Gisuepp Mezzofanti (1774-1849) was an Italian cardinal who was perhaps the best language learner ever He spoke more than 38 languages fluently He never left Italy but he learned to speak these languages without an accent people from all over the world came to take to him in their native languages all of them were amazed at his fluency
at the age of 12 Mezzofanti spoke his native Italian as well as German Greek Latin and at least five other languages then he learned Arabic Russian Hindi old English and Maltese He also learned Chinese this was the hardest language for him to learn it took him four months
Some stories say he also spoke 30 other languages fairly well and that he could understand another 20 ( for example Tibetan and Icelandic)
Another story says that he heard there were two foreigners in a prison in Rome so he learned their language in one night and spoke to them the next morning
It's hard to know if all these stories are true.Some people for example ask How did he learn Old English without meeting anyone who spoke it or did he really learn a language in a few weeks or in one night we don't know for sure but we can say for certain that Giuseppe Mezzofanti became a language-learning legend