Janer – How many languages have you currently mastered and what are your criteria for having mastered a language?
Carlos – Mastering a language, even one’s own native language, is an extremely difficult endeavor. For me, however, mastering a language is having a theoretic and practical knowledge that allows me to communicate in it and, even with some difficulty, translate literary text. Based on these criteria – which are a little personal – I say that I have mastered about thirty languages. I can translate a few others but I have very little practical knowledge of them. When they ask me how many languages I speak (or that I have mastered) I prefer to answer that I know, or that I have studied, with philological and linguistic criteria, more than one hundred languages during a period of fifty consecutive years. Since graduating in Neo-Latin and Anglo-Germanic Languages [PUC, 1958] I’ve kept up a tradition of systematically studying at least one new foreign language at the beginning of each year. I already chose the next one: Wolof, which I started studying on January 1st of 2003. Janer – Translati
