Has any President of the US been fluent in a foreign language in addition to English?
(Bracing myself for those who choose to take that question as a straight line. Yeah, I know this crowd.)
At least half spoke a second language per Wikipedia.
ETA: But fluency wasn’t as common.
FDR was raised speaking German and French.
Herbert Hoover spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently.
I believe that Eisenhower was from a Mennonite background (though his parents had converted to another church). It’s possible that he spoke Pennsylvania Dutch.
Van Buren’s native language was Dutch, and English was his second language.
Very cool Wikipedia page – thanks, Iggy!
Interesting how the only president so far whose first language was not English, was Martin Van Buren (Dutch, then spoken in the village in New York’s upper Hudson River Valley where he was raised).
(Ninja’d! Oh, well.)
Interestingly, seven of those were 18th or 19th century presidents who only spoke Latin, classical Greek, or Hebrew, which were standard requirements at the better schools in those days. (And they probably weren’t of too much use in conducting diplomacy.)
And of the major party candidates in the 2012 election…
Obama has expressed regret at not speaking another language. I guess he did not pick up fluency in a second language during his youth in Indonesia, though some sites say he speaks a bit of Bahasa Indonesiaand Spanishpoorly.
Joe Biden speaks no foreign languages.
Romney is reportedly fluent in French from his studies and time spent in France doing missionary work for his church.
Paul Ryan speaks no foreign languages.
I’ve seen George W. Bush speak creditable Spanish.
Jefferson knew a whole slew of languages.
No one’s mentioned JFK? Isn’t he famous for going to Berlin and saying “I am a jelly donut” with a good accent?
Thomas Jefferson may deserve the Gold Medal, but surely Garfield deserves at least Honorable Mention:
An impossible-to-kill urban legend: Ich bin ein Berliner - Wikipedia
John Quincy Adams spoke several languages fluently, including Russian- he served as the American Ambassador to Russia, during the reign of Tsar Alexander I.
He didn’t really NEED to speak Russian, of course, as everyone in the Tsar’s court tended to speak French.
Garfield is the one that impresses me. I’ve never known anything about him except that he was assasinated and named after a cat. Maybe I should read up on the lesser presidents.
I don’t remember ever hearing the “jelly doughnut” slander until many years after the fact. I’d say it didn’t start until a Kennedy backlash appeared, when people felt comfortable talking about his mistresses and failures. The line seemed to have slipped in as proof that he was a phony.
Once a story hits print, it gets repeated just because everything that is in print must be true, just as today everything on the internet must be true. If it wasn’t why would they print it. It’s like the line that the porn industry “generates more profits annually than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined.” as discussed in this thread. Not possibly true, but it gets repeated by people looking for a bit of color to add to a piece, totally without thinking.
As a congressman, Garfield came up with a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. Tell me that’s not cool.
ETA: The US lost a potentially great president when he was assassinated. If you’re interested in him (and the assassination), Destiny of the Republicis an outstanding book.
All that and he still didn’t know how to duck.
If JFK had said “I am a Danish” would we be having a similar argument?
Fortunately for the Danes, the Soviets never had tanks in Copenhagen.
If he said it in Danish, perhaps.
Is a danish called a danish in Danish?