when it comes to his interest in foreign languages. I remember one day when we were younger I had just learned how to count to ten in Spanish and was reciting my new skill to my parents.

Of course, they congratulated me when I was finished and I felt like the queen of counting in Spanish. Little did I know, my brother was one step ahead of me.  He picked up where I left off and counted all the way to thirty in Spanish. My mom and dad were so impressed! At the time I was upset that Eric stole my thunder, but that was the first time I really saw how smart he was.

More recently, he was on the computer and my dad went downstairs to check on him. Eric was watching a clip from a Disney movie in a language that my dad was not familiar with. He asked Eric what language it was and he replied, “Slovak, yes,” as if he was so perplexed that my dad even had to ask.

To this day he is still intrigued by different languages and rarely reads books, watches movies, or searches websites in English. We’ll never know how much he truly understands German, Italian, Russian, Slovak, French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc., but his interest in these languages is incredible and creates some really touching memories.