List of Presidents of the United States who knew a foreign language
That’s cool, but please add some original content, or I’m guessing the moderator will send this post to temp!
You have 48 hours to comply, Mr. Bond. 
Tony Blair speaks French
Nick Clegg speaks Dutch, French, German, and Spanish.
Kevin Rudd speaks Mandarin.
Can’t think of any more off hand.
Well I didn’t know that. Another weird factum about Hoover. As a lad I worked in shearing gangs in Western Australia. Traveling on dirt roads is restricted when there’s floods, and so caught in a flashflood, the team and I were holed up in a weird old gold mining boomtown that had emptied in the thirties when the price of gold tanked. The population went from 10,000 to 500, and at the time I was there was around 200. It had been a very affluent place, and the main street was incredibly preserved, as were/are the buildings. In a corner of a very grand old pub was a dusty plaque declaring Herbert Hoover the Shire President. Apparently he’d worked at the mine there for years.
The pub at Cue.
More on Wilson’s mining and China days.
[quote]Hoover went to Australia in 1897 as an employee of Bewick, Moreing & Co., a London-based mining company. He served as a geologist and mining engineer while searching the Western Australian goldfields for investments. After being appointed as mine manager at the age of 23, he led a major program of expansion for the Sons of Gwalia gold mine at Gwalia, Western Australia, and brought in many Italian immigrants to cut costs and counter the union militancy of the Australian miners. [5] [6] He believed “the rivalry between the Italians and the other men was of no small benefit.” [5] He also described Italians as “fully 20 per cent superior” [5] to other miners.
Hoover worked at gold mines in Big Bell, Cue, Leonora, Menzies and Coolgardie. [7] [8]
Hoover married his Stanford sweetheart, Lou Henry, in 1899. The Hoovers had two sons, Herbert Clark Jr. (1903-1969) and Allan Henry (1907-1993). They went to China, where Hoover worked for a private corporation as China’s leading engineer. Hoover and his wife picked up Mandarin Chinese while he worked in China and used it during his tenure at the White House when they did not want to be overheard. [9] The Boxer Rebellion trapped the Hoovers in Tianjin in June 1900. For almost a month, the settlement was under heavy fire. Hoover himself guided US Marines around Tianjin during the battle, using his extensive knowledge of the local terrain. [10]
Hoover was made a partner in Bewick, Moreing & Co. in 1901 and assumed responsibility for various Australian operations. In August-September 1905, Hoover came up with a technological innovation. When visiting the mines at Broken Hill, New South Wales, he noticed considerable zinc in the Broken Hill lead-silver ore, which could not be recovered and was lost as tailings. Hoover devised a practical and profitable method to use the then-new froth flotation process to treat these tailings and recover the zinc. [11] With William Baillieu and others, he founded the Zinc Corporation (later, following various mergers, a part of Rio Tinto Group). [/quote]
HG
James Madison spoke Hebrew.
I thought Pappy Bush also spoke Mandarin to some degree.
Hoover was a brilliant man. He also translated one of the early texts on metals by Agricola.
Wow! hane never heard such things about him before…Coolguy
Obama speaks fluent Indonesian.
Current Republican hopeful Jon Huntsman speaks fluent mandarin. Learned it as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. Usually, Republican + Mormon = not my support, but this guy is head and shoulders better than any other republican hopeful. Not devout Mormon, and differs from many republicans on science and fiscal policy. For those reasons, he’ll never win the nomination.
HGC -
Thanks for the early days info on Hoover.
I honestly did not know anything about this time of his life.
Very interesting. He was quite an innovative and successful businessman.