14. Ho Chi Minh picked up his language skills through his years studying and working abroad – as well as through the years he spent in exile
Ho Chi Minh is best remembered for his revolutionary activities. And rightly so. As the Chairman and First Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, he helped found the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (also known as North Vietnam). He would then lead the North Vietnam Army during the Vietnam War, a conflict which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them innocent civilians, including women and children. But Ho Chi Minh was also a polyglot, with the years he spent outside of his native country allowing him to pick up several foreign languages.
Of course, as well as his native Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh mastered French from an early age. Vietnam was, after all, controlled by the French during his formative years, while he also spent some time in Paris in the years leading up to the First World War. Alongside these two languages, Ho Chi Minh learned English through living in first the United States and then the United Kingdom between 1908 and 1913. All of these languages would help him as he grew to power in the post-war years.
It wasn’t just Western languages that Ho Chi Minh could speak fluently. As a young boy, his academic father taught his son how to read, write and speak Classical Chinese. He even wrote poetry in the language, once reserved for the imperial family only. Later in life, he learned Mandarin Chinese too. Furthermore, Ho Chi Minh also learned to master Russian, again another language that would come in useful when North Vietnam called on Communist Russia to help in its fight against the South. Ho Chi Minh died in September 1969, before the end of the Vietnam War. In 1998, Time magazine named him one of the ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’. His legacy stretched far and wide, thanks in no small part to his own linguistic abilities.