Learning a language at any age can be somewhat difficult, but at two-years-old, it is probably down-right impossible. Well, two-year-old Isaiah Gyamfi, aka, Izzy, from Ghana, is proving that theory wrong as the already acclaimed math genius has taught himself Japanese.
“One day Isaiah was watching a phonic video on my phone on YouTube, he scrolled to the videos at the bottom and clicked on a Japanese numeracy video,” his mother, Jazelle Anderson told the Mirror in a recent interview. “He listened to it once and was fixated. He asked to watch it again, then before I knew it, he would recite the numbers back to back.”
Anderson, who is an early childhood educator in London, began creating a learning environment for her son when he was just four-months-old. She put put numeracy and literacy flashcards in their living room so that he could start learning through visuals.
As months passed, and at eight-months-old, Isaiah astonished his parents as they noticed that he was pointing out the correct letters and eventually sound them out using phonics. He also writing numbers and solving Math problems by himself.
“I was first taken back and thought, did my 8-month-old just call out letters? I remember just laughing nervously, but I was so excited and wanted to hear it again,” she said in her interview. “I thought maybe it sounded like he said the numbers and letters, but he actually said something else. But he continued to say it, which confirmed what I thought.”
She continued, “I remember telling his dad when he got home from work I took Isaiah to the wall where the letter and number stickers were, when he called them out we both stood there just laughing. We were first time parents and just felt so proud and excited.”
In addition to adding Japanese to his foreign-language repertoire, Izzy also speaks English, Spanish, French, Italian, Twi, and Yoruba.
