Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore.
Wow, that's a lot of languages, don't you think?
Sounds like the daughter of the main protagonists in Robert K. Tanenbaum's terrific, ongoing thrillers about the trials and tribulations of the Karp family. For those who enjoy this sort of book, I can highly recommend ANYTHING by Tanenbaum.
Yes, orangutan, Tanenbaum's "Karp" books do just that. The fact that the Karp daughter is a true polyglot is often essential to the plot, so it is often discussed (and explained) in the books.
orangutan, One minor warning: get one of the Tanenbaum books and check the list of published books that's in most mass-market paperback editions. Tanenbaum is one of those authors, like Patricia Cornwell, whose "continuing odyssey of ……" style books, although each more or less "standalone" novels, are far more enjoyable when read in the order they were written. I'm not a fan of the style, but Tanenbaum is such a good writer (and his real standalones are outstanding!) that I keep reading the serial story also. I "think" the polyglot daughter enters the scene about the third book of the series, but I could be mistaken.
Off the subject, but since I mentioned Patricia Cornwell, and she's a darn good writer too, I must say that if you DON'T read her ongoing series about Scarpetta in the order they were written, you just might find yourself completely lost, as the later novels in that series "assume" that you already know most of the backstory.