Multi-language spell-checking

As many others are apparently trying to do, I wish to use aspell to check
more than one language at a time. I did see in the manual that this is
possible via the *.multi files, but I was quite unable to get it to
function. Is there a way to accomplish this without having to modify the
system-wide .../lib/aspell directory? Preferably just with a ~/.aspell.conf
file? Here is the best I could come up with, but it appears that
'local-data-dir' is silently ignored. Thanks in advance.

man page:
http://aspell.net/0.50-doc/man-html/5_Working.html#SECTION00650000000000000000

john@eleanor:~$ cat .aspell.conf
local-data-dir /home/john/
extra-dicts en_fr.multi
john@eleanor:~$ cat en_fr.multi
add en_US
add fr_FR

-John

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