Via Instapundit and Kaus, I read that Barack Obama couldn’t speak Spanish. But in 1997, he claimed to a reporter that he could speak a barely passable Spanish, one of four languages that he claimed varying abilities to speak:
Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, April 26, 1997
LAWYER-LEGISLATOR BREATHES LIFE INTO THE DREAMS OF HIS FATHER
David Heckelman
“Living in Indonesia was a fascinating time,” Obama said, “because it gave me a good sense of what the Third World was like and what an emerging nation goes through.”
He learned to speak the Indonesian language while living there.
“I also speak a barely passable Spanish, and sometimes a barely passable English,” he said, having studied the Spanish language and English literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles and at Columbia University in New York.
“I have a smattering of Swahili,” he added, “because my father was from Kenya.”
He said he had traveled to that country to learn more about his father, who had died in 1980 and whom he had not known very well.
I know that Obama is more fluent in English than most of us.
Does anyone know how fluent he is in his other three languages, especially Spanish?