“Luxembourg gave me the keys to languages”
“I always say that I don’t know if I have a talent for languages because I received four almost ‘free'”. By posting a short clip from Kiev last Monday, in six languages, for channels around the world, Philip Crowther activated a global buzz via Twitter. 22.6 million views, 181,000 likes, 35,500 retweets figures make them dizzy. Even the shows of American TV stars Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon talked about it.
Mamer’s child, who had lived in Washington for ten years, learned English from his father, German from his mother. As a child, he learned Luxembourgish with his friends, then French from the age of 8 at school”. At 14, he took up Spanish “first to understand the commentary of the original Ronaldo’s Barça football matches”. After leaving to study in London, Madrid and Barcelona, he added Portuguese to his panoply at the age of 22. “I have a facility, but Luxembourg gave me all the keys,” he says. He comes back there two or three times a year to see his family.
“I swear in English when I hurt myself”
“Philip has always been comfortable juggling between languages, but like me, math wasn’t his thing!”, jokes Joe Geimer, childhood neighbor son and ex-comrade at the Lycée Athénée. “We are here to comfort him and bring him back down to earth,” he smiles. “I suffered enormously with the French language which is full of grammatical exceptions that cannot be explained”, admits the polyglot journalist.
Of British, German, Luxembourgish nationality for three years and soon to be American, Philip assures us that he does not “think or dream in any language. When I hurt myself, I swear in English, so that must be my most instinctive language,” he laughs.
Requests from all over the world
Young dad, returned to his family on Wednesday, for a few days in Washington before leaving for Ukraine, Philip was bombarded with comments, requests for interviews from around the world. “From Thailand, Bulgaria, Israel, Australia. I have lots of cool messages asking me to learn this or that language. It’s fascinating. I can’t follow the comments anymore. We loses control a bit. I can’t complain, I made the video myself”, he admits, rejoicing that this virality, for once, serves a good cause, “learning languages “.
His next goal: for Arabic to become his seventh language. “Philip is amazing, stubborn and a perfectionist. When he says that, it’s not to speak two or three words”, jokes Joe. “I already started last year but if you learn a language, you have to put in every day. I spent a month in Ukraine and China and didn’t have time. The ambition would be to be able to hold a more or less common conversation in Qatar, for the end of the year, during the World Cup”.
(Nicolas Martin/The essential)
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