(NewsNation Now) — A news correspondent has gone viral this week for not just knowing six languages, but for being able to use all of them in reports for multiple networks, including here on NewsNation.
“A lot of people go viral for the wrong reasons, for doing something silly or stupid, and in this case the comments are all positive, so, really, I’m quite, quite grateful,” Philip Crowther, an international affiliate correspondent for the Associated Press, said Wednesday on “Dan Abrams Live.”
Crowther put together a mash of a number of his reports from Kyiv’s Freedom Square and posted the video to his Twitter account. It shows him reporting in English, Luxembourgish, Spanish, Portuguese, French and German.
“There are a lot of people commenting on the fact that they’d like to maybe learn another language, seeing what they saw in that video,” Crowther said.
By Wednesday evening, the video had nearly 22 million views.
“It’s been a pretty relentless few days, at least when you look at my phone; it’s been vibrating rather a lot to a lot of notifications,” Crowther said.
Crowther grew up in Luxembourg and said he learned the language from his friends. At home, he learned German from his mother and English from his father. He learned French in school, then Spanish and eventually Portuguese.
“I could maybe do something in Catalan for you, spoken in Catalonia in in the part of Spain and a small part of France,” Crowther said about the possibility of reporting in another language. “But that’s pretty much it. I can just about make it to seven.”
Crowther said he’s never started reporting in the wrong language by accident, but has made small mistakes.
“I might invent invent a word in Spanish that does exist in French, give it a bit of a Spanish ending and think to myself, ‘Oh, that must be a word in Spanish,’ but then it isn’t,” Crowther said. “And native speakers will find out if you’re making that mistake, and they’ll go, ‘No, this guy isn’t native after all.'”