Seventeen-year-old Timothy Doner has become a minor YouTube celebrity—not by stacking cups, juggling or even singing a particularly grating song, but by speaking. It’s not the sort of thing that typically draws a following on the Internet…unless you’re doing your speaking in 20 different languages.

In one of his videos, the New York teen speaks French, Russian, Farsi, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, Wolof and 14 other languages (not counting his native English), most of which he taught himself to speak. While he studied French and Latin when he was a fairly young child, his love of other tongues never really took off until he started learning Hebrew for his bar mitzah when he was 12. Because he already was studying a Middle Eastern culture, he opted to dive into Arabic. The rest followed.

Doner believes learning languages gives the speaker insight into other cultures—particularly the way he learns them. Doner doesn’t listen to formal lessons as much as he engages with music, literature and television using the language.

“We don’t learn a lot about Arab or Islamic history in school,” he says. “I think by learning languages you are effectively learning a lot more. You are learning about the culture, everything from cooking to TV to poetry to politics to whatever it may be. I think that fosters a much better understanding.” (New York Daily News)

Paul Asay has covered religion for The Washington Post, Christianity Today, Beliefnet.com and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette. He writes about culture for Plugged In and wrote the Batman book God on the Streets of Gotham (Tyndale). He lives in Colorado Springs with wife, Wendy, and two children. Follow him on Twitter.