In a 15-minute video that has been watched more than a million times, Doner talks about – and in – such languages as Pashtu, Turkish, Hebrew and German, to name a few, jumping from one to the other with remarkably little effort.

“Ik kan een beetje Nederlands spreken,” he says after talking about Indonesian food in Indonesian. “Maar mijn accent is niet zo goed want ik ben een beginner.” I can speak a little Dutch, but my accent is not so good because I’m a beginner. “Ik wil Nederlands leren want Nederlands en Engels zijn zustertalen,” he adds, before introducing himself in Xhosa (spoken in parts of South Africa). I want to learn Dutch because Dutch and English are sister languages.

Doner started learning languages when he was studying Hebrew for his bar mitzvah, he told the New York Daily News in a recent interview. He developed a keen interest in the Middle East and soon started learning Arabic, too. “From Arabic, I went on to more or less everything else,” he is quoted as having said. “That was the key in the beginning.”

Is the kid a genius? He obviously has more than a knack for languages. And is, therefore, worth listening to when he shares his thoughts on the art of language learning. Start young, he says. “Between the ages of nine and 12, your ability to comfortably and fluidly pick up a foreign language diminishes with regard to phonology, syntactic processing or whatever it may be.”

While that piece of advice may come too late for you, here’s another: Make it fun. “If you love jazz or R&B, listen to that kind of music in the target language. Anything you can do to make it relevant and interesting in your own life is definitely a positive step forward.”

At some point in his hit video, he says (in German): “I don’t try to learn new words from a book, but rather listen to conversations and watch movies.” And near the end of the interview, the wonderboy offers one final thought: It gets easier every time. “You start to get more familiar with different grammatical systems, different ways of idiomatically speaking, different pronunciation systems,” he says. “And of course, also, they bleed into each other. I think a lot of it has to do with getting through that brick wall of learning your first language.”

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