I'm always surprised at how often Japanese is listed among the hardest languages. If you are counting proficiency in Kanji, then I'll agree. Counters are a pain, although you only need the basic ones to get by. Otherwise I don't think it's so hard, just very different from English.
I mixed up にんじん/ninjin (carrot) and 人間/ningen (human) and accidentally exclaimed to my friend “I used to grow humans and trade them for other produce.” He nearly cried laughing.
being a student of japanese....... this had me rolling too. those are vocab i learned many years ago so i feel the friend on this one. 🤣 (ty for sharing! haha)
I once had a slip of the tongue and asked someone I met for the first time "お名前は何ですか?" (Onamae wa nandesuka? = What's your name?) as "お前は何ですか?" (Omae wa nandesuka? = What are you? -- in a rude way) 💀 The shock on his face and me being extremely terrified stumbling for words to apologise and explain myself 💀 It's been more than 10 years but the haunting memory is very fresh on my mind.
@@snithereens in Mexican Spanish avocado is aguacate. However in French the word for lawyer is the same as avocado, “avocat” so maybe they were someone who knew some French and assumed that the same rule applied in Spanish? Sometimes that works, but in this case it doesn’t at all lol. Otherwise, I agree, it would be a silly stretch to confuse the two words haha.
It's not a single event, but my Japanese friends kept saying I spoke like a yakuza. I thought I was sounding badass...no, they were trying to say I'm being rude and should be more polite
This guy with visible tattoos was telling me I shouldn't say ore. Yeah ok dude. I don't travel to Japan looking like Yakuza. I can probably get away with it.
@@Dragon-Believer it highly depends who you're talking to. In Japanese you almost never want to use any word that says "I" specifically unless you need to. Overusing おれ or わたし just makes you sound like a child who doesnt have a mature vocabulary, or a self centered narcissist.
Not really a linguistic error so much as a brain fart, but once tried to fend off a Korean evangelist by telling her 나는 유대인이다 naneun yudaein-ida “I am Jewish”, but misspoke and said 나는 예수다 naneun yesuda “I am Jesus Christ.” Anyway, it worked.
I'm a composer. I gave a concert in Mexico. My Spanish is OK. I did a pretty good intro and then I said the equivalent of "I hope I enjoy the show" I meant to use the 2nd person.
I've stopped watching content creators who support them, their therapists are glorified Celeverbots. I'd have more luck asking Akinator to identify my problems.
I’ve been annoyed by this sort of thing since I saw a “TWO POLYGLOTS MEETING!!!” video which consisted of them cycling through languages saying “Do you speak [language]?” “Yes, a bit!” so great to hear a professional backing up my irritation.
I like some of Mike's info., but it was just ridiculous for him to be marketed as a polyglot who fluently speaks over ten languages. When he was called out on it indirectly, all of a sudden his responses were he studied many languages, but did not claim he was fluent in them. He effectively said, he was unaware of it and it was his marketing team who he hired made the claims. Despite in the videos a person who interviews him said Mike is fluent in over ten languages, and conversational in about 100 languages, while Mike himself was sitting in front of the guy making the claims. Mike continued to not provide any academic information on his educational background, although he is also marketed as a linguist and phonologist.
@@Gee-xb7rtthe reason mine and many resumes have a hidden fifth proficiency level (basic, intermediate, advanced, fluent and technical - I can write a thesis and read papers, but can't order a pizza in Detroit)
@@Mordecrox yeah, when you learn in school its more more reading and writing than conversing, but seriously you aren't ready to land a job in a foreign country with three semesters of a language. I'm most proficient reading and writing in Spanish, even told I speak it really well but without the guttural stops its really hard to listen. Italian is really easy for me understand but never took it, lol.
I was cleaning with a Japanese friend and she said, "You're a good bastard." I asked her what she meant and she explained, "You know, a bastard. Someone who cleans something up. Like a Ghost-Bastard."
I spent two years living in Japan. I studied daily. I spent well over a thousand hours studying. I call my Japanese "conversational" and I am being exceptionally generous. When I hear people claiming you can learn a language in some tiny amount of time it gives me eye spasms.
As for language errors... When talking to some students of mine, I tried to speak less formally and instead of saying "How are you?" I said something closer to "Where are the girls?" I'm lucky no rumors started floating around...
Eh I taught English with a guy in China for a year and he basically went from beginner to upper intermediate in that year. He was just incredibly diligent and had a Chinese girlfriend... He really mined that lol.
The man who was confirmed to speak the most languages was a Canadian man who had to pass an hour-long test with a native speaker to be considered fluent. He spoke 42 languages and worked as a court bailiff.
@@tannern5352i knew it had to be a bunch of slavic languages, we often joke how we're all polyglots if you count every language, since some are more similar to each other than some dialects which aren't considered separate languages, i.e. arabic dialects
@@tannern5352 Also from wikipedia: "Powell was reported to have died in 2006, however this was inaccurate. In an interview, he stated that his disappearance was due to a stroke he suffered at that time. He reported that he lost his ability to speak English, due to brain damage." Imagine being a polyglot that loses your native language...
You forgot the most important function of Akkadian, writing complaints to your copper supplier about his terrible customer service and broken promises on the copper deliveries.
I once held the door for someone and they said, “Merci (thank you).” I then responded with, “Beaucoup (very much).” I think I was used to hearing “merci beaucoup” and my brain instinctively wanted to finish the sentence they started. Brains are weird sometimes.
I was once in Odessa, Ukraine, to practice Russian (as it was during covid, and Russia closed its borders). I remember walking into a Shwarma (kebab) shop and having a very basic conversation with the chef. I only knew how to read Russian, and say basic things. But hey, they appreciated the hell out of an Australian coming all the way there to learn more. As I collected my food order, I had that 'nervous moment' you get during language learning, and as I left I said in Russian "Thank you very much. Hello!" ... and then I walked out. I immediately realised my mistake, and shook my head while facepalming myself hard. For a brief moment I considered just walking off, but then decided "F**k it". I opened the the door to the shop and said, in Russian, "Excuse me. Sorry. Not Hello, but *Goodbye*!" The store owner and his delivery boy immediately had a good laugh with me as they gave a friendly wave and said "no problem". It was as this moment I realised that language learning is going to have its humorous and semi-embarrassing moments. But most of that is internal, as locals will just appreciate you actually trying.
I did this in Japan two months ago! Had a simple, nice conversation with a store clerk, thanked him, and then I said "Hello (night version)!" as I went to leave. He gave me a "what just happened" sort of smile and it was that moment I realized that word did NOT mean "Good night!" like I thought it did! 😁
Mistranslation story: I went to Japan with my wife. We don't know Japanese. We went into a pop-up sake bar. No english menus. The guy running it also didn't know any English. Regardless, he was super friendly towards us. I was able to use my phone to mostly translate the hand-written menu to order food, and then we blindly picked various sakes, because even if we could read, it would have meant absolutely nothing. We hit that place three times total since it was literally next door to our hotel and the guy was awesome (would hook us up with free food too, which was great, lol) We would sometimes type messages in our phone and use google to translate so we could converse a bit more on a very superficial level. Nothing deep just some basic "how long has this bar been open?" and "how long are you staying in town?" type messages. At one point, my wife and I were having our own conversation and he shows us a message: "Is there any hope?" I froze, lol. The good news is, my most immediate response was, "Uh.... Yes?" But I was stuck staring at it for a bit trying to figure out what was up. There's no way this dude was trying to engage in me a deep, philosophical discussion out of the blue. I think the confusion on my face led him to realize that something got lost in the translation. The follow-up message was, "Is there any request?" as in, did we need anything else in the moment. Language is a fickle thing, lol
I was once asking an Italian man what he thought was the nicest place in Italy to visit but, confusing the words il posto and la posta, I actually asked him what he thought was the nicest post office in Italy. After he finally stopped laughing he spoke in English with a thick Italian accent and said "hey, they all the same".
Generally, any video where the title is something like, "I learned x language in a week", I will firmly say, "No, you did not" and put them on the bad content list.
I live in Amsterdam and I already met a relatively famous fake polyglot a few times at the street. He used to post videos like "I will give you 5 bucks if I don't speak your language". Clearly he was only able to speak a few random words, so people caught on to that and started exposing the guy. Now his videos are more like "I will give you 5 bucks if I cannot recognise your language". Way less impressive, way less expensive.
Thats pretty funny because just being able to recognize most any language is still kind of impressive and makes for a fun video on its own, but knowing that they started by trying to fake that they speak almost every language takes any fun away from such a game.
Those "if we don't speak your language" videos are always so silly. Especially when they say "dialects don't count". I'm sorry, but what? Just take English as an example: There is no one correct way to speak the language. Hull accent is just as valid as Birmingham accent. A guy from Texas speaks the same langauge as a guy from Baltimore. If they can understand each other is a different question, but they are still speaking English, and all of those dialects are valid pronunciations.
@@LordHorst There is a significant difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent refers only to pronunciation, indicating how words are spoken. In contrast, a dialect includes unique vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Thus, while all dialects encompass accents, accents alone do not form a dialect.
@@manukartofanu Okay, but calling a soda "pop" is still valid English. Looking at my native language, the word "Wagen" ("wagon", but can also mean "car") is both singular and plural. For a native speaker from the south of Germany, the plural of that word is "Wägen" (those dots on the a are important and not just for decoration). Sounds strange to me, but it's valid German nontheless. So, I still don't get the "dialects don't count" rule, as again, there's hardly a "standard language" to follow in almost all languages.
I always think it’s funny when viral TH-cam shorts have “polyglots” saying the same simple phrase in every language. “Hello! I speak a little bit of Dutch!”
I know a sentence in Swahili and I make a great effort to make it my entire personality, and it is the first thing I tell people when they ask me anything
I was warned against the false friend “préservatifs” in French, and yet still managed to ask an older teacher in the school if she added condoms to her homemade jam…
I said to a cute French guy: “Est-ce que tu baises moi?” and I intentionally said it to mean “Are you FUCKING me?” as in are you fucking kidding me. Baiser can mean to kiss to. He asked if I was asking him to fuck him or kiss him and I said I actually simply said it to mean “are you fucking me?” as in are you kidding me? But he could certainly kiss or fuck me and I’d be happy too😂
Or maitresse meaning either mistress or teacher. It was very confusing when doing an assignment where we had to translate a grandma telling about her times in school.
At age 10, having known basic English well, I used the term "please" instead of ask. So I commonly said "I will please you" instead of I will ask you. Edit: In many languages, words for request and inquiry are identical but come in a different structure, context and thus inferrance. This is the case in my native language, Croatian; I applied this logic having not yet learned of the proper use of ask as I was actively learning English from exposure to media and speakers. I did so online, not physically so no one could see I was a child. By 13, I spoke English as a native would, and later entered acting and writing. Funny to think about, pops in my mind once in a while.
Knew a guy who met his girlfriends mother and hadn't quite gotten the tonal aspect of mandarin down. He apparently gave her a hug and called her a horse.
I'm still at the stage where I have to actively think about individual tones in a word or I lose them entirely and revert to sentence-wide tone. In other words, I have a propensity to belt out entire sentences of random and non-existent words, which is apparently normal for novice mandarin.
I remember taking a cursory Mandarin class and being taught "māma mà mǎ", meaning "my mother scolds the horse", as a means of demonstrating different tones. Was quite cool honestly
As someone who is currently learning German, I'm relieved to hear that it is in category 2. It _feels_ harder than Spanish, and it's a comfort to know that it's not all in my head. So much more inflection! Several years ago, when I spoke zero German, I was in China and some fellow exchange students came up to me and started speaking German. I wanted to tell them in German that I don't speak German. I knew that "sprechen Sie Deutsch?" means "do you speak Geramn", "ich" means "I", and that "nein" means "no". So I stapled them together and came up with this: "Ich nein sprechen Sie Deutsch", which comes out to something like, "I... no... speaking German you." But of course, speaking really terrible German conveys the idea that you don't speak the language, so when we think about the _purpose_ of language... I think I kind of nailed it.
@@Robespierre-lI That's why I thought I had it made in the shade. And in fairness, the vocabulary isn't too tricky. But those first few weeks I was learning very basic sentences, where the only inflection was the conjugation of verbs. And the noun genders took some getting used to. Even though there's a lot of consistency, you can't really see the consistency and the gender hints until you learn enough words that it starts coming together. But by that second month, we were into dative and accusative, and then verb agreement. It's still fun though. I think it can be really frustrating to learn a language if you can't enjoy a challenge.
I don't agree that German is harder to learn than Spanish. The genitive case is basically still present in English (under a different name and with somewhat different grammar), the accusative is still present for pronouns, and English's core vocabulary is closely related to that of German. Verb agreement still has to be learned in Spanish, and case for pronouns.
@@JonBrase German has words besides just pronouns that change with case: Der Bär mag meinen Lehrer. Der Lehrer mag meinen Bären. The word for "bear" changed because it's not a subject, but the word for "teacher" remained the same even though it went through the same grammatical test. And possessive pronouns in German also change depending on not just plurality but also gender and case. "Mi casa" and "mis gafas" will always be "mi" and "mis" whether we're talking about a subject, object, or direct object. Adjectives also have a greater variety of declension under German because, again, of case. The similar vocabulary is how they trick you into starting to learn German. They reel you in.
@@tom_something My point is that the concepts are still present in English even if significantly atrophied: there are still objects in the English language that decline and conjugate.
Johnny Harris has a video called "The Fastest Way to Learn a New Language: The Video Game Map Theory" where he talks about how he learned basic Italian in like, 2 months (and also he's selling a course developed by his friend). He just glosses over the fact that he's *already fluent in Spanish* from his Mormon missionary days, and that's a language that's closely related to Italian. Also, the thesis of his video is that the definition of "fluency" should basically be downgraded from "speak like a native" to "have a brief conversation with a local and be understood." Uhh sure.
I once asked someone in Japanese how many siblings they had, and very puzzled, they replied with a "2". I later realized I had asked them how many parents they had.
Good. Good. It would be very embarassing if the answer was none. In Brazil people are very invasive and sometimes tactless with personal questions, so that would be a very normal normal question for many. For me that is a delicate question, and if I wanted to to know that for some reason and would talk about family until the information came out without me forcing it. So some people in Brazil who met you today go. How many b and s do you have? Your parents are they alive? 💀
@@RogerRamos1993how is asking how many siblings someone has an invasive question? I wouldn’t be surprised someone asked that if we were having a conversation and it came up
Primed for cognates. EXACTLY THIS. I'm a native Swedish speaker. English was extremely simple for me to learn. Mostly because a huge chunk of the English language is very similar to Swedish, not just cognate words but also grammar and "sayings". I can't exactly go to a Japanese person and laugh at them for not being as skilled in English as I am despite having studied it even longer. We had different starting points.
I read a very interesting article by a Norwegian linguist (sorry, can't remember his name but I'm sure you can google it) who laid out the theory that although English is traditionally thought to have more in common with West Germanic languages, he believed its structure was really closer to the Nordic languages. I personally agree.
As a native English speaker, I have a very bizarre sense that I *should* understand Norwegian and Swedish (Danish is just gravel). But I don't. Some I can infer from dialect, a vague knowledge of the development of my own language, context clues and cognates. Regarding cognates, though, I've sat around a table where people were speaking variously Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and myself French (it's about B2 now but used to be C1 on the European framework and may still be for passive skills). We had a perfectly valid multilingual conversation with the only moments of translation being occasional Portuguese to Spanish and Romanian to Italian. If the Poles had joined the party, that might have been different.
@@barrysteven5964 It reallt isn't as significant as it sounds to say English is "structurally" more similar to Scandianvian than continental West Germanic. You could say the exact same thing about Romanian and Bulgarian vs other Slavic or Romance languages, but that is obviously due to intensive areal contact rather than inherent genetic relatedness.
I remembered seeing a tiktok video from a famous "hyperpolyglot" where he said he would pay 15$ (can't remember the exact number) to someone whose language he couldn't guess. There was a girl whose language he couldn't guess, and when she said what it was, he started "speaking in that language" to prove that he knew it. As a result, he did not pay her and put it on tik tok anyway And, to be honest, I'm tired of videos where he "speaks ukrainian", but in reality it's russian with a strange accent so that nothing is understood
Oh that guy annoys me, because whilst I am sure he can speak several languages quite well, he is not fluent in all those languages that people come up to him and speak. Being able to recognise the language being spoken, then reciting that one sentence that you have memorised, is not being able to speak that language. If I gave myself a solid weekend of effective study, I could do the same thing.
I'm so glad you made this video. Nothing is more annoying than when people call themselves polyglots but can only "Parrot" phrases they've learned instead of legit composing a sentence in their brain in which they understand why the grammar is the way it is and what the words mean.
I speak every language conversationally! If I want people to avoid me I cry publicly! if someone says something to me I shrug and walk away! If that doesn’t work I scream and run away I feel like I am able to express myself deeply anywhere in the world with that.
Reminds me of a Terry Pratchett joke: Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.** **This is important. Inexperienced travelers might think that “Aargh!” is universal, but in Betrobi it means “highly enjoyable” and in Howondaland it means, variously, “I would like to eat your foot,” “Your wife is a big hippo,” and “Hello, Thinks Mr. Purple Cat.” One particular tribe has a fearsome reputation for cruelty merely because prisoners appear, to them, to be shouting “Quick! Extra boiling oil!
this "conversationally" always baffles me - isn't it obvious that friendly conversations over coffee are the _top_ level of fluency and not the entry-level? Just being able to joke, engage in banter, relate to just about anything they might bring up, trust me, that's a lot more challenging than lecturing on quantum mechanics.
My embarrassing moment: I had been self-studying Korean for a number of years without much success and finally decided to move to Korea to boost my progress. In my Korean class I once called my teacher "생선님" (saengsun-nim) instead of "선생님" (sunsaeng-nim) infront of everyone. 선생 means "teacher". 생선 means....... "Raw fish". I called my teacher Mrs. Raw Fish. Needless to say the whole class burst out in laughter.
I just discovered your channel a few hours ago and I love it. For context: I'm a Gen X Brit whose parents encouraged her to learn French young, with the result it's my best foreign language now. But I also learned German at school and spent two years at university learning Mandarin. I also try to learn as much of the main language of any country I go to on holiday as possible so I can say more than just "hello" and "thank you", with the result I still retain a bit of a number of languages including Italian, Dutch and Czech. And you know what? If someone were to ask me what languages I speak, I'd just say English, French and German - because those are the only ones I feel confident to randomly chat to people in fluently. The TH-cam grifters piss me off so much. And one of the worst things is that it means people have less appreciation for the good ones. As an example, I'd nominate Oriental Pearl. She genuinely speaks the languages she claims to speak fluently, and doesn't overclaim her ability. One thing I've noticed, actuially, is that when she speaks Mandarin, she accepts compliments with "thank you" - which is something I was always told you shouldn't do in Chinese culture. Instead, there's a stock phrase to use: "bu gandang" - which essentially rejects the compliment by saying something like "oh no, I would never dare to think I'd be like that" etc. Do you happen to know whether Chinese culture has changed since I learned that so that accepting a compliment is OK? Or is Oriental Pearl just making a waiguoren mistake there?
I think it's sometimes in lieu of a personality. I'd rather hear about the interesting thing you read in your one other language than hear the same stuff about learning all the languages over and over again.
@@languagejones This sort of reminds me of the expat dating scene. Men who are normally losers or uninteresting in their own country go abroad and suddenly seem way more interesting than they actually are because of the language and/or cultural barriers.
and as a teacher, I know it would demotivate my students, we already have a stupid trend in my country of telling ESL learners they "won't have to learn grammar" which is wtf? on it's own. I have a group of older ladies who went from zero to a stable A2 level this past schoolyear and that's good progress and they still feel it's slow (it's a cultural thing) I don't need them to hear oh, there are people who can learn a language in 24 hours. I've seen real above average, talented learners, but come on.
English is my second language and I used to mess up phrasal verbs on a daily basis when I was still in school. Once my classmate fainted just before English class, so she was rushed to hospital. Our English teacher comes, does the roll-call, ask where that classmate is. I intended to say "she won't come, she passed out", but slipped and said "she won't come, she passed away" XD
@@veroniquejeangille8248 just in case you actually don’t know: give up means to stop trying to do something, give in means to do something you don’t want to do normally because of pressure
@@veroniquejeangille8248 When you give up, you throw your hands up in the air in exasperation. When you give in, you bow down and submit and reach your hands out to the authority in supplication.
@@veroniquejeangille8248 Give up trying to understand phrasal verbs, and just give in and use verbs that don't require prepositions. That's what I do ;)
I remember when I was learning Romanian just about the first time I plucked up courage to speak to a Romanian friend I said in Romanian "I'm a bit scared of making mistakes" and I got the word for 'mistakes' wrong.
My wife’s french friends were asking her to describe what natural wine is. She responded (in french) that it doesn’t involve the use of “préservatifs”, without knowing that this is the french word for a condom.
@@summerwinter89 And yet lots of Spanish people still struggle with French. I'm afraid I don't see the alleged mechanism. Similarity doesn't make it a golden key.
@@summerwinter89I feel like that works best when you integrate the lesson plans. There's a book called the comparative grammar of French Spanish Italian and Portuguese that suggests you learn the same concept in each language at the same time, always in the same order, and learn specifically how they differ. Because if you learn different concepts in them at random and don't go in a consistent order, you can have a lot of difficulty mixing up which word is from which language. Like if you remember Italian salire and spanish salir mean different things, you might mix up which one means to go up and which to go out. It's definitely more effort to keep two related brand new languages separate in your head than learning one then the other.
@@baronmedusei feel like sometimes similarities make things more difficult because you expect things to be the same and are surprised when they aren't. Interestingly, when learning romance languages, they usually translate prepositions directly. It gives people this expectation that they will act similar to their native language, and then you see all these people asking in forums why they don't perfectly match up. In contrast I feel like when I was studying Japanese, the particles, which have the same grammatical function as prepositions don't feel that way, because they're so different you can't translate them directly like people usually do with romance languages. instead they give a long description of the usage scenarios, which sounds way harder, but somehow makes it easier to accept. TLDR; I feel like people underestimate how hard it is to learn a language similar to their own and just assume things will work the same instead of putting in that extra effort to understand.
@@matteo-ciaramitaroIt comes with some assumption because you expect it to be the same but with different words. And even then, even if it’s similar, the intention and environment to use it is different. Also, most of those materials are usually for native French speakers learning Spanish so there might be subtle meanings that non-native speakers will not understand.
My first time in Germany, I panicked and couldn't remember the phrase for "baggage claim," but I figured if I asked the porter where my suitcase was, he'd get the idea. I said, "Wo ist meine Kartoffel?" He said he didn't know, which makes sense, since I had asked "Where is my potato?" (Should have asked for "mein Koffer.")
Your point about dead languages struck a chord with me. I'm an anthropologist trying to learn the endangered language of the culture I'm studying (Ainu). Minority groups are already oppressed enough, they don't need people lying about their languages for views.
You're literally doing my dream job! I wish you the BEST of luck, I am legitimately so excited for you. Given how few Ainu speakers are remaining, as I believe it is now considered moribund, it is a language family that needs utmost preserving.
@@shirohanakurohana yes, exactly. I've had an interest in Ainu culture for about 15 years now. I'm specifically working in the field of indigenous ecology, so I'm studying things like traditional sustainable salmon hunting techniques utilized by northern indigenous peoples such as the Ainu and Tlingit.
@@rocketbilly it's a really cool language! While it is a language isolate, it has similarities to Japanese, Nivkh, and some of the Aleut languages due to trade
I once short-circuited in my first-year Mandarin Chinese class in college. English is my first language and I've studied Spanish since I was young. I wanted to say, "We don't know," but instead of saying, "Wǒmen bù zhīdào," I said, "Wǒmen bù zhīdamos." My brain decided to conjugate the Chinese verb as if it were Spanish. The best part is that Chinese verbs don't even conjugate.
When I first started learning French, it was a year after I first started actually learning Spanish, and boy were there a lot of funny mistakes. There were many times where french -ir verbs got Spanish conjugations.
That happened to me in Mandarin, except my brain decided to randomly insert Japanese into the middle of the sentence, and I didn't even realize it had happened until I proudly finished talking about Gao Wenzhong or whatever and saw my instructor and classmates giving me blank looks, and one of them said, "Uh, half of that was in Japanese, actually." Awkward. Then later, after I had been in full-time Mandarin training for six or seven months, I tried to say something in Japanese, and it came out with Mandarin tones attached. Japanese is not a tonal language. The human brain is weird as hell.
That is fucking amazing xD Once in Japanese class, I accidentally answered "oui" because all Canadian children are forced to be in French classes for years and your brain just expects that's what you gotta do, and then panicked and tried to explain myself in an absolutely incomprehensible mix of English, Mandarin, and Spanish, but I'm pretty sure even then I didn't reach the heady heights of "zhidamos" 😂😂
Once, after living in Romania for a few months, I messed up the word for turtle. Instead of broasca testoasa (literally, "shelled frog"), I accidentally said broasca tatoasa, which basically means "titty frog". The Romanian I was talking to just laughed and asked, "What does that look like?!"
@@adi14882 Multimesc pentru traducere! Glumele romanesti imi mai sunt greu de inteles, si asta m-a scapat. Dar ar fi o lume mult mai interesanta cu broaste tatoase si cocosfarcuri!
Two C-words. One subtle difference. In Spanish, "cone" is "cono". But change the n to an ñ and you have that *other* C-word. I was living in Valencia for 3 months, and nearby was a great ice-cream shop staffed by 3 women in their early 20's. Every day I would go up to them and say "I'd like a... how do you say it... a c*nt please." And every day they would give me an unruffled smile and an ice cream cone. They never corrected me and I only realised my error months later
You saying you won't accept a better help sponsor got me to subscribe. I remember a couple of years ago when they were exposed for being a scam, hiring students to man the lines. All this whilst they claimed to have trained staff.
My wife (Spanish) taught Spanish to Americans many years ago in Santander. She would ask her students to describe what they'd done over the weekend. One poor girl said, "Fui a la playa con mi profesor para pecar" (meaning to go fishing: "pescar"). Unfortunately, she said, "I went to the beach with my professor to sin." Oops!
Well yeah, but it sounds different that the word pecar, or at the very least the whole sentence matches the accent. I doubt she was trying to omit the s on purpose
To all the people who say "well uhhh they might not be as good as they claim, but at least they bring in more people to the language learning community". Selling false hopes and methods and wasting people's time for years is actually doing more harm than not making these videos at all. These snakes have to be stopped if we want actual language geeks and their advice to get into the spotlight.
makes people go from "Anyone can do this, just need to make the effort" to "wow they're so talented, I could never learn so quickly, maybe this isn't something i can do"
@@matteo-ciaramitaro exactly! Generally the delusion of talent and "innate intelligence" being the deciding factor is very harmful to learners of any subject or skill.
One of the people he called out made materials that helped one of my friends learn Mandarin well and kick off a career as a translator. To be clear, languagejones speaks much worse than either of them.
It's deeply insidious to set people up with the expectation they'll see immediate, massive results. As soon as they collide with reality, the disappointment will be imnmeasurable and their language journey is apt to end right there. Doing that to someone is much, much worse than having done nothing to "help".
It 100% discourages people from learning languages. It discouraged me from practicing French, and I already could read and write French decently well and speak conversationally 90% of the time, but being told my three years of study was useless because I can't fluently speak it when it only took them a week makes you disappointed in yourself.
I once asked a Spanish waiter if the salad contained "lechuza" (owl) instead of "lechuga" (lettuce). He guessed what I was trying to say and didn't laugh. I realised my mistake but didn't feel embarrassed. I know that's not what you asked for but it's all I've got
The thing is precisely to realize it when you make or miss something. Many people don't have this self-consciousness. They carry all their mistakes to the grave, except the ones that put them in trouble, but even those, they keep going back to them.
birds and vegetables! easy to get confused with those.... Did you know hummingbirds are called 'colibrí' or 'picaflor'? But don't mix them up, because 'coliflor' means cauliflower ;)
The last time I heard a so-called polyglot attempt to speak Danish, it sounded like the person thought mumbling a combination of Swedish and Dutch was enough to pass as "conversational Danish". It was barely recognizable at best, and downright offensive at worst to misrepresent a language that badly.
Danish is an extremely difficult language to speak and understand when it's spoken. I've studied it for years, including several long stays in Denmark. I can understand anything I read, yet I still struggle a lot understanding the spoken language and I'm terrified of speaking it. When I visited Norway, watching tv in my hotel in Oslo and listening to Norwegian and suddenly understanding it so well, it was as if a veil had suddenly been lifted.
@@mayhu3282 i like to think og Norwegian as "Danish, but with actual consonants" : P But there's a lot of dialects of Norwegian with some exceptions to that description.
@SpiceCh Yes, that day in Oslo I thought: Danish having undergone a thorough cleansing! Not that I have anything against Danish, it's a language I've spent a lot of time learning and a country I feel a lot of affection for. But I should understand much more by now taking into account the time I've put into it (I think about five or six years of taking classes back in the day, and using it often (reading or watching tv) since then). By comparison, in only two years of learning Dutch (with a very good base of German) I could understand spoken Dutch to maybe 85% when it was Dutch from the Netherlands and maybe 95% when it was Flemish Dutch.
Not my own experience, but my Dutch tutor in uni once told us how he'd answered a Dutch store clerk who asked him if he needed any help "Nee bedankt, ik kom alleen klaar." Didn't sound too wild to us at first because "Ich komm allein klar" in German just means "I can manage fine on my own" but in Dutch it's "I'm reaching orgasm alone"
My Spanish teacher - native - always said 'Ich bin nicht schuldig" instead of "ich habe keine schuld/ich bin nicht schuld" when the classmates didn't learn their vocabs. I always found it cute. First one is "I'm not guilty" but he meant "It's not my fault".
One thing that annoys me is that so many teachers don't want to teach curse words. Here's one example why it's important. At the time when I was already intermediate in Estonian and actually started to have more and more small conversations in the language, I was at a restaurant with a few friends who are native speakers. When the waiter asked me something, I wanted to reply "it doesn't matter", which is "ükskõik" (lit. "one-all" ~ "it's all the same to me"), but I answered with the only word that was familiar to me because I heard it everywhere, "pohhui". Now that one is borrowed from Russian "похуй" (pokhuy), literally meaning "on the dick", and is pretty rude when you don't talk to friends, like "I fucking don't care" or "I don't give a shit". This was especially annoying considering in six years of learning Russian in high school and two at university, no one ever had the idea of teaching me the slang word for penis. Had I known this word already in Russian, I would have guessed that "pohhui" is probably not an appropriate word to reply with to a waitress.
This is especially true for Italian. I didn't learn it in school so I'm pretty familiar with all the words, but I genuinely wonder how'd you'd get around a native speaker going "cazzo" (Word por penis but more nuanced than that) every two seconds.
There r so very many curse words in Russian that even knowing what хуй or хер won't help a lot in understanding what is being said. I believe that watching movies or TH-cam in a foreign language of interest will do
The first thing you learn in any language are cuss words :) Online gaming did a lot in that regard. I know russian, chinese, portugese, turkish and spanish curses and expletives just from dota and CS.
When I (native german speaker) went to do an execercise with my unit at a US-Army base here in germany, I had the biggest english blackout I can remember. All I was trying to do was ask an American soldier at the laundromat for how long his laundry had been in the washing machine and all that came out was "Is uh- for how- laundry in machine?" or something to that effect. Luckily, he got what I was trying to tell him. Afterwards one of my buddies looked at me and went "Damn, aren't you supposed to be the squad translator?" I swear this will haunt for the rest of my days
@@denzelpanther240 No, folk don't stumble over simple phrases in their native tongue unless they have anxiety issues. There are mistakes that native speakers can make, and in some cultures those "mistakes" become the natural way to speak and can form new dialects over time. But by no means is any English speaking native going to struggle asking how long the laundry machine will take. Do not confuse common errors with a lack of speaking or reading ability.
It happens. Try not to worry about it so much. I'm Hungarian and sometimes I translate for my company too. But depending on how tired I am, my proficiency levels differ significantly. 2 months ago, I was in a minor car accident and I went to work just 2 days afterwards and my boss asked mevto translate to our German collegues. It was a disaster. However, I'm somewhat angry at my boss because I had concussion and mighty headaches and I surely didn't function at 100% on my first day back, it was not very comsiderate of him asking me to translate special machinery related problems. However, sometimes, there is no special reason for my blundering other than tiredness and yes, unfortunately, I do have anxiety too. When I'm overwhelmed sometimes I cannot utter a word in my native tongue either, for a half minute approximately, usually I can get over the block afterwards but I noticed that I mixe up words in my native to tongue too when I'm very tired. -- Ich mache mir aber keine Sorgen darüber, weil ich bemerkt habe, dass andere Leute ebenso tun. Zum Beispiel, mein Mann, er verweckselt sogar die Zahlen: oft spricht er über 2003 oder 2013 und eigentlich meint er 2023. Das macht doch jeder, wenn man sehr müde ist.
You’ll appreciate this story as a Hebrew learner. My fathers friend asked a woman standing on a street corner in Tel Aviv in about 1980 יש לך את הזמן ‘do you have the time’ instead of מה השעה ‘what is the hour’ and she responded with אם יש לך את הכסף יש לי את הזמן ‘if you have the money I have the time’
Oh, but that annoying grammatically incorrect use of את. Neither הזמן nor הכסף is actually the object of any verb so does not need the direct object marker.
@@barrysteven5964 actually יש also needs את when direct objects are involved. Take this example sentence from gor and o'ach season 1 episode 3 at 3:19, o'ach says to gor : "לך יש את הקמע" - "you have the medallion/charm"
okay, youTube doesn't let me post the link to the episode directly. so just write גור ואוח עונה 1 פרק 3 into the search bar, and you'll find it. I hope it's not region locked. i hope it doesn't delete this comment as well.
As a language teacher and lifelong learner I find these fakers just infuriating. Not only do I know how much time I've spent trying to improve languages, but even worse is that they set wildly unrealistic expectations for other learners who might not know enough to see through the BS and end up feeling bad about themselves.
Thank you. That was part of the motivation to make this. It's totally demoralizing if we buy that someone speaks 100 languages, meanwhile we're struggling to get a handle on one. Especially if it's your first foreign language. It can be so easy to blame yourself and think you just can't learn.
@@languagejones And I have had that exact conversation with SO MANY PEOPLE. The "oh language just isn't for me" or "I just can't learn another language" folks who've been discouraged by people like that or just by bad teachers saying "if you don't learn in this one specific way then you fail." It's really my goal as an educator to get people believing in their own capabilities and see the enjoyment in languages, even when it does get tough. Love your channel, man.
@@linguacarpa I totally agree with you (as a language teacher and language learner myself) And such a great video @languagejones6784 - you put it all perfectly!
That’s literally me. I don’t know how to learn languages, but I want to. And I felt terrible cuz I’m like yh I can’t do that. I have a life and a brain that doesn’t work like that.
The worst part is, that even if I know from experience how hard it is to learn a new language, there is still a tiny irrational voice in my head telling me it should be easy if these guys can do it. It is good that people speak up against this.
Once I was talking to a very attractive lady in Spanish and I said "mucho placer" instead of "mucho gusto". That sounds weird because the word "placer" usually means sexual pleasure, not pleasure as in "it's a pleasure to meet you". Sometimes at night I think back on that conversation over 10 years ago and I still want to die just as much as I did then and there.
Lol, at least I can assure you she may not have taken it so bad cause in Spanish you can say “un placer (de conocerte)” as a synonym of “nice to meat you” and such
A lot like my experience in Japanese. My most embarrassing moment was when I was learning Japanese and there was this super cute Japanese girl I was struggling to talk to that dressed in that Harajuko/gothic Lolita style and after some weeks I tried to praise her STYLE, her style of clothing. But Japanese has this thing of adopting English words and using it in a completely different way. So I've picked up スタイル (sutairu-style) from immersion and I said something like "I like your style." BUT it turns out that "スタイル" is more like the figure of one's body, their build, their body shape. I should have said, among other options something in the lines of "I like your ファッション (fashion)" or simply the "types of clothes you use". PS: you can say something like, "衣服のスタイル" (style of CLOTHING) but you must specify it's CLOTHING and it wouldn't fit in the context anyway. So I looked like a creepy and she was terrorized and stopped talking to me for weeks. When she finally replied, yeas, she understood it was an innocent mistake BUT (even for cultural reasons) my INTENTIONS didn't matter much but mostly the RESULTS. And the result was that I made her feel SHAME and now every freaking time she would talk to me she would remember the shame and feel shame again (even shame for being ashamed) so it wasn't funny talking to me anymore. I was associated with the cause of an unpleasant feeling. Jorge=I'm ashamed. That sucked! I could have dated her. Nice to meet someone else that sounded like a sexual predator unintentionally in a second language. Thanks God it was in public and with her male friends around. Think about that!
One of the ‘unnamed’ polyglots at the beginning here was in Norway to speak with a journalist in Norwegian. That might have been the most cringworthy thing I have ever seen.
My brother went to Korea for a while and first tried to memorize the sentence "I can't speak Korean". He said it to people a couple times, then learned that he flubbed the sentence and was actually just saying "I cannot".
Super interesting video! I'm a Spaniard living abroad for many years now. I am quite tired of the many people I have met along the years who, as soon as they learn I'm from Spain, say "you know, I speak Spanish". I try to speak Spanish with them, they say a few words, and immediately change topic. Never hear them again speaking Spanish, not even trying.
I love it. Unabashedly hating, spitting truths about everything (including sponsorship from BetterHelp, which I hear from other Psychology professionals does not treat their "employees" right)...
I keep thinking about when Trump was bashing other politicians for speaking Spanish because this is America, and English is the language of America. How did that idiot get elected
A girl in Japan was flirting with me. She was cute. I told her I would be in Tokyo over the weekend, and she said that was going to Tokyo over the weekend too! I was a tourist, but didn't think she was offering to show me around town since I was concentrating too hard on my words. I said "Sou desu ka" trying to mean "Oh that's neat!" but I guess it came off more like "Cool story, bro" cause her friend giggled at her and she said "Sou desu ka ne..." I'm sorry Yuki, if I see you again I will ask you out on a date.
oof. yeah. especially delivery matters but that one tends to get used as more of an "uh huh, uh huh......" and less of active interest. i noticed you'll even get things that should be okay like "sugoi" but then said flatly is kind of like a monotone "uhuh woooow." /s. guess a better would have been a followup question? but man convos are tricky sometimes even being in the same language. good effort bro!!
I occasionally have to remind myself that...technically you *can* say "Handy" for Smartphone in German Conversations, but you should avoid doing that in english Conversations. 😅
I’m Italian and i’ve been studying English in school/high-school/university since I was little however, I became fluent I’d say only a couple of months ago. I spent 3 months in the US during summer and one day I was annoyed by the fact that no one was answering to my question : “what HOUR (instead of time) is it ?”and then I realised I was messing up with basic grammar and I honestly felt so stupid.
As a mini-polyglot with a C2 level in just four languages, and as a PhD in language teaching from a first-rate university myself, I am thrilled to finally see an expert speak on this topic of fake polyglots. Having spent some forty years learning French, German and Spanish, I am absolutely convinced that the ridiculous claims spread across the Internet to know dozens (much less 100!) languages is nothing but a crock!
so so so so agree. I did meet two geniuses in real life, one was my German professor (he spoke 26 languages, out of which maybe 5 fluent) and Japanese professor who spoke 13 languages fluently (that guy was a beast mode genius). But these are the rare gems you encounter in linguistic departments:)
I live in a country with 11 official languages. I know two of them fluently, and speak two similar continental European languages reasonably well 😂 I can definitely see how polyglots can exist (admittedly, going above 5 does start to enter the sceptical realm). I'm not far off from it myself, but it takes years and years and living in the countries or having regular impromptu conversations to find the ins and outs. Or just cheat like me: know Afrikaans, learn the rules of Dutch. Basically two languages for the price of one!
@@silveryfeather208 that's the issue: it's really vague. It's just someone who speaks several languages (pick any dictionary). There's no hard number, though I've commonly seen 4 as a benchmark, and "speaking" a language is also very vague. There are plenty of people who claim to "speak" a language when they've barely reached A1. Personally, I don't think you should need to be perfectly proficient in all 4 languages; B1 feels like a reasonable degree of fluency to claim that you can actually speak a language
@@remy2718 yeah like I agree with the video in some sense but when he talked about using intermediate tense I think that's a little too much. Like as long as you go beyond tourist life stuff even if its broken language I still think its impressive enough to warrant speaking it. By tourist I mean how much is this etc. Something that will never allow you to know someone. For example knowing someone would mean things like what is their political leaning etc. that's just me though
So I’m a speaker of a conlang which only has a handful of “fluent” speakers so the community is relatively centralised. It’s a very friendly environment, everyone helps each other out and chips in towards running language learning events. One of the fake polyglots you hint at came into our central community server and left a really poor taste in my mouth. He demanded private 1-on-1 tutorship with an advanced speaker for free, citing his large TH-cam channel and the exposure it would bring to the language. Nobody took him up on his offer and instead pointed him towards all our free communal learning events. Someone offered to run their study group at a second time slot if timezones were an issue. He got mad, made some very rude comments about how shitty the language is and left the server.
My most embarassing moment was when I swapped "syllable" for "siblings". The person asked me if I had more than one sibling and I promptly answered: "Yes, Cai-o, two siblings".
🤣 I completely get why you'd jump to that, too. I'd bet lots of people look at your name and ask whether it's said more like "Cah-ee-oh" or "Caye-oh." Especially if they're used to English names, where vowels are just a suggestion and consonants are a joke.
As a native Italian speak married to a Peruvian, I was talking to my wife's grandmother in my broken Spanish. I don't remember the context, but at one point, I was telling her I was embarrassed. The Italian word for embarrassed is 'imbarazzato', in Spanish, it's 'avergonzado'. On the surface, not that big a deal that I used the Italian word instead. Only problem is that in Spanish, "embarazado" means pregnant. How embarrassing.
My dad visiting Spain, ordes "burro" with his breakfast bread, only to be presented with a platter of sliced meat from a confused waiter. "No tengo burro". My dad walks to the kitchen with the waiter, and points at the butter.
@@WildWestNeko Classic. Similar confusion can occur for Spanish speakers asking for olive oil in Italy.. In Spanish, it's 'aceite' (from the Arabic word for olives), while in Italian, 'aceto' (as in Acetic Acid) is vinegar.
I am not sure if you have heard of this old interview in a Chilean TV show named "¡Viva el lunes!" in which they unintentionally exposed on live TV a false polyglot from the Middle East that claimed to speak over 50 languages by making him interact with native speakers in Finnish, Farsi, Russian, Mandarin, Greek and Hindi, to which he failed miserably to understand even the most basic questions like "what day is today?" or so. It was clear that he had only learnt the basic stuff in each language and memorized the answers to questions like "Was it difficult to learn my language?", "How long did it take you to learn it?", "What was the easiest or the hardest of it?" but he was asked anything outside that topic, he would be completely lost... It would be great if you make a reaction to that.
Amen Victor Vera. I saw that show too. It took place in 1997. The so called polyglot"s name is Ziad. It is clear that Ziad was only completely fluent in Spanish but when it came time to respond in Finnish, Farsi,Russian,Mandarin and Hindi, he looked like a 3rd string high school football player playing in the Superbowl. Languagejones nailed it. It takes years of aqusition,comprehensible input,building a second brain and immersion to acquire 1 language let alone 50. Chow.
I met some Japanese folks on an elevator once. I can't remember what I said that was helpful, but then they commented how my Japanese was so good. With my very confident very high level beginner japanese, I said in so many words that, No, my Japanese is really great, which is exactly the opposite of what I meant to say. I didn't realize it until about 10 minutes after work. I think I blushed for an entire hour, just thinking about those folks chuckling how confident and rude I was.
Japanese is perfect for hindsight self-cringe. As a teenager I did a short homestay in Japan after having learned for a few years. They were so sweet and kind and we had a great time, but the mother would keep offering me different foods and I thought I was saying "That's good! (I'll have some!)" I apparently kept saying "I'm good (I don't want any)". The Japanese was いいです！ In hindsight it is so embarrassing but they were so polite nonetheless and never even let on, that I was accidentally being impolite.
@senorsmile That's because you can't use いい like the english "good". 美味しいです would be correct. Using english translations to learn Japanese has those issues.
Yeah it's crazy how different いい is from what you think it's going to be when you originally learned it, but hey, these experiences are exactly why you know that now. 😂. It's a shame they didn't tell you. I'm lucky enough to have pretty savage Japanese friends who frequently call me out when I'm saying something unhinged. @@uamsnof
I wanted to compliment my Japanese friend by telling her that her dress looks cute. Instead I told her that her dress is terrifying. She took it with humor.😅
I did a similar thing in Japan - whilst talking to two women in a blues bar, I asked them ‘was the earthquake Tokyo had last night beautiful?’ And one replied ‘KOwai not Kuwaii’ - scary not beautiful 🤦♂️
«N'importe quoi!» is an idiom used to say “Whatever!”. It literally means «anything» which is exactly what «quoi que ce soit» means. Saying : «Rappelez-moi pour n'importe quoi» sounds a bit weird, but it definitely does not mean “Call me for B.S.!”, it's more like “call me for any thing/if anything!). In this context, «quoi que ce soit» is better. Another way to convey the message would be : Rappelez s'il y a autre chose! / Call back should you need anything else!
In Lao, when you want to say "I am very tired" you would say "Khoy meuay laiy". Tones make all the difference. Because if you soften a 'k' here and shorten a the 'eu ' vowel you get "My penis has a lot of pubes" or "koi muay laiy". When I first moved here I learned that error very quickly.
If I squint I could almost imagine that being the slang phrase for it. I don't know if it exists in English, but in Danish it's common to refer to something making you tired or bored as "it gave me long balls/tits".
When I was first learning Russian when I began dating my now wife, I tried to call her Моя прекрасная девушка (My wonderful girlfriend). I instead called her Моя прекрасная дедушка (My wonderful grandpa). She still brings it up every now and then lmao.
I tripped on писать (pisat'), as in write. Ended up saying я писаю (ya pisayu - i piss) Я пишу (ya pishu - i write) sounds like "io piscio" (i piss in italian). So confusing!
Thank you very much for mentioning the difficulty of learning grammar intuitively via flash cards. I had Italian lessons at university and our teacher was very focused on both pronunciation and especially learning full sentences, but very, VERY little syntax. (To be fair, I studied music and all the other students were opera singers, I was the only conductor... They had no interest in actually learning Italian, they needed good pronunciation...) I tried begging her for some help in that regard but ultimately gave up. I struggle a lot with speaking in front of other people if I'm not sure about syntax, so I stopped going to her lessons and winged the exam thanks to my knowledge regarding latin. Sadly, that was enough to pass... That was a true waste of time...
IMHO, another good way to tell whether you're dealing with a fraud or not is if they claim to speak all of their languages well, or at the same level. Fake polyglots will never admit that there's a language they've "learned" which they don't speak well. Real ones will often go out of their way to point out that they're not fluent in everything they've studied, and there's some languages they still don't speak well, because that's just a normal part of learning and using different languages different amounts.
i feel like that's us lowering our standards i said in a separate comment but there's even some that describe their proficiency in each language in great detail, and show their -cramming- studying techniques, which is the good direction of transparency yet, stating that it ain't really like that *if you asked them* still feels scummy, the people that want to look at your method are language-learners that already know there may be tricks involved you put 'fluent' on the title of the videos that get dozillions of views, and the shorts that may get grossiliards of views definitely paint you as a speaker of the language more than as a learner coming clean would be clear titles, stating you're at an early point of learning with these languages, maybe even mentioning whether you are ACTUALLY going to study them past this point coming 10% clean feels somehow even more scummy because a stained shirt is obviously put in the wash, but this looks clean on the outside while still having the greater public believing the same thing also now it's more scrolling than thumbnails and titles, but i remember 'i never stated i'm flluent, i just put in in my title and you know? algorithm title bait make a living food you see?' no. a claim is a claim, and you wrote it on the most visible part of the video that can be edited afterwards. this is bleaching dirty clothes.
At that point you're not a fake polyglot, you're a real not polyglot though. I can speak 3 languages (including native) proficiently, but I've studied so many other languages and would never in a million years claim to speak them because I'm so bad at them. I learned enough Japanese to be useful when I traveled to Japan, but I can't speak or understand anything at all. I only do a few nouns, modifiers and verbs here and there in poorly grammaticalized sentences.
@@gambitacio that's what I said. The person who started the thread said that a fake polyglot wouldn't say they are super weak in these languages, but my point is if you're super weak you wouldn't say you speak them at all, so they might be honest, but they're not polygots (also I'm not saying I only knew a few travel phrases, I studied for months, as much as I could in preparation for the trip, but I just didn't acquire enough of the language to have real conversations. So obviously I would never claim to speak Japanese because I simply can't rn.)
I noticed all the jumpcuts with Xiaoma's videos. I noticed his latest video in Italy, he was having a conversation in Sicilian . His responses had nothing to do with what they were asking/telling him. He just rattles off his rehearsed lines about how he loves learning languages and loves Italian food. Also, I speak intermediate Spanish and notice he makes a lot of basic mistakes when speaking with Spanish people, and doesnt know simple words and mishears a lot of what they say. I assume its the same with most other languages he makes videos for. But my girlfriend is Chinese and says his Mandarin is native level. Its videos are still fun to watch. I dont see a problem with it.
ive watched some of his vids recently and from what I heard he does some brief preparation (like studying flashcards with common sentences/terms and having a few conversations) but ultimately does not learn the language fully. from what I understand, he only really learns common phrases and then builds off of what he knows. the exception is his understanding of chinese due to him living in beijing
And this is one key point I distrust this video. Xiao ma never claim to be a polygot, and when he soaks it was often in jest, and for fun, even at himself. Yet this stupid OP youtuber claim that xiaoma is a "fake polygot"¿ LOL. And if he is so wrong in something so obvious, what side is he wrong in, this my distrust.
He's pretty open and honest about the fact he is only fluent in a few languages and only learns some words and phrases in many other languages. I don't consider it faking it if the person is upfront and I still find it impressive.
Xiaoma's titles can be a bit clickbaity, but I also find that the videos themselves are fairly honest. I really liked his video on an Ojibwe dialect, where he featured native speakers and used his platform to showcase what the tribe is doing to keep their language alive (and collect money to support them). It's pretty obvious if you watch the video that he can only say a few sentences, but he's willing to try. As far as I've seen, the only languages he claims to speak fluently are English, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Another Xiaoma defender here. Jones is lumping him in with fake polyglots when he's never claimed to be one, nor has he ever shilled a product and claimed you can be fluent in x weeks. The vast majority of his videos are very honest about his ability and he leaves the mistakes in. He doesn't even attempt to come off as fluent in anything but Chinese which he is very obviously fluent in. He does what every person learning a language SHOULD do. He learns a basic foundation and goes out into the world to learn more. And claiming Chinese people only compliment him to save face because a random with a camera came up to them is an egregious assumption to make about EVERY Chinese person lol. It really just makes it look like this TH-camr has a chip on his shoulder about Xiaoma's popularity when he just makes things up about him.
I minored in Arabic. Studied for five years. 20 years later I can still read and write (and diagram a mean sentence), but I am terrible at speaking and always was. When I was still studying, I had a Saudi conversation partner. Our meetings were primarily about improving his English, but he was very gracious and we usually spent the first 10-15 minutes practicing my Arabic. Before our meetings I would usually decide on a topic and then I’d take some time looking up a few words so I could rehearse talking about my day - just routine stuff. One day, after a particularly trying day at work I looked up a bunch of words that were related to frustration. When I met my friend, he asked me (in Arabic) how I was, and I replied using one of my new Arabic words. He froze and asked me (in English) what I had said. I repeated the Arabic word far more timidly and he said “No. In ENGLISH.” So I told him that I’d had a rough day and I was feeling cranky. He relaxed and started to move on with our English conversation, but I stopped him and asked what I had said. He hesitated but I insisted. He finally relented: I had announced to him that I was…ahem…a woman of loose virtue. Who could be bought. Another time, in the middle of class, I inserted the wrong vowel when I was trying to say something to my professor. He corrected me, but then went on to add (in front of the whole class) that the way I had pronounced it was a vulgar slang word for male anatomy in the UAE and I needed to be mindful of that because I had visited Dubai. English-to-Arabic dictionaries suck because they don’t mark which words are preferable (the order doesn’t help like with English dictionaries). I stick to reading and writing. Much safer that way!
That's too bad, but ultimately a good decision. Unless you are always speaking only a certain dialect, it might be hard to improve. I can read Arabic fairly well, and have basic proficiency in the Levantine dialect. But unless I'm going back to that part of the world, there's no point. I feel like Arabic is not the best language to know casually, but will get you very far if you must interact with those communities regularly.
I am married to a Russian woman, I realized that learning Russian is excruciatingly difficult. While I can read and write it well, no way for speaking. I sound like an American. I know enough to get myself into trouble, and not enough to get out.
I am Swiss but live in USA and i must have a Russian accent in English, because everyone keeps asking me if I am Russian. It's really amusing :D I study Russian too, but only read and write since I have no opportunity to practice speech.
When I met my partners little sister I'd learnt some Swedish phrases to try to engratiate myself with her family, I nervously intended to ask this 5 year old girl "do you hear? (höra du?)" as she was being called from the other room, instead I said "hora du (you whore)" 10 years later I still feel my face turning pale remembering that
Not to take anything away from you it’s a funny moment but I wouldn’t be to embarrassed, things like that happen and also it’s structured so weird that I doubt a 5 year old would understand what you said ;)
In Arabic, I once confused the pronunciation of قص and كس، basically I said that I'm having a pain in the Vulva area, instead of the Sternum area. I'm a male. Yeah
I was sitting with a driver outside Cairo practicing reading signs and I confused ق and ف reading the stop sign as فق. 😮 He was an English speaker quickly corrected me.
Yeah, س/ص and ك/ق and others are difficult to pick up on at the beginning. Not to mention when you start throwing in assimilation, like in words like أصدقاء where the ص sounds like a z vs a stronger s sound like its singular صديق. Really makes transcription early in study difficult
Here's a tip and advice from a native speaker : The ك in arabic is much more softer than ق. If you look at the holy book of Islam, you can see that the letters over there are used multiple times it might be quite a struggle at first and ever so intimidating, but once you get the hang of it trust me there is no going back, if you familiarise yourself deeply with the letters you can easily get used to the differences.
I was helping a customer in Japanese here in America, and I was trying to ask someones bithday, but instead I kept asking if today was Saturday, she was confused.
@@sinthrix1432 Ironically, you did make a mistake. Just a simple one, threw in an extra "u". doyoubi - Saturday - 土曜日 douyoubi - same day of the week - 同曜日 日本語は難しいですよね？
You had me at אהא. Seriously, though, excellent video. I've gotten tangled in the web of attention-span-depleting shorts, so this was a pleasant change. I look forward to seeing what else you've made!
Once, at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, I was struck by the immense size of the bell and accidentally asked how the bell didn't "blind" the bellringer. I had meant to say "deafen." The tour guide laughed hysterically. So embarrassing!
Why embarrassing? If I was that guide I would have laughed too. Not at you, but at your unintentional play on words. And that's what the guide probably did. You made a mistake a child would make, so it's even interesting.
Years ago I had a book on languages of the world and this book mentioned a couple of hyperpolyglots from the Victorian era capable of reading and writing more than fifty languages each. This book said that generally speaking a person is only capable of fluency in 20 languages at any one time and that when you know more than 20 it's like loading and unloading luggage from an ever whirling language carousel. The unused languages go into some kind of linguistic left luggage ready to pop up again when reloaded.
more like 7 languages max i think. reading and writing (especially reading) is much easier than speaking though. i can comfortably read french if i have a dictionary to look up the odd word, but i am in no way fluent
Thanks for making this. Some of these fake polyglots drive me crazy. Laushu never pretended to be PERFECT in every language. He would say “I’m learning” or “I speak a little”. Their videos would be much more watchable with a little bit of humility added in.
I used to take students to Japan every year and they would often have the opportunity to introduce themselves in Japanese. One student intended to say his major was international relations - kokusai kankei 国際関係. Instead he broke the first word and said his major was ko kusai kankei 子臭い関係 - or relations with stinky children.
In Bhutan my tour guide taught me how to say “Hello, I am Handsome” (or so I thought) and every time I Introduced myself the locals would giggle. At the end of the week when I introduced myself to his friend she asked why do you introduce yourself like that? Turns out he actually taught me to say “Hello I am Long Nose.”
A friend from China once showed me how to say 我感冒了 (wǒ gǎnmàole; I am sick), but he trolled me and actually taught me 我干猫了 (wǒ gàn māole; I fucked the cat).
Thirty years ago I asked some Indian friends in California how to say something along the lines of "Hi how are you" but I found out after trying it with another Indian who laughed so hard he cried that they actually taught me how to say I did something unnatural with a banana.
It could have been much worse! This little anecdote is not exactly related, but a bit similar: At a business dinner one night a German manager asked how to get the waiter's attention in English. He asked one of the disaffected English subcontractors, who without hesitation jokingly responded by saying, "Oi dickhead!" The German manager immediately turned and repeated the phrase to the waiter. Needless to say, the waiter was NOT impressed!
The danger of accidentally saying condom is ever-present in any language. Whether they euphemise them as rubbers, preservatives or something else, the condoms are always lying in wait for the unwary foreign speaker.
@@poiz921and in the US it is the name of gelatin candy. Notably gummi bears and gummi worms, sometimes spelled gummy. At one point Disney even made a Gummi Bears cartoon inspired by the candy. In the show they would drink gummi bear juice which would allow them to quickly bounce around like they were made of rubber.
When I was studying abroad in Japan, my host mom and I were talking about what gifts I'd want at my wedding. I told her "tonkatsu" (fried pork cutlets) but meant "kotatsu" (a heated table with a heavy blanket). The pure confusion on her face until I realized my mistake...
Hogging the "conversation" is a tell I've seen, particularly, in that famous Dutch "polyglot". He asks a question to the person just so he can monologue away in the response, which wouldn't be a tell if it were not for the fact that he is just cycling the same script over and over. Makes me think of a child looking for validation when she learns something.
I kind of like him because he does not pretend to speak any of the languages he speaks well. Plus he has some sort of standard. Even when he can respond in a language he still gives the money because he doesn't think he speaks it well enough. He just goes for quantity over quality.
You have a point but dont be mislead. He knows more than you give him credit for. He speaks english, spanish,portuguese,french, italian, duch, and german well. I doubt that he speaks the asian ones as well.
@@languagejonescareful, she actually helped one of the scammers you were talking about, and even had a video with him on her channel. He ticked off all the red flags like making a course and was charging an extreme amount of money.
Once a kid from my school who was on a school trip to Japan bumped into a stranger and he was trying to apologise but accidentally said "thank you for the nice meal". My Japanese teacher now tells every class about it
My old Japanese teacher (fellow Aussie) told us a story about when she was a homestay student, she was talking to someone on the phone, and her host brother came in and she was like "This is honey! Honey! Don't tell!" 秘密 - Himitsu, secret 蜂蜜 - Hachimitsu, honey
My white American grandparents lived in Japan for 17 years, then came back with their family to the US via Europe. In Russia, my grandfather bumped into another man on the street, then turned and repeatedly bowed while saying "Спасибо! Спасибо! Спасибо!" (Spaciba - meaning "thank you"). My mother and her siblings laughed so hard and love to tell this story to this day.
i mixed up “waffen” and “waffeln” when I met some Germans years ago and now I’m the American who told them I eat guns for breakfast
Lol
Playing into the American stereotype ^^
Sounds like a constitutional breakfast
That is just gold :DD
Not good for your teeth🥴
I shocked locals with this one trick: I learnt Japanese for 20 years.
Here's the extent of my Japanese: 日本語むず!
And then they still say jouzu, and you don't know if it's a sincere compliment or micro aggression?
I'm always surprised at how often Japanese is listed among the hardest languages. If you are counting proficiency in Kanji, then I'll agree. Counters are a pain, although you only need the basic ones to get by. Otherwise I don't think it's so hard, just very different from English.
@@interchangexVP3 I had the very same thoughts
@@interchangexVP3 If you don't have your N2 at least you haven't hit the wall
In Vietnamese, I tried to ask for hot water, and instead requested “male fluids”.
I did that too. More than once, sadly.
Did you ask for “Nước Nam” instead of “Nước Nóng”? It makes more sense as “Southern Country” but “male fluids” is a more fun interpretation haha.
...better than asking for "hot male fluids"
@@JohnnyLynnLee Once is an error. More, I start to suspect it’s a kink.
If you think thats awkward, wait till its the other way around.
I mixed up にんじん/ninjin (carrot) and 人間/ningen (human) and accidentally exclaimed to my friend “I used to grow humans and trade them for other produce.” He nearly cried laughing.
being a student of japanese....... this had me rolling too. those are vocab i learned many years ago so i feel the friend on this one. 🤣 (ty for sharing! haha)
and ninjin with the jin suffix easy mistake 😂
I once had a slip of the tongue and asked someone I met for the first time "お名前は何ですか?" (Onamae wa nandesuka? = What's your name?) as "お前は何ですか?" (Omae wa nandesuka? = What are you? -- in a rude way) 💀
The shock on his face and me being extremely terrified stumbling for words to apologise and explain myself 💀 It's been more than 10 years but the haunting memory is very fresh on my mind.
Oh man, I've messed up so much already learning Japanese it's too funny! Deff nervous to talk to anyone until I get some REAL tutoring haha!
Heh - I made the same mistake going the other direction...
私はニンジンです! 私には人権があります！
I witnessed a lawyer telling a roomful of Mexicans that he was an avocado. We never let him forget it.
Abogado vs palta?
Lawyerado
😂😂😂
was the lawyer french?
@@snithereens in Mexican Spanish avocado is aguacate. However in French the word for lawyer is the same as avocado, “avocat” so maybe they were someone who knew some French and assumed that the same rule applied in Spanish? Sometimes that works, but in this case it doesn’t at all lol. Otherwise, I agree, it would be a silly stretch to confuse the two words haha.
It's not a single event, but my Japanese friends kept saying I spoke like a yakuza. I thought I was sounding badass...no, they were trying to say I'm being rude and should be more polite
This guy with visible tattoos was telling me I shouldn't say ore. Yeah ok dude. I don't travel to Japan looking like Yakuza. I can probably get away with it.
@@Dragon-Believer it highly depends who you're talking to. In Japanese you almost never want to use any word that says "I" specifically unless you need to. Overusing おれ or わたし just makes you sound like a child who doesnt have a mature vocabulary, or a self centered narcissist.
@@TheKlopka you think you're not going to sound like a child? Get realistic.
@@Dragon-Believer yes, because I don't. You seem like you're fun at parties
@TheKlopka you're delusional. Nobody is impressed by the skill you imagine that you have.
Not really a linguistic error so much as a brain fart, but once tried to fend off a Korean evangelist by telling her 나는 유대인이다 naneun yudaein-ida “I am Jewish”, but misspoke and said 나는 예수다 naneun yesuda “I am Jesus Christ.”
Anyway, it worked.
😂 You'd think that's exactly who they'd want at their church!
oh that's a good one!
Hilarious!
LMAOOOMKJDFJKD
This is my favorite
I'm a composer. I gave a concert in Mexico. My Spanish is OK. I did a pretty good intro and then I said the equivalent of "I hope I enjoy the show" I meant to use the 2nd person.
P9
Ironically it sounds pretty charming lol
Sweet! I hope you did enjoy the show, though ;-)
Ha ha I told a french man your dad is french instead of my kids dad is french
"i will never accept a sponsor from better help" language jones i love you
truly, thank god
Did he say Sponsor or sponsorship?
I've stopped watching content creators who support them, their therapists are glorified Celeverbots. I'd have more luck asking Akinator to identify my problems.
This line was what caused me to hit subscribe.
I’m just commenting to say how much I loved that he said this.
In Hebrew, I accidentally told someone that I was going to be late because I committed suicide. I was trying to say that I had gotten lost.
"Got lost" in Ukrainian sounds a lot like "ruined" or even "killed" in russian.
Actually it makes a lot of sense grammatical, כל הכבוד 😂
@@AnnaSibirskaja yeah, the only difference is that one is a reflexive verb, and the other is a transitive verb with a reflexive pronoun
People probably tought you had a terrible excuse
Hahahahahaha נאבדתי and התאבדתי, you thought the root verb אבד conjugated into התאבד to mean lost, never even thought of that
I’ve been annoyed by this sort of thing since I saw a “TWO POLYGLOTS MEETING!!!” video which consisted of them cycling through languages saying “Do you speak [language]?” “Yes, a bit!” so great to hear a professional backing up my irritation.
I wish they were just honest and says "I know a handful of words"
I am academically proficient in languages I can't even say "turn up the ac because I feel like a pig on a bbq" in.
I like some of Mike's info., but it was just ridiculous for him to be marketed as a polyglot who fluently speaks over ten languages. When he was called out on it indirectly, all of a sudden his responses were he studied many languages, but did not claim he was fluent in them. He effectively said, he was unaware of it and it was his marketing team who he hired made the claims. Despite in the videos a person who interviews him said Mike is fluent in over ten languages, and conversational in about 100 languages, while Mike himself was sitting in front of the guy making the claims.
Mike continued to not provide any academic information on his educational background, although he is also marketed as a linguist and phonologist.
@@Gee-xb7rtthe reason mine and many resumes have a hidden fifth proficiency level (basic, intermediate, advanced, fluent and technical - I can write a thesis and read papers, but can't order a pizza in Detroit)
@@Mordecrox yeah, when you learn in school its more more reading and writing than conversing, but seriously you aren't ready to land a job in a foreign country with three semesters of a language. I'm most proficient reading and writing in Spanish, even told I speak it really well but without the guttural stops its really hard to listen. Italian is really easy for me understand but never took it, lol.
I was cleaning with a Japanese friend and she said, "You're a good bastard."
I asked her what she meant and she explained, "You know, a bastard. Someone who cleans something up. Like a Ghost-Bastard."
@@JJKoester dust bastard 😂
This is so kawaii I can't even...
@@elevenseven-yq4vu??????????
I teach languages to Japanese people, it's always fun!!! Every now and then they come up with hilarious stuff!!!
"I like old movies, especially the ones starring Bastard Keaton"
I spent two years living in Japan. I studied daily. I spent well over a thousand hours studying. I call my Japanese "conversational" and I am being exceptionally generous. When I hear people claiming you can learn a language in some tiny amount of time it gives me eye spasms.
As for language errors... When talking to some students of mine, I tried to speak less formally and instead of saying "How are you?" I said something closer to "Where are the girls?" I'm lucky no rumors started floating around...
@@spman2099there’s no rumors because everyone already knows and nobody cares as much as oneself thinks everyone else does.
It honestly depends on the method. You can learn a lot of Japanese by just watching anime without subtitles. It's fun too
Eh I taught English with a guy in China for a year and he basically went from beginner to upper intermediate in that year. He was just incredibly diligent and had a Chinese girlfriend... He really mined that lol.
@@ericsalidbar1693 ah yes, anxiety. Gotta be my favorite emotion
The man who was confirmed to speak the most languages was a Canadian man who had to pass an hour-long test with a native speaker to be considered fluent. He spoke 42 languages and worked as a court bailiff.
Were those 42 completely distinct languages or did they include dialects and variations?
@@Laotzu.Goldbug According to the wikipedia article (his name is Powell Janulus);
"It was reported that Powell speaks the following 42 languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, German, Dutch, Frisian, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Kashubian, Lusatian, Wendish, Belarusian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Armenian, Sinhala, Tibetan, Japanese, Chinese, Cantonese, Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Kurdish, Finnish, Korean and Persian."
He was a court translator, not a bailiff.
And the tests were 2 hours long.
@@tannern5352i knew it had to be a bunch of slavic languages, we often joke how we're all polyglots if you count every language, since some are more similar to each other than some dialects which aren't considered separate languages, i.e. arabic dialects
@@tannern5352 Also from wikipedia: "Powell was reported to have died in 2006, however this was inaccurate. In an interview, he stated that his disappearance was due to a stroke he suffered at that time. He reported that he lost his ability to speak English, due to brain damage."
Imagine being a polyglot that loses your native language...
You forgot the most important function of Akkadian, writing complaints to your copper supplier about his terrible customer service and broken promises on the copper deliveries.
Ea Nassir you bastard
😄😄
That was a real missed opportunity for EXTREMELY niche humor
Kati understands the kind of content that we are all here for.
iltam zumra rashubti ilatim
I once held the door for someone and they said, “Merci (thank you).” I then responded with, “Beaucoup (very much).” I think I was used to hearing “merci beaucoup” and my brain instinctively wanted to finish the sentence they started. Brains are weird sometimes.
I was once in Odessa, Ukraine, to practice Russian (as it was during covid, and Russia closed its borders).
I remember walking into a Shwarma (kebab) shop and having a very basic conversation with the chef.
I only knew how to read Russian, and say basic things. But hey, they appreciated the hell out of an Australian coming all the way there to learn more.
As I collected my food order, I had that 'nervous moment' you get during language learning, and as I left I said in Russian "Thank you very much. Hello!"
... and then I walked out.
I immediately realised my mistake, and shook my head while facepalming myself hard. For a brief moment I considered just walking off, but then decided "F**k it".
I opened the the door to the shop and said, in Russian, "Excuse me. Sorry. Not Hello, but *Goodbye*!"
The store owner and his delivery boy immediately had a good laugh with me as they gave a friendly wave and said "no problem".
It was as this moment I realised that language learning is going to have its humorous and semi-embarrassing moments. But most of that is internal, as locals will just appreciate you actually trying.
I love this story!
I did this in Japan two months ago! Had a simple, nice conversation with a store clerk, thanked him, and then I said "Hello (night version)!" as I went to leave. He gave me a "what just happened" sort of smile and it was that moment I realized that word did NOT mean "Good night!" like I thought it did! 😁
dont come to ukraine to practise russian
😊😊😊l
As an Odessite, I want to say that if you get into russia, stay there! We don't need russophiles in Odesa. They tend to explode on us.
Mistranslation story:
I went to Japan with my wife. We don't know Japanese. We went into a pop-up sake bar. No english menus. The guy running it also didn't know any English. Regardless, he was super friendly towards us. I was able to use my phone to mostly translate the hand-written menu to order food, and then we blindly picked various sakes, because even if we could read, it would have meant absolutely nothing. We hit that place three times total since it was literally next door to our hotel and the guy was awesome (would hook us up with free food too, which was great, lol)
We would sometimes type messages in our phone and use google to translate so we could converse a bit more on a very superficial level. Nothing deep just some basic "how long has this bar been open?" and "how long are you staying in town?" type messages. At one point, my wife and I were having our own conversation and he shows us a message:
"Is there any hope?"
I froze, lol. The good news is, my most immediate response was, "Uh.... Yes?" But I was stuck staring at it for a bit trying to figure out what was up. There's no way this dude was trying to engage in me a deep, philosophical discussion out of the blue.
I think the confusion on my face led him to realize that something got lost in the translation. The follow-up message was,
"Is there any request?" as in, did we need anything else in the moment.
Language is a fickle thing, lol
no, the answer is no. there is no hope.
@@47michaelcooper haha, the sake in me at the time felt differently
As long as you know “sake kudesai” you’re pretty much good to visit Japan
He sees your confused look, and thinks to himself sadly “this is not the chosen one” and returns to small talk
"No. We are doomed. The end is near."
I was once asking an Italian man what he thought was the nicest place in Italy to visit but, confusing the words il posto and la posta, I actually asked him what he thought was the nicest post office in Italy. After he finally stopped laughing he spoke in English with a thick Italian accent and said "hey, they all the same".
For some reason, this made me laugh the most of all the examples.
I do like a good post office
I saw that phrase in front of me, hand movement and all.
This is what I hate about romance languages. lol corte vs corto etc There's lots lots
Now I want to travel around and write reviews of post offices, see which one actually is the nicest
Generally, any video where the title is something like, "I learned x language in a week", I will firmly say, "No, you did not" and put them on the bad content list.
The only "learned X language in a week" story I find plausible involves an autistic savant who already knew several related languages.
I live in Amsterdam and I already met a relatively famous fake polyglot a few times at the street.
He used to post videos like "I will give you 5 bucks if I don't speak your language". Clearly he was only able to speak a few random words, so people caught on to that and started exposing the guy.
Now his videos are more like "I will give you 5 bucks if I cannot recognise your language".
Way less impressive, way less expensive.
Thats pretty funny because just being able to recognize most any language is still kind of impressive and makes for a fun video on its own, but knowing that they started by trying to fake that they speak almost every language takes any fun away from such a game.
Those "if we don't speak your language" videos are always so silly. Especially when they say "dialects don't count". I'm sorry, but what? Just take English as an example: There is no one correct way to speak the language. Hull accent is just as valid as Birmingham accent. A guy from Texas speaks the same langauge as a guy from Baltimore. If they can understand each other is a different question, but they are still speaking English, and all of those dialects are valid pronunciations.
Godverdomme..!
@@LordHorst There is a significant difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent refers only to pronunciation, indicating how words are spoken. In contrast, a dialect includes unique vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. Thus, while all dialects encompass accents, accents alone do not form a dialect.
@@manukartofanu Okay, but calling a soda "pop" is still valid English. Looking at my native language, the word "Wagen" ("wagon", but can also mean "car") is both singular and plural. For a native speaker from the south of Germany, the plural of that word is "Wägen" (those dots on the a are important and not just for decoration). Sounds strange to me, but it's valid German nontheless. So, I still don't get the "dialects don't count" rule, as again, there's hardly a "standard language" to follow in almost all languages.
I always think it’s funny when viral TH-cam shorts have “polyglots” saying the same simple phrase in every language.
“Hello! I speak a little bit of Dutch!”
I'm learning Japanese and I don't even include it when people ask me how many languages I speak.
I know a sentence in Swahili and I make a great effort to make it my entire personality, and it is the first thing I tell people when they ask me anything
"I know a little German. ... He's sitting over there." :D
@@kockastiekran good one. I'm gonna use it some day :)
@@kockastiekran …And when he's dried and ready, in German I will swear?
I was warned against the false friend “préservatifs” in French, and yet still managed to ask an older teacher in the school if she added condoms to her homemade jam…
I said to a cute French guy: “Est-ce que tu baises moi?” and I intentionally said it to mean “Are you FUCKING me?” as in are you fucking kidding me. Baiser can mean to kiss to. He asked if I was asking him to fuck him or kiss him and I said I actually simply said it to mean “are you fucking me?” as in are you kidding me? But he could certainly kiss or fuck me and I’d be happy too😂
Or maitresse meaning either mistress or teacher. It was very confusing when doing an assignment where we had to translate a grandma telling about her times in school.
same thing happens in spanish
Also true in German. I had a fellow exchange student tell her host parents that American food is full of condoms.
@@kaerzokledAlthough at least in Spain it means both things.
Thanks for sharing your expertise in this topic.
At age 10, having known basic English well, I used the term "please" instead of ask. So I commonly said "I will please you" instead of I will ask you. Edit: In many languages, words for request and inquiry are identical but come in a different structure, context and thus inferrance. This is the case in my native language, Croatian; I applied this logic having not yet learned of the proper use of ask as I was actively learning English from exposure to media and speakers. I did so online, not physically so no one could see I was a child. By 13, I spoke English as a native would, and later entered acting and writing. Funny to think about, pops in my mind once in a while.
Oh, oh dear
Is your first language Polish?
@@FarfettilLejl as in equating ask with poproszę?
@@bubbletea-v4717 yes
@@FarfettilLejl Croatian.
Knew a guy who met his girlfriends mother and hadn't quite gotten the tonal aspect of mandarin down.
He apparently gave her a hug and called her a horse.
Well tones are extremely hard to get right if you're not used to them. I know I keep messing them up all the time.
I'm still at the stage where I have to actively think about individual tones in a word or I lose them entirely and revert to sentence-wide tone. In other words, I have a propensity to belt out entire sentences of random and non-existent words, which is apparently normal for novice mandarin.
I remember taking a cursory Mandarin class and being taught "māma mà mǎ", meaning "my mother scolds the horse", as a means of demonstrating different tones. Was quite cool honestly
As someone who is currently learning German, I'm relieved to hear that it is in category 2. It _feels_ harder than Spanish, and it's a comfort to know that it's not all in my head. So much more inflection!
Several years ago, when I spoke zero German, I was in China and some fellow exchange students came up to me and started speaking German. I wanted to tell them in German that I don't speak German. I knew that "sprechen Sie Deutsch?" means "do you speak Geramn", "ich" means "I", and that "nein" means "no". So I stapled them together and came up with this: "Ich nein sprechen Sie Deutsch", which comes out to something like, "I... no... speaking German you." But of course, speaking really terrible German conveys the idea that you don't speak the language, so when we think about the _purpose_ of language... I think I kind of nailed it.
Oh. It's definitely more challenging for native English speakers. Ironic though, isn't it, given that English is a Germanic language.
@@Robespierre-lI That's why I thought I had it made in the shade. And in fairness, the vocabulary isn't too tricky. But those first few weeks I was learning very basic sentences, where the only inflection was the conjugation of verbs. And the noun genders took some getting used to. Even though there's a lot of consistency, you can't really see the consistency and the gender hints until you learn enough words that it starts coming together.
But by that second month, we were into dative and accusative, and then verb agreement. It's still fun though. I think it can be really frustrating to learn a language if you can't enjoy a challenge.
I don't agree that German is harder to learn than Spanish. The genitive case is basically still present in English (under a different name and with somewhat different grammar), the accusative is still present for pronouns, and English's core vocabulary is closely related to that of German. Verb agreement still has to be learned in Spanish, and case for pronouns.
@@JonBrase German has words besides just pronouns that change with case:
Der Bär mag meinen Lehrer.
Der Lehrer mag meinen Bären.
The word for "bear" changed because it's not a subject, but the word for "teacher" remained the same even though it went through the same grammatical test.
And possessive pronouns in German also change depending on not just plurality but also gender and case. "Mi casa" and "mis gafas" will always be "mi" and "mis" whether we're talking about a subject, object, or direct object.
Adjectives also have a greater variety of declension under German because, again, of case.
The similar vocabulary is how they trick you into starting to learn German. They reel you in.
@@tom_something My point is that the concepts are still present in English even if significantly atrophied: there are still objects in the English language that decline and conjugate.
Johnny Harris has a video called "The Fastest Way to Learn a New Language: The Video Game Map Theory" where he talks about how he learned basic Italian in like, 2 months (and also he's selling a course developed by his friend). He just glosses over the fact that he's *already fluent in Spanish* from his Mormon missionary days, and that's a language that's closely related to Italian. Also, the thesis of his video is that the definition of "fluency" should basically be downgraded from "speak like a native" to "have a brief conversation with a local and be understood." Uhh sure.
I once asked someone in Japanese how many siblings they had, and very puzzled, they replied with a "2". I later realized I had asked them how many parents they had.
Good. Good. It would be very embarassing if the answer was none.
In Brazil people are very invasive and sometimes tactless with personal questions, so that would be a very normal normal question for many. For me that is a delicate question, and if I wanted to to know that for some reason and would talk about family until the information came out without me forcing it.
So some people in Brazil who met you today go.
How many b and s do you have?
Your parents are they alive?
💀
Well that person could be raised by a single parent so that's that
@@RogerRamos1993how is asking how many siblings someone has an invasive question? I wouldn’t be surprised someone asked that if we were having a conversation and it came up
@@agme8045 Not that. Read my whole comment. The insensitive question is "How many parents do you have?" Or "Do you have both parents?".
@@RogerRamos1993 it sounds like a question someone with autism would make tbh, but i could see the question coming up in certain contexts.
Primed for cognates. EXACTLY THIS. I'm a native Swedish speaker. English was extremely simple for me to learn. Mostly because a huge chunk of the English language is very similar to Swedish, not just cognate words but also grammar and "sayings".
I can't exactly go to a Japanese person and laugh at them for not being as skilled in English as I am despite having studied it even longer.
We had different starting points.
On the other hand - false cognates, too! My favourite is probably to swim - att svimma - no, wait :D
I read a very interesting article by a Norwegian linguist (sorry, can't remember his name but I'm sure you can google it) who laid out the theory that although English is traditionally thought to have more in common with West Germanic languages, he believed its structure was really closer to the Nordic languages. I personally agree.
As a native English speaker, I have a very bizarre sense that I *should* understand Norwegian and Swedish (Danish is just gravel). But I don't. Some I can infer from dialect, a vague knowledge of the development of my own language, context clues and cognates.
Regarding cognates, though, I've sat around a table where people were speaking variously Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and myself French (it's about B2 now but used to be C1 on the European framework and may still be for passive skills). We had a perfectly valid multilingual conversation with the only moments of translation being occasional Portuguese to Spanish and Romanian to Italian. If the Poles had joined the party, that might have been different.
Det tror jag inte på!
@@barrysteven5964
It reallt isn't as significant as it sounds to say English is "structurally" more similar to Scandianvian than continental West Germanic. You could say the exact same thing about Romanian and Bulgarian vs other Slavic or Romance languages, but that is obviously due to intensive areal contact rather than inherent genetic relatedness.
I remembered seeing a tiktok video from a famous "hyperpolyglot" where he said he would pay 15$ (can't remember the exact number) to someone whose language he couldn't guess. There was a girl whose language he couldn't guess, and when she said what it was, he started "speaking in that language" to prove that he knew it. As a result, he did not pay her and put it on tik tok anyway
And, to be honest, I'm tired of videos where he "speaks ukrainian", but in reality it's russian with a strange accent so that nothing is understood
I know the one. His "knowledge" of the languages didn't really extend beyond "hell, my name is X, I want to be your friend"
€5 I think it was.
these piss me off so much, im irish tho and i love seeing irish people getting that money every time
He's so tedious
Oh that guy annoys me, because whilst I am sure he can speak several languages quite well, he is not fluent in all those languages that people come up to him and speak. Being able to recognise the language being spoken, then reciting that one sentence that you have memorised, is not being able to speak that language. If I gave myself a solid weekend of effective study, I could do the same thing.
I'm so glad you made this video. Nothing is more annoying than when people call themselves polyglots but can only "Parrot" phrases they've learned instead of legit composing a sentence in their brain in which they understand why the grammar is the way it is and what the words mean.
I speak every language conversationally! If I want people to avoid me I cry publicly! if someone says something to me I shrug and walk away! If that doesn’t work I scream and run away
I feel like I am able to express myself deeply anywhere in the world with that.
Reminds me of a Terry Pratchett joke: Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.**
**This is important. Inexperienced travelers might think that “Aargh!” is universal, but in Betrobi it means “highly enjoyable” and in Howondaland it means, variously, “I would like to eat your foot,” “Your wife is a big hippo,” and “Hello, Thinks Mr. Purple Cat.” One particular tribe has a fearsome reputation for cruelty merely because prisoners appear, to them, to be shouting “Quick! Extra boiling oil!
@@stretchchris1 omg I like that! It feels like a mix of Vonnegut and Douglas Adams!
Good description for Adams
this "conversationally" always baffles me - isn't it obvious that friendly conversations over coffee are the _top_ level of fluency and not the entry-level? Just being able to joke, engage in banter, relate to just about anything they might bring up, trust me, that's a lot more challenging than lecturing on quantum mechanics.
You'd get by perfectly with that here in Norway, as no one will speak to you in the first place 😊
should i become the first woman polyglot scammer? hashtag feminism or sth
😂
there are already many of them but, go for it
Isn't femism a scam anyways?
Como decir "gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss" en español?
@@bjhale gaslightear, gatekeepear, jefa (gatekeepear i may have made up but gaslightear, as well as hacer luz de gas) are things i have seen
My embarrassing moment:
I had been self-studying Korean for a number of years without much success and finally decided to move to Korea to boost my progress. In my Korean class I once called my teacher "생선님" (saengsun-nim) instead of "선생님" (sunsaeng-nim) infront of everyone.
선생 means "teacher".
생선 means....... "Raw fish".
I called my teacher Mrs. Raw Fish. Needless to say the whole class burst out in laughter.
😂
Don't worry, thats a very common mistake! I may or may not know someone who said 소주 (Soju, a Korean liquor) instead of 주소 (address).😅
I have accidentally called my 老师 (laoshi - teacher), 老鼠 (laoshu - mouse).
@@seorenate5782I assume that after drinking soju that mistake happens even more frequently 😅😅
I just discovered your channel a few hours ago and I love it. For context: I'm a Gen X Brit whose parents encouraged her to learn French young, with the result it's my best foreign language now. But I also learned German at school and spent two years at university learning Mandarin. I also try to learn as much of the main language of any country I go to on holiday as possible so I can say more than just "hello" and "thank you", with the result I still retain a bit of a number of languages including Italian, Dutch and Czech.
And you know what? If someone were to ask me what languages I speak, I'd just say English, French and German - because those are the only ones I feel confident to randomly chat to people in fluently. The TH-cam grifters piss me off so much. And one of the worst things is that it means people have less appreciation for the good ones. As an example, I'd nominate Oriental Pearl. She genuinely speaks the languages she claims to speak fluently, and doesn't overclaim her ability.
One thing I've noticed, actuially, is that when she speaks Mandarin, she accepts compliments with "thank you" - which is something I was always told you shouldn't do in Chinese culture. Instead, there's a stock phrase to use: "bu gandang" - which essentially rejects the compliment by saying something like "oh no, I would never dare to think I'd be like that" etc. Do you happen to know whether Chinese culture has changed since I learned that so that accepting a compliment is OK? Or is Oriental Pearl just making a waiguoren mistake there?
THANK YOU! These fakes really demotivate language learners like myself. This isn’t Pokémon, you don’t need to catch ‘em’ all.
I think it's sometimes in lieu of a personality. I'd rather hear about the interesting thing you read in your one other language than hear the same stuff about learning all the languages over and over again.
@@languagejones This sort of reminds me of the expat dating scene. Men who are normally losers or uninteresting in their own country go abroad and suddenly seem way more interesting than they actually are because of the language and/or cultural barriers.
@@Billy4321able Absolutely! There's actually a passage in _Breakfat at Tiffany's _ (the novel) that basically makes the same observation.
@@Billy4321able Dang I never thought about that
and as a teacher, I know it would demotivate my students, we already have a stupid trend in my country of telling ESL learners they "won't have to learn grammar" which is wtf? on it's own. I have a group of older ladies who went from zero to a stable A2 level this past schoolyear and that's good progress and they still feel it's slow (it's a cultural thing) I don't need them to hear oh, there are people who can learn a language in 24 hours. I've seen real above average, talented learners, but come on.
English is my second language and I used to mess up phrasal verbs on a daily basis when I was still in school. Once my classmate fainted just before English class, so she was rushed to hospital. Our English teacher comes, does the roll-call, ask where that classmate is. I intended to say "she won't come, she passed out", but slipped and said "she won't come, she passed away" XD
Oh nooo XD
Ah those phrasal verbs, what a nightmare!! E.g. Give up or give in, what’s the difference?
@@veroniquejeangille8248 just in case you actually don’t know: give up means to stop trying to do something, give in means to do something you don’t want to do normally because of pressure
@@veroniquejeangille8248 When you give up, you throw your hands up in the air in exasperation. When you give in, you bow down and submit and reach your hands out to the authority in supplication.
@@veroniquejeangille8248 Give up trying to understand phrasal verbs, and just give in and use verbs that don't require prepositions. That's what I do ;)
I remember when I was learning Romanian just about the first time I plucked up courage to speak to a Romanian friend I said in Romanian "I'm a bit scared of making mistakes" and I got the word for 'mistakes' wrong.
Happened to me in Czech:
-I'm learning Czech, but I'm still making lots of mistakes
-What?
The irony
‘I’m a bit scared of taking misses.’
*nods as though they understand*
@@derpauleglot9772taky se učím česky. Je strašně těžké. ☹️
Trpělivost růže přináší^^
My wife’s french friends were asking her to describe what natural wine is. She responded (in french) that it doesn’t involve the use of “préservatifs”, without knowing that this is the french word for a condom.
I mean... I hope not
@@oz_jones Bareback wine is much better
The real "polyglots" take years to learn one language. That's a sign of being legitimate.
the new trend is to learn 5 languages at once. and i can see how that can work.
for example learning spanish can help with learning french.
@@summerwinter89 And yet lots of Spanish people still struggle with French. I'm afraid I don't see the alleged mechanism. Similarity doesn't make it a golden key.
@@summerwinter89I feel like that works best when you integrate the lesson plans. There's a book called the comparative grammar of French Spanish Italian and Portuguese that suggests you learn the same concept in each language at the same time, always in the same order, and learn specifically how they differ. Because if you learn different concepts in them at random and don't go in a consistent order, you can have a lot of difficulty mixing up which word is from which language. Like if you remember Italian salire and spanish salir mean different things, you might mix up which one means to go up and which to go out. It's definitely more effort to keep two related brand new languages separate in your head than learning one then the other.
@@baronmedusei feel like sometimes similarities make things more difficult because you expect things to be the same and are surprised when they aren't.
Interestingly, when learning romance languages, they usually translate prepositions directly. It gives people this expectation that they will act similar to their native language, and then you see all these people asking in forums why they don't perfectly match up.
In contrast I feel like when I was studying Japanese, the particles, which have the same grammatical function as prepositions don't feel that way, because they're so different you can't translate them directly like people usually do with romance languages. instead they give a long description of the usage scenarios, which sounds way harder, but somehow makes it easier to accept.
TLDR; I feel like people underestimate how hard it is to learn a language similar to their own and just assume things will work the same instead of putting in that extra effort to understand.
@@matteo-ciaramitaroIt comes with some assumption because you expect it to be the same but with different words. And even then, even if it’s similar, the intention and environment to use it is different. Also, most of those materials are usually for native French speakers learning Spanish so there might be subtle meanings that non-native speakers will not understand.
My first time in Germany, I panicked and couldn't remember the phrase for "baggage claim," but I figured if I asked the porter where my suitcase was, he'd get the idea. I said, "Wo ist meine Kartoffel?" He said he didn't know, which makes sense, since I had asked "Where is my potato?" (Should have asked for "mein Koffer.")
That's really delightful!
Your point about dead languages struck a chord with me. I'm an anthropologist trying to learn the endangered language of the culture I'm studying (Ainu). Minority groups are already oppressed enough, they don't need people lying about their languages for views.
Ainu as in the minority from Japan?
You're literally doing my dream job! I wish you the BEST of luck, I am legitimately so excited for you. Given how few Ainu speakers are remaining, as I believe it is now considered moribund, it is a language family that needs utmost preserving.
@@shirohanakurohana yes, exactly. I've had an interest in Ainu culture for about 15 years now. I'm specifically working in the field of indigenous ecology, so I'm studying things like traditional sustainable salmon hunting techniques utilized by northern indigenous peoples such as the Ainu and Tlingit.
@@rocketbilly it's a really cool language! While it is a language isolate, it has similarities to Japanese, Nivkh, and some of the Aleut languages due to trade
Minority’s favorite pastime muh oppression
Gladyl supporting your righteous indignation. Danke aus Österreich! 👍
Thank you!!
I once short-circuited in my first-year Mandarin Chinese class in college. English is my first language and I've studied Spanish since I was young. I wanted to say, "We don't know," but instead of saying, "Wǒmen bù zhīdào," I said, "Wǒmen bù zhīdamos." My brain decided to conjugate the Chinese verb as if it were Spanish. The best part is that Chinese verbs don't even conjugate.
When I first started learning French, it was a year after I first started actually learning Spanish, and boy were there a lot of funny mistakes. There were many times where french -ir verbs got Spanish conjugations.
I picked up on that and was like, wow, they conjugate like Spanish does and then I read your comment.😂
That happened to me in Mandarin, except my brain decided to randomly insert Japanese into the middle of the sentence, and I didn't even realize it had happened until I proudly finished talking about Gao Wenzhong or whatever and saw my instructor and classmates giving me blank looks, and one of them said, "Uh, half of that was in Japanese, actually." Awkward.
Then later, after I had been in full-time Mandarin training for six or seven months, I tried to say something in Japanese, and it came out with Mandarin tones attached. Japanese is not a tonal language. The human brain is weird as hell.
That is fucking amazing xD Once in Japanese class, I accidentally answered "oui" because all Canadian children are forced to be in French classes for years and your brain just expects that's what you gotta do, and then panicked and tried to explain myself in an absolutely incomprehensible mix of English, Mandarin, and Spanish, but I'm pretty sure even then I didn't reach the heady heights of "zhidamos" 😂😂
I went from mandarin classes to Spanish at one point and the amount of times I found myself doing the same thing
Once, after living in Romania for a few months, I messed up the word for turtle. Instead of broasca testoasa (literally, "shelled frog"), I accidentally said broasca tatoasa, which basically means "titty frog". The Romanian I was talking to just laughed and asked, "What does that look like?!"
That Romanian is probably calling turtles “titty frogs” to this day.
@@malvoliosf Knowing her, I'm sure she is.
E mâncarea preferată a cocosfârcului.
Translation: It's the favourite food of the cocosfârc. Cocostârc=stork, cocosfârc=nipple bird
@@adi14882 Multimesc pentru traducere! Glumele romanesti imi mai sunt greu de inteles, si asta m-a scapat. Dar ar fi o lume mult mai interesanta cu broaste tatoase si cocosfarcuri!
As a Romanian, I will never look at this word the same way again
Two C-words. One subtle difference.
In Spanish, "cone" is "cono". But change the n to an ñ and you have that *other* C-word.
I was living in Valencia for 3 months, and nearby was a great ice-cream shop staffed by 3 women in their early 20's. Every day I would go up to them and say "I'd like a... how do you say it... a c*nt please."
And every day they would give me an unruffled smile and an ice cream cone. They never corrected me and I only realised my error months later
Reminiscent of the age-old año vs. ano trap. Don't neglect your diacriticals or you'll die of critical embarrassment.
Diabolical
it's either that, or having to resort to the more complicated word "cucurucho" :D
@@Solfonny
Does my brother have 30 years, or 30 holeros butteros?
WHO KNOWS
Or maybe they just liked you and were waiting for you to take the next step with your flirting?
You saying you won't accept a better help sponsor got me to subscribe. I remember a couple of years ago when they were exposed for being a scam, hiring students to man the lines. All this whilst they claimed to have trained staff.
My wife (Spanish) taught Spanish to Americans many years ago in Santander. She would ask her students to describe what they'd done over the weekend. One poor girl said, "Fui a la playa con mi profesor para pecar" (meaning to go fishing: "pescar"). Unfortunately, she said, "I went to the beach with my professor to sin." Oops!
In many Spanish dialect it is common to not or to barely pronounce the "s" in "pescar".
Well yeah, but it sounds different that the word pecar, or at the very least the whole sentence matches the accent. I doubt she was trying to omit the s on purpose
@@13tuyuticame here to say this. Listen to a Cuban or a southern Spaniard talking about fishing, you will think they're confessing.
Did she say estoy caliente, yo me lamo ___________ 😂
@@jerryyoung-m7g What if she learned the pronunciation from youtube videos without specifying the accent in the search bar?
To all the people who say "well uhhh they might not be as good as they claim, but at least they bring in more people to the language learning community". Selling false hopes and methods and wasting people's time for years is actually doing more harm than not making these videos at all. These snakes have to be stopped if we want actual language geeks and their advice to get into the spotlight.
makes people go from "Anyone can do this, just need to make the effort" to "wow they're so talented, I could never learn so quickly, maybe this isn't something i can do"
@@matteo-ciaramitaro exactly! Generally the delusion of talent and "innate intelligence" being the deciding factor is very harmful to learners of any subject or skill.
One of the people he called out made materials that helped one of my friends learn Mandarin well and kick off a career as a translator. To be clear, languagejones speaks much worse than either of them.
It's deeply insidious to set people up with the expectation they'll see immediate, massive results. As soon as they collide with reality, the disappointment will be imnmeasurable and their language journey is apt to end right there. Doing that to someone is much, much worse than having done nothing to "help".
It 100% discourages people from learning languages. It discouraged me from practicing French, and I already could read and write French decently well and speak conversationally 90% of the time, but being told my three years of study was useless because I can't fluently speak it when it only took them a week makes you disappointed in yourself.
I once asked a Spanish waiter if the salad contained "lechuza" (owl) instead of "lechuga" (lettuce). He guessed what I was trying to say and didn't laugh. I realised my mistake but didn't feel embarrassed. I know that's not what you asked for but it's all I've got
Jajajajajjajajajajajajjajsjsjs
Hey, at least you didn't say 人間 (ningen, human being) for 人参 (ninjin, carrot). Not that I have ever done that. 😅
The thing is precisely to realize it when you make or miss something. Many people don't have this self-consciousness. They carry all their mistakes to the grave, except the ones that put them in trouble, but even those, they keep going back to them.
birds and vegetables! easy to get confused with those.... Did you know hummingbirds are called 'colibrí' or 'picaflor'? But don't mix them up, because 'coliflor' means cauliflower ;)
"Disculpe, pero claramente esta no es la que pedí. Por favor que me traiga una ensalada con búho"
The last time I heard a so-called polyglot attempt to speak Danish, it sounded like the person thought mumbling a combination of Swedish and Dutch was enough to pass as "conversational Danish". It was barely recognizable at best, and downright offensive at worst to misrepresent a language that badly.
to be fair, no one speaks Danish anymore ;)
(this is a joke, in reference to th-cam.com/video/s-mOy8VUEBk/w-d-xo.html )
@@CynicalIndulgence good one lol
Danish is an extremely difficult language to speak and understand when it's spoken. I've studied it for years, including several long stays in Denmark. I can understand anything I read, yet I still struggle a lot understanding the spoken language and I'm terrified of speaking it. When I visited Norway, watching tv in my hotel in Oslo and listening to Norwegian and suddenly understanding it so well, it was as if a veil had suddenly been lifted.
@@mayhu3282 i like to think og Norwegian as "Danish, but with actual consonants" : P
But there's a lot of dialects of Norwegian with some exceptions to that description.
@SpiceCh Yes, that day in Oslo I thought: Danish having undergone a thorough cleansing! Not that I have anything against Danish, it's a language I've spent a lot of time learning and a country I feel a lot of affection for. But I should understand much more by now taking into account the time I've put into it (I think about five or six years of taking classes back in the day, and using it often (reading or watching tv) since then). By comparison, in only two years of learning Dutch (with a very good base of German) I could understand spoken Dutch to maybe 85% when it was Dutch from the Netherlands and maybe 95% when it was Flemish Dutch.
Not my own experience, but my Dutch tutor in uni once told us how he'd answered a Dutch store clerk who asked him if he needed any help "Nee bedankt, ik kom alleen klaar." Didn't sound too wild to us at first because "Ich komm allein klar" in German just means "I can manage fine on my own" but in Dutch it's "I'm reaching orgasm alone"
My Spanish teacher - native - always said 'Ich bin nicht schuldig" instead of "ich habe keine schuld/ich bin nicht schuld" when the classmates didn't learn their vocabs. I always found it cute. First one is "I'm not guilty" but he meant "It's not my fault".
😂 i guess that was his favourite store
*alleen
@@ringoinah Right, thanks
I tell my German colleagues that the Dutch language is as if English and German had a baby. This sentence is an example of that, so thank you.
One thing that annoys me is that so many teachers don't want to teach curse words. Here's one example why it's important. At the time when I was already intermediate in Estonian and actually started to have more and more small conversations in the language, I was at a restaurant with a few friends who are native speakers. When the waiter asked me something, I wanted to reply "it doesn't matter", which is "ükskõik" (lit. "one-all" ~ "it's all the same to me"), but I answered with the only word that was familiar to me because I heard it everywhere, "pohhui". Now that one is borrowed from Russian "похуй" (pokhuy), literally meaning "on the dick", and is pretty rude when you don't talk to friends, like "I fucking don't care" or "I don't give a shit". This was especially annoying considering in six years of learning Russian in high school and two at university, no one ever had the idea of teaching me the slang word for penis. Had I known this word already in Russian, I would have guessed that "pohhui" is probably not an appropriate word to reply with to a waitress.
lmaoooooo
This is especially true for Italian. I didn't learn it in school so I'm pretty familiar with all the words, but I genuinely wonder how'd you'd get around a native speaker going "cazzo" (Word por penis but more nuanced than that) every two seconds.
There r so very many curse words in Russian that even knowing what хуй or хер won't help a lot in understanding what is being said. I believe that watching movies or TH-cam in a foreign language of interest will do
Honestly though if you don't learn that on your own are you even learning the language?
The first thing you learn in any language are cuss words :)
Online gaming did a lot in that regard. I know russian, chinese, portugese, turkish and spanish curses and expletives just from dota and CS.
When I (native german speaker) went to do an execercise with my unit at a US-Army base here in germany, I had the biggest english blackout I can remember. All I was trying to do was ask an American soldier at the laundromat for how long his laundry had been in the washing machine and all that came out was "Is uh- for how- laundry in machine?" or something to that effect. Luckily, he got what I was trying to tell him. Afterwards one of my buddies looked at me and went "Damn, aren't you supposed to be the squad translator?"
I swear this will haunt for the rest of my days
Happens to all of us, mate
Well thats almost the averagr americans proficiency in english
@@denzelpanther240 No, folk don't stumble over simple phrases in their native tongue unless they have anxiety issues.
There are mistakes that native speakers can make, and in some cultures those "mistakes" become the natural way to speak and can form new dialects over time. But by no means is any English speaking native going to struggle asking how long the laundry machine will take.
Do not confuse common errors with a lack of speaking or reading ability.
It happens. Try not to worry about it so much. I'm Hungarian and sometimes I translate for my company too. But depending on how tired I am, my proficiency levels differ significantly. 2 months ago, I was in a minor car accident and I went to work just 2 days afterwards and my boss asked mevto translate to our German collegues. It was a disaster. However, I'm somewhat angry at my boss because I had concussion and mighty headaches and I surely didn't function at 100% on my first day back, it was not very comsiderate of him asking me to translate special machinery related problems. However, sometimes, there is no special reason for my blundering other than tiredness and yes, unfortunately, I do have anxiety too. When I'm overwhelmed sometimes I cannot utter a word in my native tongue either, for a half minute approximately, usually I can get over the block afterwards but I noticed that I mixe up words in my native to tongue too when I'm very tired. -- Ich mache mir aber keine Sorgen darüber, weil ich bemerkt habe, dass andere Leute ebenso tun. Zum Beispiel, mein Mann, er verweckselt sogar die Zahlen: oft spricht er über 2003 oder 2013 und eigentlich meint er 2023. Das macht doch jeder, wenn man sehr müde ist.
Getting the nouns and part of the question right can do so much lifting. Shoutouts to my terrible French
The algorithm has blessed me today. This is my new favorite channel and creator. You're funny and engaging on a topic that I really enjoy.
You’ll appreciate this story as a Hebrew learner. My fathers friend asked a woman standing on a street corner in Tel Aviv in about 1980 יש לך את הזמן ‘do you have the time’ instead of מה השעה ‘what is the hour’ and she responded with אם יש לך את הכסף יש לי את הזמן ‘if you have the money I have the time’
😂😭
That's priceless!
Oh, but that annoying grammatically incorrect use of את. Neither הזמן nor הכסף is actually the object of any verb so does not need the direct object marker.
@@barrysteven5964
actually יש also needs את when direct objects are involved. Take this example sentence from gor and o'ach
season 1 episode 3 at 3:19, o'ach says to gor :
"לך יש את הקמע"
-
"you have the medallion/charm"
okay, youTube doesn't let me post the link to the episode directly. so just write
גור ואוח עונה 1 פרק 3
into the search bar, and you'll find it. I hope it's not region locked. i hope it doesn't delete this comment as well.
As a language teacher and lifelong learner I find these fakers just infuriating. Not only do I know how much time I've spent trying to improve languages, but even worse is that they set wildly unrealistic expectations for other learners who might not know enough to see through the BS and end up feeling bad about themselves.
Thank you. That was part of the motivation to make this. It's totally demoralizing if we buy that someone speaks 100 languages, meanwhile we're struggling to get a handle on one. Especially if it's your first foreign language. It can be so easy to blame yourself and think you just can't learn.
@@languagejones And I have had that exact conversation with SO MANY PEOPLE. The "oh language just isn't for me" or "I just can't learn another language" folks who've been discouraged by people like that or just by bad teachers saying "if you don't learn in this one specific way then you fail." It's really my goal as an educator to get people believing in their own capabilities and see the enjoyment in languages, even when it does get tough.
Love your channel, man.
@@linguacarpa I totally agree with you (as a language teacher and language learner myself) And such a great video @languagejones6784 - you put it all perfectly!
That’s literally me. I don’t know how to learn languages, but I want to. And I felt terrible cuz I’m like yh I can’t do that. I have a life and a brain that doesn’t work like that.
The worst part is, that even if I know from experience how hard it is to learn a new language, there is still a tiny irrational voice in my head telling me it should be easy if these guys can do it. It is good that people speak up against this.
Unrelated but massive respect for taking shots at BetterHelp in the beginning of the video.
Thanks!
Thank you!
Once I was talking to a very attractive lady in Spanish and I said "mucho placer" instead of "mucho gusto". That sounds weird because the word "placer" usually means sexual pleasure, not pleasure as in "it's a pleasure to meet you". Sometimes at night I think back on that conversation over 10 years ago and I still want to die just as much as I did then and there.
That would haunt me. I'm cracking up thinking about it
Lol, at least I can assure you she may not have taken it so bad cause in Spanish you can say “un placer (de conocerte)” as a synonym of “nice to meat you” and such
@@czfuchs heh meat
Sounds like she never liked you in the first place lol
A lot like my experience in Japanese.
My most embarrassing moment was when I was learning Japanese and there was this super cute Japanese girl I was struggling to talk to that dressed in that Harajuko/gothic Lolita style and after some weeks I tried to praise her STYLE, her style of clothing. But Japanese has this thing of adopting English words and using it in a completely different way. So I've picked up スタイル (sutairu-style) from immersion and I said something like "I like your style." BUT it turns out that "スタイル" is more like the figure of one's body, their build, their body shape. I should have said, among other options something in the lines of "I like your ファッション (fashion)" or simply the "types of clothes you use".
PS: you can say something like, "衣服のスタイル" (style of CLOTHING) but you must specify it's CLOTHING and it wouldn't fit in the context anyway.
So I looked like a creepy and she was terrorized and stopped talking to me for weeks. When she finally replied, yeas, she understood it was an innocent mistake BUT (even for cultural reasons) my INTENTIONS didn't matter much but mostly the RESULTS. And the result was that I made her feel SHAME and now every freaking time she would talk to me she would remember the shame and feel shame again (even shame for being ashamed) so it wasn't funny talking to me anymore. I was associated with the cause of an unpleasant feeling. Jorge=I'm ashamed.
That sucked! I could have dated her.
Nice to meet someone else that sounded like a sexual predator unintentionally in a second language. Thanks God it was in public and with her male friends around. Think about that!
One of the ‘unnamed’ polyglots at the beginning here was in Norway to speak with a journalist in Norwegian. That might have been the most cringworthy thing I have ever seen.
That narrows it down
That very dude came to Rabat misgendering everything.
Is it xiaomanyc?
That's when I realised what he meant when he said that he could speak a language
ooh, is there a link you can share?! I desire the cringe!!
My brother went to Korea for a while and first tried to memorize the sentence "I can't speak Korean". He said it to people a couple times, then learned that he flubbed the sentence and was actually just saying "I cannot".
Super interesting video! I'm a Spaniard living abroad for many years now. I am quite tired of the many people I have met along the years who, as soon as they learn I'm from Spain, say "you know, I speak Spanish". I try to speak Spanish with them, they say a few words, and immediately change topic. Never hear them again speaking Spanish, not even trying.
3 minutes in and the jokes are top tier. "Spanish is the language you hear when you go outside" had me laughing
Had to pause to finish laughing at that one!
I love it. Unabashedly hating, spitting truths about everything (including sponsorship from BetterHelp, which I hear from other Psychology professionals does not treat their "employees" right)...
I laughed, too, although around here (PNW) Mandarin might be the more accurate punchline...er, punchword?
I keep thinking about when Trump was bashing other politicians for speaking Spanish because this is America, and English is the language of America. How did that idiot get elected
It's definitely 100% true in Florida.
A girl in Japan was flirting with me. She was cute. I told her I would be in Tokyo over the weekend, and she said that was going to Tokyo over the weekend too! I was a tourist, but didn't think she was offering to show me around town since I was concentrating too hard on my words. I said "Sou desu ka" trying to mean "Oh that's neat!" but I guess it came off more like "Cool story, bro" cause her friend giggled at her and she said "Sou desu ka ne..."
I'm sorry Yuki, if I see you again I will ask you out on a date.
i ment penis
Pennis
Pennies
That might be a missed hint issue more than a mistranslation issue lol...
oof. yeah. especially delivery matters but that one tends to get used as more of an "uh huh, uh huh......" and less of active interest. i noticed you'll even get things that should be okay like "sugoi" but then said flatly is kind of like a monotone "uhuh woooow." /s. guess a better would have been a followup question? but man convos are tricky sometimes even being in the same language. good effort bro!!
In German mobile phone is usually called "Handy". Great conversation that was. My American friend group still won't let me live it down
Haha that is good!
I occasionally have to remind myself that...technically you *can* say "Handy" for Smartphone in German Conversations, but you should avoid doing that in english Conversations. 😅
I’m Italian and i’ve been studying English in school/high-school/university since I was little however, I became fluent I’d say only a couple of months ago. I spent 3 months in the US during summer and one day I was annoyed by the fact that no one was answering to my question : “what HOUR (instead of time) is it ?”and then I realised I was messing up with basic grammar and I honestly felt so stupid.
As a mini-polyglot with a C2 level in just four languages, and as a PhD in language teaching from a first-rate university myself, I am thrilled to finally see an expert speak on this topic of fake polyglots. Having spent some forty years learning French, German and Spanish, I am absolutely convinced that the ridiculous claims spread across the Internet to know dozens (much less 100!) languages is nothing but a crock!
so so so so agree. I did meet two geniuses in real life, one was my German professor (he spoke 26 languages, out of which maybe 5 fluent) and Japanese professor who spoke 13 languages fluently (that guy was a beast mode genius). But these are the rare gems you encounter in linguistic departments:)
I live in a country with 11 official languages. I know two of them fluently, and speak two similar continental European languages reasonably well 😂
I can definitely see how polyglots can exist (admittedly, going above 5 does start to enter the sceptical realm). I'm not far off from it myself, but it takes years and years and living in the countries or having regular impromptu conversations to find the ins and outs.
Or just cheat like me: know Afrikaans, learn the rules of Dutch. Basically two languages for the price of one!
Serious question though, what counts as polyglot though?
@@silveryfeather208 that's the issue: it's really vague. It's just someone who speaks several languages (pick any dictionary). There's no hard number, though I've commonly seen 4 as a benchmark, and "speaking" a language is also very vague. There are plenty of people who claim to "speak" a language when they've barely reached A1.
Personally, I don't think you should need to be perfectly proficient in all 4 languages; B1 feels like a reasonable degree of fluency to claim that you can actually speak a language
@@remy2718 yeah like I agree with the video in some sense but when he talked about using intermediate tense I think that's a little too much. Like as long as you go beyond tourist life stuff even if its broken language I still think its impressive enough to warrant speaking it. By tourist I mean how much is this etc. Something that will never allow you to know someone. For example knowing someone would mean things like what is their political leaning etc. that's just me though
So I’m a speaker of a conlang which only has a handful of “fluent” speakers so the community is relatively centralised. It’s a very friendly environment, everyone helps each other out and chips in towards running language learning events. One of the fake polyglots you hint at came into our central community server and left a really poor taste in my mouth.
He demanded private 1-on-1 tutorship with an advanced speaker for free, citing his large TH-cam channel and the exposure it would bring to the language. Nobody took him up on his offer and instead pointed him towards all our free communal learning events. Someone offered to run their study group at a second time slot if timezones were an issue.
He got mad, made some very rude comments about how shitty the language is and left the server.
Oooo…. Fascinating. Which conlang?
ooh which conlang is it?
"your language is shitty" is certainly a thing a person could say to someone else
@@NovaNyst Especially a person who claims to be interested in languages, lol. ....And approached you first about wanting to 'learn' it.
Oh, what's the conlang?
My most embarassing moment was when I swapped "syllable" for "siblings". The person asked me if I had more than one sibling and I promptly answered: "Yes, Cai-o, two siblings".
Are you Brazilian?
🤣 I completely get why you'd jump to that, too. I'd bet lots of people look at your name and ask whether it's said more like "Cah-ee-oh" or "Caye-oh." Especially if they're used to English names, where vowels are just a suggestion and consonants are a joke.
@@Cryptic0013 actually most people think my name is “Ciao”, like Italian. People don’t people enough attention to it, so I’m quite used to it 😂
@@andred7684 yep
@@CaioCodes Oooh. Okay
As a native Italian speak married to a Peruvian, I was talking to my wife's grandmother in my broken Spanish. I don't remember the context, but at one point, I was telling her I was embarrassed. The Italian word for embarrassed is 'imbarazzato', in Spanish, it's 'avergonzado'. On the surface, not that big a deal that I used the Italian word instead. Only problem is that in Spanish, "embarazado" means pregnant. How embarrassing.
LMAO SAME
My dad visiting Spain, ordes "burro" with his breakfast bread, only to be presented with a platter of sliced meat from a confused waiter. "No tengo burro". My dad walks to the kitchen with the waiter, and points at the butter.
@@WildWestNeko Classic. Similar confusion can occur for Spanish speakers asking for olive oil in Italy.. In Spanish, it's 'aceite' (from the Arabic word for olives), while in Italian, 'aceto' (as in Acetic Acid) is vinegar.
I am not sure if you have heard of this old interview in a Chilean TV show named "¡Viva el lunes!" in which they unintentionally exposed on live TV a false polyglot from the Middle East that claimed to speak over 50 languages by making him interact with native speakers in Finnish, Farsi, Russian, Mandarin, Greek and Hindi, to which he failed miserably to understand even the most basic questions like "what day is today?" or so.
It was clear that he had only learnt the basic stuff in each language and memorized the answers to questions like "Was it difficult to learn my language?", "How long did it take you to learn it?", "What was the easiest or the hardest of it?" but he was asked anything outside that topic, he would be completely lost... It would be great if you make a reaction to that.
Amen Victor Vera. I saw that show too. It took place in 1997. The so called polyglot"s name is Ziad. It is clear that Ziad was only completely fluent in Spanish but when it came time to respond in Finnish, Farsi,Russian,Mandarin and Hindi, he looked like a 3rd string high school football player playing in the Superbowl. Languagejones nailed it. It takes years of aqusition,comprehensible input,building a second brain and immersion to acquire 1 language let alone 50. Chow.
@@jerrymcknight3177 podrias hacer una referencia mas internacional? El futbol americano no es popular en muchas partes
@@SieMiezekatze a teenager who plays in the local football/soccer club playing in the FIFA football world championship. :)
I met some Japanese folks on an elevator once. I can't remember what I said that was helpful, but then they commented how my Japanese was so good. With my very confident very high level beginner japanese, I said in so many words that, No, my Japanese is really great, which is exactly the opposite of what I meant to say. I didn't realize it until about 10 minutes after work. I think I blushed for an entire hour, just thinking about those folks chuckling how confident and rude I was.
Japanese is perfect for hindsight self-cringe.
As a teenager I did a short homestay in Japan after having learned for a few years. They were so sweet and kind and we had a great time, but the mother would keep offering me different foods and I thought I was saying "That's good! (I'll have some!)" I apparently kept saying "I'm good (I don't want any)". The Japanese was いいです！
In hindsight it is so embarrassing but they were so polite nonetheless and never even let on, that I was accidentally being impolite.
@@uamsnof that's fantastic. That's such a a great example of what makes a so called difficult language actually difficult.
@senorsmile That's because you can't use いい like the english "good". 美味しいです would be correct. Using english translations to learn Japanese has those issues.
Yeah it's crazy how different いい is from what you think it's going to be when you originally learned it, but hey, these experiences are exactly why you know that now. 😂. It's a shame they didn't tell you. I'm lucky enough to have pretty savage Japanese friends who frequently call me out when I'm saying something unhinged. @@uamsnof
I think I might never speak Japanese again after that. 😂
I wanted to compliment my Japanese friend by telling her that her dress looks cute. Instead I told her that her dress is terrifying. She took it with humor.😅
kawaii-->kowai?
I did a similar thing in Japan - whilst talking to two women in a blues bar, I asked them ‘was the earthquake Tokyo had last night beautiful?’ And one replied ‘KOwai not Kuwaii’ - scary not beautiful 🤦♂️
There was some Japanese learning blogger who went to "ansatsu" his neighbours. Um, moshimoshi, police?
Kowai instead of Kawaii? Lmao
@@Komatik_ LOL XD keisatsu desu, nani ka mon ka? :P
«N'importe quoi!» is an idiom used to say “Whatever!”. It literally means «anything» which is exactly what «quoi que ce soit» means. Saying : «Rappelez-moi pour n'importe quoi» sounds a bit weird, but it definitely does not mean “Call me for B.S.!”, it's more like “call me for any thing/if anything!). In this context, «quoi que ce soit» is better. Another way to convey the message would be : Rappelez s'il y a autre chose! / Call back should you need anything else!
I know someone who went into a store in Israel to buy a towel (מגבת “magevet”), but instead he asked for עגבת “agevet”, which is syphilis.
Well did they give him what he asked for?
Oh my god. The joy this gave me.😂😂😂
Oy gevalt
The costumer is always right.. 😂
*Palestine 🇵🇸
In Lao, when you want to say "I am very tired" you would say "Khoy meuay laiy". Tones make all the difference. Because if you soften a 'k' here and shorten a the 'eu ' vowel you get "My penis has a lot of pubes" or "koi muay laiy". When I first moved here I learned that error very quickly.
If I squint I could almost imagine that being the slang phrase for it. I don't know if it exists in English, but in Danish it's common to refer to something making you tired or bored as "it gave me long balls/tits".
Surely this is on purpose to fuck with people
@@lolkhjort Doesn't "lange loeg" rather refer to something causing great irritation as opposed to something making one bored or tired?
When I was first learning Russian when I began dating my now wife, I tried to call her Моя прекрасная девушка (My wonderful girlfriend). I instead called her Моя прекрасная дедушка (My wonderful grandpa).
She still brings it up every now and then lmao.
Before I read your mistake I knew it's gonna be дедушка. XD They are so similar :D
I tripped on писать (pisat'), as in write. Ended up saying я писаю (ya pisayu - i piss)
Я пишу (ya pishu - i write) sounds like "io piscio" (i piss in italian). So confusing!
Thank you very much for mentioning the difficulty of learning grammar intuitively via flash cards. I had Italian lessons at university and our teacher was very focused on both pronunciation and especially learning full sentences, but very, VERY little syntax. (To be fair, I studied music and all the other students were opera singers, I was the only conductor... They had no interest in actually learning Italian, they needed good pronunciation...) I tried begging her for some help in that regard but ultimately gave up. I struggle a lot with speaking in front of other people if I'm not sure about syntax, so I stopped going to her lessons and winged the exam thanks to my knowledge regarding latin. Sadly, that was enough to pass... That was a true waste of time...
IMHO, another good way to tell whether you're dealing with a fraud or not is if they claim to speak all of their languages well, or at the same level. Fake polyglots will never admit that there's a language they've "learned" which they don't speak well. Real ones will often go out of their way to point out that they're not fluent in everything they've studied, and there's some languages they still don't speak well, because that's just a normal part of learning and using different languages different amounts.
i feel like that's us lowering our standards
i said in a separate comment but there's even some that describe their proficiency in each language in great detail, and show their -cramming- studying techniques, which is the good direction of transparency
yet, stating that it ain't really like that *if you asked them* still feels scummy, the people that want to look at your method are language-learners that already know there may be tricks involved
you put 'fluent' on the title of the videos that get dozillions of views, and the shorts that may get grossiliards of views definitely paint you as a speaker of the language more than as a learner
coming clean would be clear titles, stating you're at an early point of learning with these languages, maybe even mentioning whether you are ACTUALLY going to study them past this point
coming 10% clean feels somehow even more scummy because a stained shirt is obviously put in the wash, but this looks clean on the outside while still having the greater public believing the same thing
also now it's more scrolling than thumbnails and titles, but i remember 'i never stated i'm flluent, i just put in in my title and you know? algorithm title bait make a living food you see?'
no. a claim is a claim, and you wrote it on the most visible part of the video that can be edited afterwards. this is bleaching dirty clothes.
Absolutely.
At that point you're not a fake polyglot, you're a real not polyglot though. I can speak 3 languages (including native) proficiently, but I've studied so many other languages and would never in a million years claim to speak them because I'm so bad at them. I learned enough Japanese to be useful when I traveled to Japan, but I can't speak or understand anything at all. I only do a few nouns, modifiers and verbs here and there in poorly grammaticalized sentences.
@@matteo-ciaramitaroThen that’s not a polyglot. Knowing a few travel phrases is not being a polyglot. Also, there is language asymmetry.
@@gambitacio that's what I said. The person who started the thread said that a fake polyglot wouldn't say they are super weak in these languages, but my point is if you're super weak you wouldn't say you speak them at all, so they might be honest, but they're not polygots
(also I'm not saying I only knew a few travel phrases, I studied for months, as much as I could in preparation for the trip, but I just didn't acquire enough of the language to have real conversations. So obviously I would never claim to speak Japanese because I simply can't rn.)
I noticed all the jumpcuts with Xiaoma's videos. I noticed his latest video in Italy, he was having a conversation in Sicilian . His responses had nothing to do with what they were asking/telling him. He just rattles off his rehearsed lines about how he loves learning languages and loves Italian food. Also, I speak intermediate Spanish and notice he makes a lot of basic mistakes when speaking with Spanish people, and doesnt know simple words and mishears a lot of what they say. I assume its the same with most other languages he makes videos for. But my girlfriend is Chinese and says his Mandarin is native level. Its videos are still fun to watch. I dont see a problem with it.
ive watched some of his vids recently and from what I heard he does some brief preparation (like studying flashcards with common sentences/terms and having a few conversations) but ultimately does not learn the language fully. from what I understand, he only really learns common phrases and then builds off of what he knows. the exception is his understanding of chinese due to him living in beijing
And this is one key point I distrust this video. Xiao ma never claim to be a polygot, and when he soaks it was often in jest, and for fun, even at himself.
Yet this stupid OP youtuber claim that xiaoma is a "fake polygot"¿ LOL. And if he is so wrong in something so obvious, what side is he wrong in, this my distrust.
He's pretty open and honest about the fact he is only fluent in a few languages and only learns some words and phrases in many other languages. I don't consider it faking it if the person is upfront and I still find it impressive.
Xiaoma's titles can be a bit clickbaity, but I also find that the videos themselves are fairly honest. I really liked his video on an Ojibwe dialect, where he featured native speakers and used his platform to showcase what the tribe is doing to keep their language alive (and collect money to support them). It's pretty obvious if you watch the video that he can only say a few sentences, but he's willing to try. As far as I've seen, the only languages he claims to speak fluently are English, Mandarin, and Spanish.
Another Xiaoma defender here. Jones is lumping him in with fake polyglots when he's never claimed to be one, nor has he ever shilled a product and claimed you can be fluent in x weeks. The vast majority of his videos are very honest about his ability and he leaves the mistakes in. He doesn't even attempt to come off as fluent in anything but Chinese which he is very obviously fluent in. He does what every person learning a language SHOULD do. He learns a basic foundation and goes out into the world to learn more. And claiming Chinese people only compliment him to save face because a random with a camera came up to them is an egregious assumption to make about EVERY Chinese person lol. It really just makes it look like this TH-camr has a chip on his shoulder about Xiaoma's popularity when he just makes things up about him.
I minored in Arabic. Studied for five years. 20 years later I can still read and write (and diagram a mean sentence), but I am terrible at speaking and always was. When I was still studying, I had a Saudi conversation partner. Our meetings were primarily about improving his English, but he was very gracious and we usually spent the first 10-15 minutes practicing my Arabic. Before our meetings I would usually decide on a topic and then I’d take some time looking up a few words so I could rehearse talking about my day - just routine stuff. One day, after a particularly trying day at work I looked up a bunch of words that were related to frustration. When I met my friend, he asked me (in Arabic) how I was, and I replied using one of my new Arabic words. He froze and asked me (in English) what I had said. I repeated the Arabic word far more timidly and he said “No. In ENGLISH.” So I told him that I’d had a rough day and I was feeling cranky. He relaxed and started to move on with our English conversation, but I stopped him and asked what I had said. He hesitated but I insisted. He finally relented: I had announced to him that I was…ahem…a woman of loose virtue. Who could be bought.
Another time, in the middle of class, I inserted the wrong vowel when I was trying to say something to my professor. He corrected me, but then went on to add (in front of the whole class) that the way I had pronounced it was a vulgar slang word for male anatomy in the UAE and I needed to be mindful of that because I had visited Dubai.
English-to-Arabic dictionaries suck because they don’t mark which words are preferable (the order doesn’t help like with English dictionaries). I stick to reading and writing. Much safer that way!
That's too bad, but ultimately a good decision. Unless you are always speaking only a certain dialect, it might be hard to improve. I can read Arabic fairly well, and have basic proficiency in the Levantine dialect. But unless I'm going back to that part of the world, there's no point. I feel like Arabic is not the best language to know casually, but will get you very far if you must interact with those communities regularly.
I am married to a Russian woman, I realized that learning Russian is excruciatingly difficult. While I can read and write it well, no way for speaking. I sound like an American. I know enough to get myself into trouble, and not enough to get out.
I am Swiss but live in USA and i must have a Russian accent in English, because everyone keeps asking me if I am Russian. It's really amusing :D
I study Russian too, but only read and write since I have no opportunity to practice speech.
When I met my partners little sister I'd learnt some Swedish phrases to try to engratiate myself with her family, I nervously intended to ask this 5 year old girl "do you hear? (höra du?)" as she was being called from the other room, instead I said "hora du (you whore)"
10 years later I still feel my face turning pale remembering that
Not to take anything away from you it’s a funny moment but I wouldn’t be to embarrassed, things like that happen and also it’s structured so weird that I doubt a 5 year old would understand what you said ;)
to be fair you can do that really easily in english too
@@Podzhagitelwhen I was 5, I accidentally said “f you” to my mother. I was very confused why my mom was yelling at me for saying thank you.
HELP HAHAHAHHA
Just to say- it's "hör du?". "höra" is past tense and I think also whatever tense "to hear" is in.
In Arabic, I once confused the pronunciation of قص and كس، basically I said that I'm having a pain in the Vulva area, instead of the Sternum area.
I'm a male. Yeah
did you get your point across anyway?
@@lucienryk5343 probably, ق and ک, and س and ص are pretty close in pronunciation anyway
I was sitting with a driver outside Cairo practicing reading signs and I confused ق and ف reading the stop sign as فق. 😮 He was an English speaker quickly corrected me.
Yeah, س/ص and ك/ق and others are difficult to pick up on at the beginning. Not to mention when you start throwing in assimilation, like in words like أصدقاء where the ص sounds like a z vs a stronger s sound like its singular صديق.
Really makes transcription early in study difficult
Here's a tip and advice from a native speaker :
The ك in arabic is much more softer than ق.
If you look at the holy book of Islam, you can see that the letters over there are used multiple times it might be quite a struggle at first and ever so intimidating, but once you get the hang of it trust me there is no going back, if you familiarise yourself deeply with the letters you can easily get used to the differences.
I was helping a customer in Japanese here in America, and I was trying to ask someones bithday, but instead I kept asking if today was Saturday, she was confused.
Lol! the ol' 誕生日と同曜日. Gotta love it, a year and a half later and I would still expect to make a mistake like this
@@sinthrix1432 Ironically, you did make a mistake. Just a simple one, threw in an extra "u".
doyoubi - Saturday - 土曜日
douyoubi - same day of the week - 同曜日
日本語は難しいですよね？
@@calen3152 And so the cycle continues... -_-. I appreciate the correction!
You had me at אהא.
Seriously, though, excellent video. I've gotten tangled in the web of attention-span-depleting shorts, so this was a pleasant change. I look forward to seeing what else you've made!
Once, at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, I was struck by the immense size of the bell and accidentally asked how the bell didn't "blind" the bellringer. I had meant to say "deafen." The tour guide laughed hysterically. So embarrassing!
Why embarrassing?
If I was that guide I would have laughed too. Not at you, but at your unintentional play on words. And that's what the guide probably did.
You made a mistake a child would make, so it's even interesting.
@peirigill What are the two words in French you got wrong there?
@@Diotallevi73 Aveugler and assourdir would be my guess
@@aikya5684 Thanks a lot
i get that you felt embarassed, but i don´t think it IS embarassing to mess u p a language one is just learning. :)
Years ago I had a book on languages of the world and this book mentioned a couple of hyperpolyglots from the Victorian era capable of reading and writing more than fifty languages each. This book said that generally speaking a person is only capable of fluency in 20 languages at any one time and that when you know more than 20 it's like loading and unloading luggage from an ever whirling language carousel. The unused languages go into some kind of linguistic left luggage ready to pop up again when reloaded.
more like 7 languages max i think.
reading and writing (especially reading) is much easier than speaking though. i can comfortably read french if i have a dictionary to look up the odd word, but i am in no way fluent
Thanks for making this. Some of these fake polyglots drive me crazy. Laushu never pretended to be PERFECT in every language. He would say “I’m learning” or “I speak a little”. Their videos would be much more watchable with a little bit of humility added in.
I feel bad about Laoshu dying so young. I think he worked too hard learning his many languages.
Locals SHOCKED when I say "can I have this item" and "I need to learn this language" then spend the last 13 minute video speaking english.
I used to take students to Japan every year and they would often have the opportunity to introduce themselves in Japanese. One student intended to say his major was international relations - kokusai kankei 国際関係. Instead he broke the first word and said his major was ko kusai kankei 子臭い関係 - or relations with stinky children.
"子臭い関係" sounds like a tough major AHAHAHAHA
Nice 事故紹介
@@chrisff1989 I saw what you did there 笑笑
How are 国際関係 and 子臭い関係 pronounced differently?
@@DevilMaster unfortunate pause combined with pitch accent... 子•••臭い
In Bhutan my tour guide taught me how to say “Hello, I am Handsome” (or so I thought) and every time I Introduced myself the locals would giggle.
At the end of the week when I introduced myself to his friend she asked why do you introduce yourself like that?
Turns out he actually taught me to say
“Hello I am Long Nose.”
hahah
A friend from China once showed me how to say 我感冒了 (wǒ gǎnmàole; I am sick), but he trolled me and actually taught me 我干猫了 (wǒ gàn māole; I fucked the cat).
Thirty years ago I asked some Indian friends in California how to say something along the lines of "Hi how are you" but I found out after trying it with another Indian who laughed so hard he cried that they actually taught me how to say I did something unnatural with a banana.
🤣😂 brilliant. although, introducing yourself with 'I'm Handsome' would also be strange wouldn't it?
It could have been much worse!
This little anecdote is not exactly related, but a bit similar:
At a business dinner one night a German manager asked how to get the waiter's attention in English. He asked one of the disaffected English subcontractors, who without hesitation jokingly responded by saying, "Oi dickhead!" The German manager immediately turned and repeated the phrase to the waiter.
Needless to say, the waiter was NOT impressed!
In German class a friend asked me for an eraser, but they shortened it from "Radiergummi" to "Gummi". They actually asked me for a condom.
Seems likely this may just have been a translation of 'rubber', which is the British term for an eraser. It only means 'condom' in American slang.
The danger of accidentally saying condom is ever-present in any language. Whether they euphemise them as rubbers, preservatives or something else, the condoms are always lying in wait for the unwary foreign speaker.
To be fair, "Gummi" is slang and technically also a term for an eraser
@@poiz921and in the US it is the name of gelatin candy. Notably gummi bears and gummi worms, sometimes spelled gummy.
At one point Disney even made a Gummi Bears cartoon inspired by the candy. In the show they would drink gummi bear juice which would allow them to quickly bounce around like they were made of rubber.
Radiergummi is the correct full word but all through my school time we usually only said "Radierer" which just means "Eraser"
When I was studying abroad in Japan, my host mom and I were talking about what gifts I'd want at my wedding. I told her "tonkatsu" (fried pork cutlets) but meant "kotatsu" (a heated table with a heavy blanket). The pure confusion on her face until I realized my mistake...
I swear to God, i'm laughing Tears over here. 😂👌
Hogging the "conversation" is a tell I've seen, particularly, in that famous Dutch "polyglot". He asks a question to the person just so he can monologue away in the response, which wouldn't be a tell if it were not for the fact that he is just cycling the same script over and over. Makes me think of a child looking for validation when she learns something.
Won’t say his name but it rhymes with “Pouter?” 🙃
I kind of like him because he does not pretend to speak any of the languages he speaks well. Plus he has some sort of standard. Even when he can respond in a language he still gives the money because he doesn't think he speaks it well enough. He just goes for quantity over quality.
@@13tuyutiBro, he's just harassing tourists the whole time. There's no excuse for that.
@@markus-ks9sf i don't think the tourists mind being harassed.
You have a point but dont be mislead. He knows more than you give him credit for.
He speaks english, spanish,portuguese,french, italian, duch, and german well.
I doubt that he speaks the asian ones as well.
I love your videos Taylor. You’re witty and informative. If any bigger TH-camrs come after you, I have your back.
We still need to do a collaboration!
@@languagejonesYes, for sure. When you get a chance send me an email with some dates you’re free. We’ll make it work this time. 😊
this is a beautiful defensive pact. you both rock
@@languagejonescareful, she actually helped one of the scammers you were talking about, and even had a video with him on her channel. He ticked off all the red flags like making a course and was charging an extreme amount of money.
@@languagejoneshis name was MattvsJapan
Once a kid from my school who was on a school trip to Japan bumped into a stranger and he was trying to apologise but accidentally said "thank you for the nice meal". My Japanese teacher now tells every class about it
ごちそうさま instead of ごめんなさい?
My old Japanese teacher (fellow Aussie) told us a story about when she was a homestay student, she was talking to someone on the phone, and her host brother came in and she was like "This is honey! Honey! Don't tell!"
秘密 - Himitsu, secret
蜂蜜 - Hachimitsu, honey
My white American grandparents lived in Japan for 17 years, then came back with their family to the US via Europe. In Russia, my grandfather bumped into another man on the street, then turned and repeatedly bowed while saying "Спасибо! Спасибо! Спасибо!" (Spaciba - meaning "thank you"). My mother and her siblings laughed so hard and love to tell this story to this day.
calling out bullshit with solid logic. this is my jam