Quote Originally Posted by Man About Town View Post
It's nothing but a show-off. Anyone can learn a few phrases, put some effort into practicing a proper accent and you are good to go!
True... for example, I would bet money that if you showed him a photograph of a bird from the genus Passer ...



...and asked him Что это такое?, he would answer Это маленькая птица ("It's a small bird") or something close to that, whereas most Russian children over the age of five or six would answer Это воробей ("It's a sparrow").

Or, if you asked him how to say "Those people are very wealthy" in Russian, he might be able to provide a direct literal translation like Эти люди очень богатые, but it would never occur to him to say У них всё есть, кроме птичьего молока, ("They've got everything but bird milk") because he was too busy learning Hebrew, Catalan, Afrikaans, etc., to study Russian in more depth and learn some common proverbs and figures of speech.

Which is to say that "fluency" can be defined in different ways, and the BBC video shows that he has an impressive ability to master different accents and perhaps also an excellent memory for rehearsed phrases, but he's not actually demonstrating an ability to converse fluently in all those different languages. (Maybe he can, but the video doesn't prove this.)