Bella speaks her native Russian and also French, Arabic, German, English, Spanish and Chinese.
Bella has stunned the world when she plainly spoke seven languages on national television.
The clip later made its way online where it has been blowing peoples’ minds for a week, totalling over a million views on YouTube, alone.
Some people criticized her parents for loading her up with such a learning curriculum (they have her studying all of these languages), but neuropsychologist Anna Semenovich clarified that she was doing it of her own volition. “If the girl is learning languages through curiosity, if her parents managed to build a schedule that works as a game – it will only benefit her. She’s not studying, she’s playing!” Semenovich said.
Bella speaks languages belonging to three different groups: Indo-European (Russian, French, English, Spanish, German), Semitic (Arabic) and Sino-Tibetan (Chinese) – which in short means that they are very, very different to each other and lack structural similarities.
That doesn’t stop Bella from thinking clearly in each language, however, and she correctly answered age-appropriate questions on the show, as well as some material from the school curriculum. School starts for Russian kids at the age of seven, which for Bella is still three years away.
Bella’s mother, Yulia, said that they started teaching her Russian and English when she was only two and noticed her interest in linguistics.
Gradually they started adding more languages to her schedule, and she now studies with native speakers.
