Many people claim to know dozens of languages, but few really manage to master those languages.

While there are several reports of people who have demonstrated knowledge of up to ten languages, one of the few known cases of polyglots of up to half a hundred languages is that of German Emil Krebs. It has been said that he mastered 68 languages, and even took the trouble to learn up to 120 dialectal varieties of these.

His life is not at all boring, being held up as a great example to those who wish to be able to free themselves from the barriers of monolingualism to the point that it is considered a savant. Let us know about his interesting life and what he did to become a speaker of so many languages, through this summarized biography of Emil Krebs .

Brief biography of Emil Krebs

If already the fact of dominating German, his mother tongue, is for many considered a real milestone given the difficulty of this Germanic language, the possession of extensive knowledge of up to fifty languages of all kinds is already something that takes your breath away.

His life began like that of any other German child of the 19th century , but little by little, having contact with many languages, it became the story of an excellent sinologist, that is, one who knows about Chinese culture.

Early life and first contact with multilingualism

Emil Krebs was born in Freiburg of Silesia, today Åšwiebodzice, Poland , on November 15, 1867, when this city was still in German territory. His family was not upper class, his father being a carpenter and his mother a housewife.

In 1870 he moved with his parents to Esdorf, where he went to primary school. Between 1878 and 1880 he went to the Freiburger Realschule, a secondary school, and in the period from 1880 to 1887 he attended the Schweidnitz high school.

The education he received in these centers was quite complete, having in his educational curriculum the learning of multiple languages besides German, including classical Latin and Greek, French and Hebrew.

However, the desire to learn more languages led Krebs to study modern languages on his own, including modern Greek, English, Italian and, a little later in life, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Polish and Arabic.

When he finished his studies at the lyceum he enrolled at the University of Wroclaw for a semester-long course in theology in the summer. At that time he already had an advanced command of twelve languages.

Later he moved to the University of Berlin, where he studied law . It was in this city that he was drawn to the newly founded Oriental Seminary, where courses in Asian languages were offered.

The first Asian language he studied was Mandarin Chinese. The choice of this language was not accidental, since it was known to be the most difficult language to learn, and he took it as a challenge to master it.

Having started studying Chinese in 1887, in 1890 he managed to pass the exame n to graduate as an interpreter of this language, with very good grades.

Over the next two years, Emil Krebs was able to acquire a level of Mandarin Chinese comparable to that of a native with a careful education in his mother tongue.

However, although the study of foreign languages was his main hobby, they did not take him away from his studies in law , passing the university exams also with good grades.

After completing his university studies, he was accepted as a student lawyer by the Gottesberg court and later in Berlin.

In 1893 he was accepted as an interpreter to travel to Beijing , China, thus beginning an important period of his life as a scholar of oriental cultures and training as a sinologist.

Trip to China

In 1893 Emil Krebs first set foot in China, working for Germany in the eastern country until German-Chinese relations ended with the outbreak of World War I.

During that time, Krebs worked as a diplomatic translator for German interests in Beijing and Qingdao . Due to his great fluency in Mandarin, the polyglot became more and more famous among both German and native Chinese colleagues.

In 1897, two German missionaries were killed in Qingdao, making the German Reich interpret this as a perfect excuse to invade the region. So Krebs, for a year and the next joined the occupation forces of Kiau Chiau.

Later, after the occupation, the polyglot became the main interpreter in the region , becoming a very close confidant of the Zishi empress, because the aristocrat was impressed by the way Krebs wrote Chinese. In fact, Emil Krebs was invited on several occasions to the palace to have tea with the empress.

Nevertheless, and although his passion for Mandarin was very great, he also took advantage of his stay in Asia to learn other oriental languages, among them Mongolian, Manchu and Tibetan , and even took it upon himself to teach the Chinese officials languages from other parts of his own Empire.

In 1913, while in Shanghai, Emil Krebs took another German citizen in China, Mande Heyne, as his wife.

Years later and after having obtained a great knowledge about the Chinese language and culture, Krebs had to leave the country due to the end of the relations between China and Germany, when the First World War started in 1917 .

In conflict, China sided with the Triple Entente (France, UK and Russia), while Germany was on the opposite side, the Central Powers. It is for this reason that the Germans began to be harassed by the Chinese.

Return to Berlin

In 1917 Emil Krebs was forced to return to his native Germany. He was accepted as part of the German intelligence in Asian affairs , taking charge of the coding of the language of the enemy for the duration of the war.

After the end of World War I, the polyglot continued to work in language-related jobs, translating and interpreting several of them for the German authorities.

In his free time he continued to study languages, and also became curious about the dialectal varieties of languages.

After a life in which he focused on mastering dozens of languages, reaching no less than 68 languages and, if we take into account dialectal varieties, some 111, Emil Krebs died on March 31, 1930 in Berlin, at the age of 62.

Study of your brain

After the death of this polyglot, scientists did not want to miss the opportunity to study the brain of one who had mastered over a hundred different forms of language. His brain was sent to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in Berlin, an institution that several years later, at the end of World War II, would be renamed the Max Planck Society.

More recently, in 2004, three scientists, Katrin Amunts, Karl Zilles and Axel Schleiche published a study on Emil Krebs’ brain, which revealed certain differences in his Broca’s area , which could be behind his great ability to learn to speak new languages.

Today, Krebs’ brain can be found at the University of Düsseldorf.

Curiosities

Emil Krebs’ life is full of curiosities that, although they have not been confirmed, if true, are a clear example of his abilities and personality when he was alive.

The first remarkable anecdote in the life of this polyglot was when he was still young. At that time he received an application to attend the Oriental Languages Seminar in Berlin. In this form he had to specify which language he wanted to study, however, he instead of specifying only one, answered with “as many as there are” .

The form was not accepted at first, since they understood from the Seminar that Emil Krebs had not understood the instructions. It was necessary to resubmit it up to ten times for the Seminar to finally accept him and invite him to come to Berlin.

Years later, when he was travelling in China, he received a letter from the Mongolians, which he was able to translate without any problems. Later, a Mongolian tribe asked him to translate some documents that had been written in ancient Mongolian language , and Krebs knew how to carry out the task immediately.

Also while in Asia, Krebs made contact with people who spoke Chinese dialect varieties that had hitherto been barely known to Europeans. Although he did not have much information, Krebs managed to understand some of these unknown dialects.

Another curiosity was that Emil Krebs once received one of the issues of the magazine Argia , a Basque publication. In that issue it was stated that an American professor who had mastered 53 languages had just died.

After that, Krebs learned the four main dialects of the Basque language in a few weeks , and sent a reply to Argia. On this basis, the magazine itself decided to publish an article in honour of the polyglot, called “Young Basques! Take the example of Emil Krebs”.

Finally, and as a curiosity that cannot be ignored, there is a language learning method called the Krebs method , which does honour to the polyglot protagonist of this article. This method was not really invented by Emil Krebs, but is rather a reinterpretation of how he studied and acquired mastery of foreign languages.

It has been said that this method is capable of mastering a language in just ten days, which has not really been demonstrated with enough empirical evidence.

Bibliographic references:

  • Amunts, K., Schleicher, A., and Zilles, K. (2004). Outstanding language competence and cytoarchitecture in Broca’s speech region. Brain and Language, 89(2). 346-353.