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Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Thursday, January 29, 2015

What Makes Bill Gates Feel 'Stupid'

Bill Gates’ big regret in life isn’t Clippy. Or Microsoft’s failed MP3 player, the Zune. Or Comic Sans. It’s that he speaks only English. During a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session on Wednesday, the Microsoft founder said he wants to learn another language. “I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages,” Gates, who runs the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote in the third such Q&A he has done on Reddit. “I took Latin and Greek in high school and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.” He said he was impressed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who conducted a Q&A with students in China last October completely in Mandarin, a language he began studying in recent years. Gates called the move “incredible.” “I keep hoping to get time to study one of these -- probably French because it is the easiest,” wrote Gates, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest man. “I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up.” As a billionaire endeavoring to become bilingual, Gates is in good company. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- now back at the helm of his eponymous media and financial data company -- has been studying Spanish for years. According to a profile published Tuesday in The New York Times, he continues his lessons in a designated conference room at Bloomberg headquarters. A 2009 poll from employment agency Korn/Ferry International found that 31 percent of executives speak two languages, and about 20 percent speak three.


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