Every Polyglot Video on TH-cam where they meet other Polyglots: "Hey! My Name is [name], I learned [language] when I was in [place], I have many friends who are speaking [language]. Yes, I like speaking [language] very much. Do you also speak [language]?" - "Oh yes, I learned [language] when I was in [place], I like speaking [language] a lot!"
*changes language* "but can you speak [language]? I learned [language] when I was in [place] and I also like [language] a lot. Can you speak [language]? Do you like [language]?"
Yes, that's exactly what it is. Maybe they do that to get hits on their channel or to make themselves feel better. I don't know. But it's very disingenuous.
There's a certain TH-cam polyglot I saw speaking Spanish in a couple of videos. He was not actually saying what he wrote in the subtitles, not even close. He would say very basic things, sometimes even getting those things wrong, but then write something much more advanced in the subtitles. I'm left to assume he is probably doing that with other languages as well, and mostly trusting people won't pick up on it.
@@AlvarM Yes. Name and shame. I'm tired of the fake polyglots out there making it look so easy and using tricks to make tons of money off innocent viewers.
Most "polyglots" get to a certain level of proficiency in a language and then real progress slows down at the higher levels so they switch to another language and call themselves a polyglot. Largely they are a bunch of frauds because it takes a lifetime really to learn 2 or possibly 3 languages well. I'm a C2 tested Spanish speaker and still I'm learning new things all the time and I use the language on a daily basis. These polyglots so-called attain a certain level of proficiency but rarely if ever really know more than 1 or 2 languages even close to the level of a native speaker. I have yet to see a true case of someone speaking more than 3 languages fluently at near native fluency. Better to focus on one or 2 and really learn it.
@@AlvarMYeah. I think he claims to know 29 languages. Once I saw him speaking Hindi which is my first language and it was looking like he doesn't know even basics and just memorised what he's saying because he was making many errors in every sentence. But if someone like him comes across me and I don't know who he actually is, I'd be very appreciative of him for trying to speak my language and that's where people fall for guys like these.
LOL! I speak Ukrainian but everyone thinks I'm speaking Russian. Of course, I lived in an eastern city in Ukraine so I'm sure I know more Russian than I'm aware of.
@@rakhatthenut3815depends on the criterion of similarity, to be honest. But as for mutual comprehension, yes: I am a native Russian speaker, and my ability to comprehend other Slavic languages (especially Ukrainian and Belarusian) became tolerable only when I learned Polish on more or less acceptable level.
To me (French-speaking), Portuguese looks more like Polish, as far as nasal sounds are concerned, because both have nasal diphthongs while the French nasal sounds are not diphthongs; quite a difference to my ears ;-)
The only language I have studied quite a lot and read a lot is Spanish. When I check these ''polyglot speaks 15 languages'' I normally go to the part where they speak Spanish and find that not only is it very basic, but they make a lot of mistakes that people generally stop once they leave absolute beginner level. The trick is simply that when you meet a new person the conversation is almost always exactly the same, so if you just learn how to follow those rails in that initial-type conversation, you could easily pretend to speak ten languages.
Woooo tu aprendiste español interesante me gustaría saber el porqué I've been studying English during 1 Year am here... I think that had to do it because it's a important language from the planet perhaps the most...y es verdad yo quiero profundizar mucho más en mí segunda lengua ya sabes cultura su historia su gente etc when I pretended to learn another language i mean Italian I got that I must focus on my second one first la verdad la vida en colombia es una esclavitud pero como amo aprender saco tiempo para estudiar y practicar con migo mismo inglés... that's all....see ya
Yep. There’s one whose name I won’t mention, has “conversations” with random people on the street in different languages. I listened to his “Greek” - he said something like “Hi how are you? I like Greek foods. Souvlaki.” 🤨
I can relate, he estado aprendiendo español por algún tiempo sola. So I've been coming across many polyglots and like you i like to skip to their Spanish. I also noticed that what they say is usually something "generically general". They are also aware that most foreigner will appreciate or be surprised when you know a few lines in their language.
The hyperpolyglot interactions always remind me of the Kids in the Hall sketch "I Speak No English," where the clerk speaks to the customer in perfect English: "I've learned this sentence phonetically, but I know nothing of its syntax or grammar. I assure you, I speak no English."
I remember Family Guy did a similar bit where the guy literally only knew how to answer that on specific question and a short speech explaining that it's the only thing he knows how to speak in English.
I wish I'd gone that far when I went to Russia over a decade ago, but all I memorized was "nee penemayou parouskye" (approximately), meaning "I don't understand Russian". Was never an impediment in street markets - the merchant would respond with something like "English? Deutsch?", I'd say "English", and they'd describe their wares in pretty good English.
In college, when I was waiting at O'Hare airport for my flight to a summer archaeological program in Israel, I tried to use my time at the gate to study from my newly purchased Hebrew phrase book. I quickly realized that if I got good at reciting the phrases listed in it, I would only succeed in tricking people into responding to me in a language I still would not understand. I looked up the sentence, "I speak only a little Hebrew. I speak English," then used a few other sentences to figure out how to change it to "I do not speak Hebrew. Do you speak English?" Had that memorized in five minutes, and it served me better than the whole phrase book would have.
@@trishoconnor2169 what's the point though? You could literally say that in English because the people who can speak English also understand it, and the rest won't be of any help. I guess one benefit is that it serves as an icebreaker and shows some respect by making an effort to learn that one phrase, but from a utilitarian point of view, it does nothing.
I recommend the film "Persian Lessons" about a Jewish young man in a concentration camp who pretends to know Persian. A German officer takes him as his language tutor. The plot has a great script, both suspenceful and cleverly entertaining.
Number 9, I spent a summer in US in a Russian immigrant bungalow colony. My spouse is a native Russian speaker. Any attempt of mine to speak Russian in the colony, was always answered in English, by the colony members. If I tried it in our bungalow , I was told (most likely correctly) that my Russian was terrible. If I tried speaking Russian to our 18 month old child, the child would burst out laughing. I think the child gave me the most accurate review.
Well, it's very hard to listen to English accent for long tbh, but I can advise you next time to start with asking people if they wish to help you with your skills, cause if you don't they may assume you find it too hard to speak in their language and they want to spare you that "torture". The video author would pass as a Russian in an American movie as they always speak that way, lol. P.S. Many "colonies" who migrated long enough have language that is quite different from the modern one.
Fuck all those people. Watch Bald and Bankrupt. My guy has the strongest English accent and doesn't much care for grammar, but has wonderful conversations with people regardless!!! Don't be discouraged by mean babies and silly bungalow dwelling Ruskis. I would be glad if someone took the time to learn my language even if the grammar or fluency wasn't top notch!
I didn't have a French person tell me I was speaking horribly, but they did switch to English right after I said bonjour. Then again, I can't blame them. Working at a gas station in Quebec, on the border of Ontario, I'm sure they hear all sorts of anglophones butchering their language. It still made me appreciate the folks in Mexico who appreciate you trying to speak Spanish and will even help you out.
The Quebec border has lots of English. I studied French in uni and went to rural France where they also switched to English after my greeting. 😂 in Tulum they thought I was fluent in Spanish even though I know ten words. Guy stopped talking about his bribe to a cop and pointed to me saying I speak Spanish.
@@BonMooney Except that by the same measure you can also claim that Parisians butcher the French language, since neither group speaks it how it used to be spoken before Quebec was colonized but they give the impression that Quebecois started as modern Parisian and then degraded.
Yeah, it’s a nice thing about speaking Spanish as a second language that Mexicans and other Spanish speakers will try to help you. ❤ I found the same thing in Italy when I visited Rome. People were really nice about trying to help me when I tried out the elementary stuff.
I will respect the channel’s desire not to name and shame TH-camrs who at best exaggerate their polyglot capabilities. But I can say that he’s spot on about what they do. I frequent an Indian restaurant that a well known Polyglot TH-camr visited after claiming to learn the regional Indian language in a few hours. The owner was surprised and happy to see a white American speaking our language. However the TH-camr made a lot of mistakes and asked the staff to translate when he couldn’t understand, and asked them how to say things. The video clip apparently edited all that out and just made it look like he was much more proficient in the language then he really was.
That's 100% how I expect all of those videos to be in reality. Honestly it's sad. Because I'm sure said youtuber (and I'm sure I know which one you're talking about) could legitimately learn the language, but they push this lie that they can do it in hours when that's just not how that works.
@@RingsOfSolace I figured that anyone who'd watch this video and then read the comments would have a pretty good idea of whom I was referring to. To be fair the owner of said restaurant was happy to have someone make a video in his restaurant and to hear a foreigner trying to speak our language. But again the idea that he learned the language at all, let alone in a few hours, is a joke at best and probably closer to a scam. There's a reason why he never does any live videos with speakers of the native American, Indian and African languages he claimed to learn so quickly.
Haha. I think I also know of said TH-camr. In his defence (if you could call it that), he was inspired to learn from another TH-camr who died recently and I think he's taken it upon himself to continue in his footsteps. I'm okay with him giving it a shot. Hopefully he becomes more proficient.
This is why I enjoy the more honest variety, who leaves in the part where the locals correct his grammar, teach him new words, etc. that is so much more wholesome
Richard Fenyman told a story in his autobiography about a time he went to Brazil as ... I think it was basically a guest lecturer for a semester? So he spent some time trying to learn to speak (Brazilian) Portuguese even though he was told he could lecture in English because he figured the students would learn better if they weren't trying to learn and translate at the same time. He was later on an airplane with a Portuguese couple and was talking to them and they were amazed that he spoke even a little bit of Portuguese, so he started to explain how/why he knew it, and realized partway into a sentence that he'd forgotten how to say "so" in Portuguese. However, he also realized that, when there's an English word derived from Latin, the Romance languages will quite frequently have a close cognate, so he thought "consequently = consequentemente" and used that. Which impressed them even more that he knew such long words.
Genius. One of my favorite people ever. I love that his interests were so broad and varied. He just seemed to have been engaged with life, whether that was playing the bongos or doing physics.
Brilliant! Finally someone talked about these things! I see “polyglots” speaking Spanish TERRIBLY with so much confidence. It’s insane. And my own audience is often really good at English, but they just don’t have the confidence when they speak. Confidence is so powerful.
And Spanish is one of the languages they tend to know better too due to its popularity. When I see them pretend to speak German or Turkish (my two best languages) they're unintelligible.
my family is 🇩🇴 & 🇵🇷 and language learners and non-caribbean latinos who are from the US have told me my spanish is wrong or that i’m saying things “incorrect” referring to my grammar and phrase usage. most people don’t understand that there’s more to spanish than just spaniard and mexican spanish lol i find that most learners who are as fluent as possible in the mexican dialect are even unfamiliar with caribbean spanish and will correct learners who are learning a dialect like, for example, puerto rico.
Languages aren't sacred entities... You just can master a language when you practice it. What's the problem if people speak a foreign language terribly? Better than be a proud monolingual "because my language is better than the others!".
@@vervideosgiros1156 there's no problem with speaking a language terribly. The problem is, when they try to trick you into thinking they are great at it for clicks
I've been learning a new language intensively for a year and a half, practising every day, and I honestly feel like those videos where people "sneezed and suddenly became fluent in a new language" are making light of the time and effort it actually takes.
I think it's somewhat possible to pick up a language quickly, but it was probably preceded by a lot of unconscious practice. When I started studying Japanese I would often just 'know' the meaning of words even though it was my first time studying it. I didn't even know that I knew them, but I have watched a lot of anime over the years. Some of it has clearly rubbed off, because when it came to writing, my ability to memorize things was significantly worse. But when I say quickly, I'm still talking months and years.
@@Aerroonit's easy to learn similar languages, like German and English, for me as Russian speaker it is hard to learn English, and much more easier to learn Polish.
@@overgrownkudzu This is what a lot of people from English-speaking countries like the US and Australia think "learning a language" amounts to because their schooling gives them this impression. I've met so many people who told me they "studied German" at high school and it turned out they could say "Guten Tag" but had forgotten "Auf Wiedersehen" already.
As a blunt and rude Russian I will say it bluntly and rudely: your Russian is very good! The American accent is very strong of course, but there are no mistakes. The switch from the formal "you" to the informal "you" is a little surprising but I can assume that you have created a strong bond with the other person during the short dialogue. 🤣
Honestly though, it fits *very* well with the role of someone who can't actually speak russian and simply memorized stock phrases without understanding what they mean haha
@@floppyearfriend You are right. Recently I have watched a video in which Ikenna talks to his girlfriend in a bunch of languages. When he speaks in Russian, the phrases with one or two words are ok, but when he tries to say a three word sentence, he makes a mistake.
I am learning Russian but as a Czech I dont have much trouble with it. Only I thought I would be able to watch movies and understand pretty much everything right away but there are surprisingly many more different words than I expected. The basic words are generally the same but I will likely need another 6 months to learn enough new words to watch a movie without stopping every 5 seconds and looking into a dictionary what half of the words in a sentence mean. Moreover sometimes you pronounce words bit differently than how they are written which is uncommon in czech language. Like пожалуйста where you cant really hear уй.
I speak native Russian, C2 (native-like proficiency) English, C1 (advanced) Spanish and Turkish, B1 Portuguese and Learning Japanese and Ukrainian. And it took me 15 years to be able to switch between 4 languages in a natural way and hold a profound conversation. Like when you can talk to natives for hours. I know the eye are people out there who are better and faster learners and speakers than me but I still think 4 languages at that level is a great achievement :)
It absolutely is! Having small talk is nice but it feels so rewarding to really connect with people in other languages and have actual conversations. To me speaking about opinions or telling longer anecdotes/stories is the hardest.
It is. When someone claims to know more than 6 languages, I wonder what level of proficiency they count as "knowing" a language. Anything more than ten, I think they're lying. I say this because I've actually studied a few languages and know what a huge, intractable undertaking each one is.
@@loisavci3382agreed. i knew a girl in the past who claimed to know ten languages. these included some of the hardest languages, such as chinese and thai. i speak mandarin fluently so i would try to ask her to speak mandarin but she always avoided demonstrating any sort of ability in any of the ten languages she claimed to know. needless to say, she most likely did not know ten languages lol.
@@loisavci3382 I agree how one determines language competency, which is quite often exaggerated with bilinguals (those not raised by parents fluent in a different language than their residency), who than actual polyglots. However, you cannot compare your perceived difficulties with others having similar problems.
Very interesting because I follow a European polyglot here who claims to speak a lot of languages and he IS good at identifying them. I've watched dozens of his videos and it struck me that he always uses the same phrases with people in their language. "I like [country] very much, I like the food especially. I like to make new friends. It's fun to meet new people." And when they invariably ask him how he can speak [language], he says, "I speak [language] because I have a friend here who speaks it." It's always the same phrases. But he never gets into a real discussion with them (unlike a couple of others I follow here, who can tackle any subject and respond intelligently). You've given me a lot to think about.
@@pjperdue1293 I knew it. As soon as you said European polyglot I knew it was him. When I first discovered that guy, I was impressed and fascinated by him. Then when I heard him said that he speaks 29 languages, I was like "Stop your BS". That's when I found one of his video where he interviews random people and give them prizes if they speak a language that he doesn't speak. In that video he stumbled upon a French lady, I was very excited to hear him speak French because 1) French is one of my 2 native languages and 2) I saw him in another video listing French as one the languages that he speaks. The French girl told him " I'm enjoying my summer here, I usually come to Amsterdam every year" and that guy replied " I love French people, the cheese in Paris is very delicious, I visited the Eiffel Tower a year ago", I was like wtf... What does that has to do with anything she said ?? Why isn't he asking her what she usually does in Amsterdam and keep the conversation going ??? That's when I realised that he actually can't hold a general conversation in French. It looks like he just memorised a few words/sentences and be using them everytime he want to show that he speaks French. I saw a similar comment from an Italian who said the exact same thing. Apparently the guy was butchering a bunch of random sentences in Italian. Like you said, he's good at identifying languages but doesn't speak 90% of the languages he claim to speak. I actually wonder how many languages does he actually speak.... I genuinely can't stand these fake polyglot.
@@lawtraf8008 exactly. I liked him at first as well but as I watched more videos it was clear from the subtitles that he just repeats the same phrases over and over. I know a bit of French and Spanish, I definitely wouldn't list them as languages I actually speak but when I saw him speaking those, even I could tell he's pretty bad at them.
@@Starkiller935 We're the same. I don't claim to speak a language if I can't actually understand everything and hold a conversation. I speak 3 languages fluently: Comorian (native language of the island where I'm from), French ( second official language of my country) and then English ( I'm 21, I learned and started speaking English 3 years ago when I moved to an English speaking country to study). Those are the 3 languages that I claim to speak when someone asks me because I actually do speak them. I started learning Spanish recently and I would say I'm doing quite well and can understand and converse quiet a bit but still wouldn't claim that I speak Spanish. The funny thing is that my spanish is atleast 5 times better that the French he claim to speak. Btw, where are you from and how many languages do you speak ?
My husband trained as an interpreter nearly fifty years ago although he ended up in a completely different profession. His French, although without a trace of an English accent, is now quite ropey because he rarely gets a chance to speak it. The language he knew least well (Latin American Spanish) is now exceptional because there's a Latino community in London and he uses it often. Immersion in a language is the best way and use it or lose it is totally true.
I could not t agree more on your comment of "do not pick Hungarian with all the cases". A bilingual (English - German) guest specialist at my work place once proudly announced that he cracked the code of Hungarian language by studying the menu in the cafeteria and catefully analyzing the elevator security tab for 2 weeks. He explained us what he made of the endings and the sentence structure. None of them were correct or even slightly close to what was really happening. He then made up his mind to impress the cafeteria lady by asking for milk for his coffee in Hungarian. He said it was a great thing thst cow and milk starts with the same two letters in Hungarian so it would be easy to remember. Well, it was easy to mix up so he asked for a coffee with a cow (sometimes with THE cow when he accidentally used a definitive article). The cafeteria lady acted like nothing happened, did not bat an eyelid and gave him milk and he was so happy.
@@arawilson i guess its the paper brief talking about how you must not use elevator in fire, not allow children alone, call help if gets stuck and all of that stuff
I've noticed this many years ago, when polyglot videos started coming up. I'm fluent in 4 languages, and it really bothered/frustrated me that some "polyglots" who obviously do not know how to speak the language pretends to speak it. I wrote a comment on one of those videos and was downvoted into oblivion for calling them out. So, thank you very much for making this video and exposing the truth of these languages grifters.
Yeah, the worse is that the audiences are usually simping them very strongly and prasing those fakers into heavens for nothing and if you not do that then they will bite down your head.
I am highly proficient in 4 languages and still find myself learning after many decades - and that includes my native tongue! Still, I am slow so I am quite impressed with folks who master basic vocab, grammar patterns and passable accents in days or weeks.
@@ghmj2607 I know there was. I've been on TH-cam for many years. It's just that there's been no such thing since Google+ wormed its way into TH-cam, which was in 2013. To think you'd still remember something like that after a decade. Just wow.
As someone who was born and raised in Portugal, "You might as well speak Portuguese, which is Spanish spoken in French" made me laugh. What a simple and effective way to describe it. 😂
Your French person saying it is terrible was funny to me. French is my first language from my mother and father. I went and lived in Japan for four years to translate Japanese and English for the military. When I came home, I answered my mother in French... with a Japanese accent. 😆🤦 She smacked me. In public. Yelled at me in French to just speak my horrible English and not butcher her language. I was careful for the rest of my 2 weeks visit at home before returning to Japan. 🤣
I've noticed that some of these youtubers sometimes use a kind of fake stutter, where they repeat a few words over and over whilst they are thinking of the next part of the sentence, to make it look like they are more fluent than they are, because if you don't understand what they're saying, you just hear them talking fast!
Finally someone says this. I lived in Shanghai for 7 years, so whenever I see TH-camrs speak Chinese and get a typical “wow you speak so well” responses, it’s underwhelming to me. And listening further, the accent sounds exactly like a typical American speaking Chinese with a heavy accent. And you hit it on the head, a lot of the phrases I hear are the exact same. It’s doing the most basic things for a shock.
I agree. You can't be fluent without being immersed in the language and I don't see how you can be immersed in a few languages in a short amount of time
@@anpleidhceeireannach9498 I don’t know if it’s the same guy but I do remember someone who was married to a shanghainese and I think he might have been from Germany. He used to do comedy skits
@@anpleidhceeireannach9498 Funny you mention Shanghainese.. l lived in Singapore and studied Mandarin… Then, later lived in Hong Kong, married a woman who was born there, but whose parents were from Shanghai and spoke Shanghainese… I tried to learn Cantonese, it my mother in law would mix her Shanghainese in with Cantonese… Not to mention, I would forget words in Cantonese so would use, or be more comfortable with pronouncing, Mandarin words… So now, when speaking Cantonese, I still wind up mixing without realizing some words are Mandarin (or even Shanghainese)… Kind of made me want to give up on continuing to learn more…
Yes I was wondering why youtubers love to make this "white guy speak Chinese in Chinatown" video but I would rarely see similar content for other major language like Russian or Arabic that's also considered hard to Westerners. Turns out it's because Chinese typically react very generously to other people making an attempt to speak their language. The same applies to the Japanese who also tend to give very generous feedback, but more white people have actually learnt Japanese so it's harder to fake to the youtube audience.
Dad would try to learn "please" "thank you" and 1-10 in as many languages as possible. It really doesn't take a huge vocabulary to impress people that you're trying to relate to them and that their English is better than your second language. Dad's favorite trick was "do you mind if I listen?". Made people unsure if they could get away with saying things in front of him.
Real polyglots can be easily identified by how much depth they go into. For example, a fake polyglot in Chinese would probably only do videos where they go to a supermarket in Flushing and talk with strangers. A real polyglot in Chinese does comedy skits, talk about some specialty subject... basically the same stuff you'd expect a TH-camr to do if everything was in English.
Loic Suberville comes close to that. He makes comedy skits in English, French, and Spanish. Sometimes all three in the same video. He can have long conversations in those languages, too. But being a polyglot means knowing four or more languages fluently so you would call him trilingual which is still impressive.
Think it also depends on their channel and the videos they like to make and people like to see. If a certain niche is your calling cars and you have millions of subs , why change ? Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. I enjoy seeing polyglots of all abilities be brave and talk to strangers. I find it scary to try to practice my Spanish even in my Uber or to a co worker. I am far from fluent but I know enough to get by and much much more than someone who hasn’t studied Spanish or done hundreds of hours of lessons
@@AZ-ty7ub Dogen is brilliant and I love him and his content, but it feels weird to bring him up in a discussion about polyglots. To my knowledge he only speaks 2 languages. His overall phonetic prowess is obviously stunning so the word "only" is also weird here, but I think linguist or somesuch would be a more fitting title as to me Polyglot is at MINIMUM 3 languages and I'd usually expect 4-5+, while hyperpolyglot is nothing more than exaggeration unless you can at least *claim* to have some level of ability in 7+ languages or smth.
I’m so glad someone made this video. Thank you. I’ve been studying mandarin for over 10 years and I’ve been doing it without any formal classes. It’s been a slog. And you are right, my family is Dutch and that language is technically much easier to speak but the Dutch are a lot harder to please than the Chinese. And so thanks to the wonderful kindness of all the poor people who have suffered through conversations with me, I have persisted. For better or worse. But it’s really something else to see how many TH-camrs have mastered mandarin in 6 months. And I’m still over here trying to ask the shop keeper where they keep the honey but I keep asking her where they keep their bees. And you’re telling me you learned to read in 6 months? Really? Reaaaallly? Those people definitely exist because I’ve met them, but those people are beautiful freaks of nature but they know they are special. They aren’t out their telling everyone “you can achieve the same thing my elite athlete brain can do… if you just study more and do some productivity hacks”
It’s not really how many years you’ve been learning that matters. It’s how many HOURS of learning you’ve put in, and what kind of learning and how focused you were while learning. Will Hart (on TH-cam) reached a level that could pass as a native Chinese speaker in just two years, but he put a lot of time and effort into it, and had lots of Chinese friends who were willing to speak with him in Chinese and correct his mistakes. I’ve been learning for about 6 years, and have reached a decent conversational level. My wife and I pretty much only talk in Chinese, so it’s good enough to talk about day to day stuff. But I barely put any effort into it after the first couple years. Now I just learn new words passively while listening or reading or looking up words in Pleco, and that’s it. Of course, it’s true that some people are smarter than others, better at languages than others, have better methods for learning, and/or a better environment. But for the most part, the most important factors are simply the amount of input and output, that is, the amount of focused time spent on reading, writing, listening and speaking. Ideally, the input should be comprehensible and the output should be corrected when mistakes are made. And you have to use it consistently. If you are doing alright, and then you don’t speak Chinese for a couple months, you might have forgotten some of what you learned. If you’ve been learning for ten years and still mix up basic vocabulary words, I would guess that you probably were either not focused in your learning, not consistent, haven’t had the ideal environment, or haven’t been using the best methods.
@@artugert It's not unusual for people to learn japanese in around 2 years, but they had to read many books, and listen to it from morning to night everyday. Most people will never do that so they don't know what's truly possible.
Argh -- I am one of those kids who came to the northeastern US from China as a toddler and promptly forgot all her Chinese. I was visiting some family around 2010 -- we met at a fairly international Hainan resort -- and I wanted some maple syrup with the pancakes and waffles they were serving. I'm sure there's a way to say 'maple syrup', but at the time, 'feng tang' was only getting me 'honey' from the waiter. (not 'oh honey' either).
@@life_is_the_proof_of_god lmaoo i only realized op was mixing up 'honey' and 'bees' after i read your comment. for some reason i misread the original comment and thought they were mixing up *money* and 'bees'. i was so confused trying to figure out an expression for 'money' that even came close to sounding like 蜜蜂 lol.
Is it really that the Dutch are harder to please? I'd argue their English is on average just so good that they'd rather have a smoother conversation for both participants by switching to it
Pretty good video, you're spot on. Also, the more languages a faker pretends to speak, the less likely a single person will expose all of them. For example, if I claim to speak only a handful of languages, I might meet someone who can properly assess my level of fluency in all of them, and expose me. If, however, I claim to speak like two dozen languages, not a single person in the world can assess my level in all of them. I've seen some of Wouter Corduwener's videos, who pretends to speak 29 languages, and people regularly comment: "Being an X-speaker I can tell his X is very bad, but it's still impressive he speaks so many other languages."
I can sorak English, Portuguese anf French, and some Italian and Spanish, as well as having a good oassive knowledge of Catalan. He seems a bit limited in all of them, as far as I know. His Portugyese accent is very bad, but he doesn't claim proficiency in all of those languages.
That guy exposed himself in his own video speaking with a genuine polyglot who wanted to talk about his experiences studying languages and their respective literatures
I can relate with point 9. I speak both Dutch and Japanese, and the response to non-native speakers is very different in both cultures. Dutch people will often switch to English on the first hint of you making a mistake, whilst most Japanese people will almost always respond with "日本語上手" (your Japanese is great) even if the only thing you did was say one Japanese word really badly.
I think it's also because: -most japanese can't speak english well so they won't switch to it -most japanese won't assume you can speak english well unless they know you're from english speaking country -most japanese are flattered by people speaking their language at all as it's very hard same here in poland. when I see a foreigner trying to speak polish, I'd compliment them for effort.
@@wilhelmu Well yea, I'm already aware of all of this; it's exactly the point that that was being made in the video. Different cultures exist within different circumstances, and these generally affect people's response to non-native speakers. I was simply adding my own related anecdote.
@@wilhelmu Most Japanese don't have many opportunities to practice speaking in school. I saw the same sort of thing in China where reading and writing English is mandatory to pass their school and get into college, but listening and speaking are barely covered. There probably are other cultural differences that lead to it, but that's a big one. Nobody gets comfortable speaking a language without conversing, and if they do get comfortable, it's usually not quality language use.
How was it learning Japanese vs learning Dutch? I spent 6 years studying Spanish in school, but just from playing several Japanese video games and watching various anime I feel like it's much easier for me to actually listen to the language and process each word for Japanese than Spanish. I can even kind of tell how simple or complex Japanese translation for a show/game is and notice for some words where the direct translation isn't used to make it fit the context better. I've been watching One Piece lately and it's so interesting as I understand so much of it whereas while watching Hunter X Hunter I didn't get nearly as much.
@@HairyJuan japanese is super easy to learn to speak and understand, it's the writing that is hard. if you want a recommendation for anime that has simple language for beginner, watch Precure. If that floats your boat, of course.
My cousin is a polyglot, although I'm not sure if she would fit the definition of a hyperpolyglot. She speaks, reads and writes German, Polish, Russian, Greek, and Khmer fluently. She also has a basic reading and conversational level of Hebrew, Spanish, Portugese and Italian. The thing is though you wouldn't know she was a polyglot unless you asked, or unless you were a family member who knew her well enough to know how many languages she spoke. She doesn't go around waving her language proficiency in people's faces, she's not on TH-cam trying to sell courses, she just happens to a) be able to learn new languages fairly easily and b) loves to travel and engage with different cultures. I am always highly suspicious of people making claims like being a hyperglot when they are either doing it to make money off people, or doing it for views and attention. This was good information you presented here.
Thats amazing. I speak Khmer by mother tongue. Also Russian by mother tongue, but im learning German has a hobby. These languages are so different in structure and tone, to speak them all fluently is no easy feat! Shes amazing!
@@RogerRamos1993 Making money off a talent is not bad. What is bad is cutting corners and speedrunning a discipline for the end goal of making money. You can fake having philosophical knowledge or going to the gym for clout and attract the ire of those communities as well.
Actually, using fillers to stall while you try to figure out how to phrase your response is super useful when you learn a language. For example, I really used a lot of "it's like... you know", "you know what I mean", and "you know what I'm saying" as I was learning English. It made me feel more confident when having conversations.
I think the obvious thing is that even though fillers are very useful, both for getting more time to think and to be relatable to native speakers, that fillers are just that--fillers. It can't be the only thing you know. It's like how people complain their meat is full of "fillers" rather than real meat. You need to be interested in having a genuine conversation with the other person. You must have something to say of substance. Wait long enough and people will surely pick up on it. Fillers in and of themselves are not bad.
THIS, YES! I've studied Chinese as a hobby for years and I was very aware that I never got much more than getting by, but never fully able to hold a very consistent conversation. Strangers and friends would say "Oh wow, you were speaking Mandarin, you sounded so proficient", but once you always use the same conversation patterns, it'll get very easy to repeat the same "mind script". So I never dared to say that I could really speak a language if I couldn't hold a fluid conversation in it.
You can always say that you are beginner or intermediate (depending on your self assessment). You can always, "Oh I really suck at vocabulary, they are my weak points" stuffs like that.
I was exactly the same for years, you have to force yourself to go out of your comfort zone, like choose random topics with an italki teacher, consume a variety of content in Chinese and constantly note down words you're not familiar with. After sometime of doing this I really can say I can speak the language outside of very specialised or complicated topics. It just takes time, 加油！
There’s nothing wrong to start out that way. All language learning begins somewhere. It’s when you have a reason to speak to people in that language, like being in sales, acting as a translator, or marrying someone that speaks that language is when you become fluent. Otherwise, it’s really hard to get passed basic level.
@@jshurt1814 More deep interaction = more learning opportunity. Also, the more the necessity, the more it forces you to learn. If you can get away with broken language, you are likely to progress slowly rather than speeding up.
I refuse to claim that I really speak Spanish, but I'm also the only person at work who speaks ANY Spanish so... catch me asking the patient if she needs a refill on her "medicine for the sads" because I don't know how to say "antidepressants" 😂 I'm genuinely not even close to fluent but I speak well enough to get by in a casual conversation or short interaction and my accent is so on point that I definitely COULD trick people into thinking I'm fluent.
Oh my god, it’s the worst being the person with the most knowledge about a language when that knowledge isn’t fluent lol I learned a little bit of Italian as a kid (emphasis on a little) due to living there briefly. Moved to Texas where there was a kid that only spoke Spanish in one of my classes. The teacher asked me if I learned Italian, and I said yes. So then they told me to be this students partner for the class and translate things since Italian and Spanish are so similar. I was 7 or 8 lmao. I’d learned simple phrases, counting, letters, colors, animals, stuff like that. I was able to communicate one sentence lmao. So glad ways to translate in real time are a thing now
Next time, if you're trying to say a word that sounds like it might come from Latin (long word and related to medicine are two strong signs), then just wing it and say it in a Spanish-sounding way: "antidepresantes" or something like that. It's actually "antidepresivos" but you would have been understood no problem.
#9 is so true. I was told multiple times in Moscow to speak English when I mispronounced Russian words. I learned a rather old form of Russian with a weird accent from my great-grandparents who immigrated from western Russia but were born in Belarus, and then tried to learn both Belarusian and Russian at various times, mainly from watching TH-cam videos. Russians were not impressed and let me know very quickly. I've been trying to do genealogical research in Russia and Belarus (probably won't be able to continue that for a very long time now) so reading old records including some written in cursive has been my main goal. So, I couldn't care less about being conversational, but in small towns where few speak English, having some ability to communicate is important.
Oh, the Cyrillic cursive is something else. Lots of people have beautifully regular handwriting shapes that make it extra hard to, you know, tell different letters apart. Plus genealogy means looking at church registers and stuff, where the titles and headings are in Church Slavic. That's always fun. On the ground there's something of a language continuum between western Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and southern Russian. The grammars, vocabularies, and pronunciations get mixed and matched. This way of speaking takes a lot of guff for not being one of the standard languages, but lots of people do it, probably including your great-grandparents. You might be able to find the shortest path from what you know now to a pretty consistent and widely understandable speech by steeping yourself in Russian-language audio from cities in that area. (City residents tend to speak Russian, even in Minsk and Kyiv, where the surrounding countrysides speak Belarusian and Ukrainian.) Or you could say to heck with all national standards anyway and learn Medžuslovjansky jezyk / Interslavic :)
Guys, thank you both for your efforts in learning languages of this part of the World. Sorry that Russians are so harsh with their critics. I know it can be really tough for a person from Europe or North America.
@@eritain Personally, I quite enjoyed learning to write Cyrillic cursive. It's not so bad once you accept the unusual quirk that it's a write-only script. ;)
Well, Moscow is noticeably different culture to the rest of Russia (and even more so compared to Belarus, even if we share same language and are of the same USSR origin). They are significantly more xenophobic and gatekeeping in many aspects. Sometimes it gets as stupid as breaking ties with their own family because if they not live in Moscow they are inherently worse people, lol. A lot more people would be genuinely impressed if a foreigner speaks any Russian at all (even though English native pronunciation sounds funny af), because we are taught everywhere that Russian is the_most_complicated_language_to_ever_exist. Cheers from Minsk :)
This is so on point. I studied Thai language at the School of Oriental and African Studies and subsequently worked as a interpreter for the International Red Cross about a decade ago. Thai is one of those languages that is often used by "Polyglots" to illustrate their fluency and they are without fail going for the first trick whilst butchering the pronounciation. I just know that all the other interpreters that I have got to know that speak these more obscure languages such as Pashtun, Farsi or Thai like I did, have been embedded ( and I am using the term embedded loosly when speaking about Thailand 😂 ) for many years ( 4-6 years ) and put in countless hours and lifetime. The effort it takes is truely mindboggling. There is just no way one can be "fluent" in one year in anything other than Portuguese, Italian or Spanish and even that demands every fiber of your being. I think there are so many points worth mentioning when it comes to fluency as well which would deserve their own video.
2:28 Number 1 - Memorize the basics 3:53 Number 2 - Railroad 4:47 Number 3 - Learn to stall 5:52 Number 4 - Sister languages 7:20 Number 5 - Go easy or go home 7:52 Number 6 - Obscure through obscurity 8:28 Number 7 - Edit deceptively 8:40 Number 8 - Use stereotypes! 9:16 Number 9 - Social engineering 10:00 Number 10 - Shadowing gone wrong
I speak several languages fluently and have the degrees to prove it. I've not encountered anyone who is not in fact at least functional in their claimed target language. Some people DO claim to speak "just like a native" but don't. I know of no one on youtube who claims to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently who does not.
@@QuizmasterLaw I only speak Chinese up to HSK3, with a few words of HSK4, but I can't pass HSK4 because I don't like to study reading/writing Chinese. I've never claimed I'm fluent in Mandarin, but I've said I can talk "daily life" and live in China (Which I've done!). Is HSK3 proof to claim I speak, "daily life" Chinese? I believe I speak enough Chinese to be a waiter / hostel host, since customers in those jobs will always ask you the same questions, but I definitely could NOT hold a college level job and speak only Chinese at my level
Certified professional medical interpreter here! 👋 I have a degree in Chinese language, and lived in China for 12 years. You just ruined my whole world because my patients _always_ tell me my Mandarin is better than theirs. 😞
haha it depends on the context, if you're really bad and they say that it's just to sound nice, but when you're actually good the really mean it. it's the same with every other culture in my experience, even Russian believe it or not, I've had Russians tell me my Russian is really good even though I'm only an A2 in Russian lol.
In Turkey if you speak even a little Turkish people will say “Ah, you speak such good Turkish!” They say you know when you’re getting somewhere when they start correcting you. :-) But if you’re a certified medical interpreter, I’d say you’ve done the work. :-)
Well said! I'm an Indonesian with Chinese decent. It's always been painful to see TH-cam "polyglots" claiming to speak Indonesian harshly or barely understand how our spoken languages are drastically different than the written one. Nice content! Edited: thank you for 150 likes
Yoi betul vs ya benar That's how drastically different the formal text book official Indonesian language as "easiest language in the world" compare to unofficial colloquial style which vary greatly across the country. And yet many polyglot pretenders are still proudly speaking the text book version that spoken by almost nobody
that's obvious. foreigners will learn standard indonesian and nobody really speaks standard indonesian in our daily lives. we all speak in our respective regional dialects. my aunt is married to a german for more than 20 years and he still doesn't understand us when we speak in our local dialect. just like how people from jakarta won't understand us.
Thank you - I love that TH-cam has brought out a new issue that didn't exist prior to the monetisation of a video. My Grandfather probably qualified as a hyper polyglot. he was born in Paris with a Norman (not French) Mother and British Father, oh and a German nanny/governess so tri-lingual from birth. In the 1939 British army list he was listed as a class 1 interpreter in 12 languages and a class 2 in 11 further languages. The funny side is that when he was talking to someone in any language other than English and they had some kind of speech impediment - he would acquire it ... very embarrassing.
It's actually very easy to catch a fake polyglot when they started to speak Chinese languages like Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin etc. Because we have different speech patterns like in English, whether it's news report speech, formal cooperate speech or imperial speech. They might catching bits and pieces but can't fully grasps the entire sentences. Plus, Chinese and Japanese have a lots of daily idioms and proverbs we'll be using in a casual conversation, if a real polyglot sure learned a few of them prior.
I love your sense of humour and your dry delivery… hilarious! #9 Social Engineering was my favourite. In bilingual Canada, I just can’t even forcibly make myself study French. It is so discouraging to get the negative feedback at the outset when I attempt French and then be ignored out of disgust. I am learning Spanish because love, kindness, and friendship is what they show me. They encourage me to continue speaking their language.
French insults transcend nationality. A French friend who was visiting Canada was rudely told by a Quebecker, "Stop trying to use your American High School French!" A Canadian friend used to tell me, all the time, "Votre accent est terrible!" (Which it probably is.) Mexicans are, on the other hand, mostly polite and supportive, asking, "How long did you live in Mexico to learn Spanish so well?" I have to tell them, "No hablo español. No se muchas palabras, pero tengo la pronunciasion buena. And I've never been to Mexico. Mexico came here." They say, "No, you speak it very well. But how did you learn it?" "Del buen pueblo mexicano."
And to think! You are ina France-light area and getting that disgust. Imagine trying to speak French to someone in Paris, and having the smell of piss waft over you as they sneer at your feeble attempts at communication.
but English people can be super rude. probably because. Canada is predominantly English they do not have to really care about french. i gave you that french people seem to be rude also even in France rudeness is there toward French Canadians. if you are English in France it might even be the worst because the level of a don't give an f is god tier sometimes.
I am glad you articulated how easy it is to get the basics down. The only real way to become fluent is to make a fool of yourself 1000 times in front of native speakers. Important to point out the differences in levels and how much more effort it takes to become an advanced speaker. I got conversational in Ukrainian within 6 months and could go to a store and a bar and impress people with conversations based mostly around the fact I was a foreigner studying the language. Then I cracked open a book, started translating song lyrics, and was put into University classes with other Ukrainians in Ukrainian and then it turned into Hard Mode.
This is so true ... just go for it! "The only real way to become fluent is to make a fool of yourself 1000 times in front of native speakers." Mexico and Latin America were great - they would just repeat what I should have said, or calmly tell me what my error was.
In some ways, I think it's better to make a fool of yourself in front of native speakers than to appear more fluent than you are. I got into difficulties more than once as a tourist by asking a phrasebook question passably well, but then I was clueless as to what their answer meant - like the time I only realized *after* I had unpacked my bike and rolled out my sleeping bag, that the campsite owner had probably been saying "Sure, you can camp anywhere here, I'd avoid that spot there though, it's full of big-arse ants that are going to chew you to pieces as soon as you sit down." She must still be scratching her head over why I went straight to that very spot.
@@DaniZeAlmighty I get that it's a whole different type of obstacle for some people. I have def felt embarrassed a lot in front of people but I would be lying if I said I knew coping strategies for those with legit social anxiety. Speaking a language so few foreigners know definitely gives me a boost of confidence though.
This whole genre of videos probably stems from the fact that people think speaking a foreign language is hard. In reality it's usually the learning part that's hard, not the making of mouth sounds. I can probably learn to speak a single phrase in German almost perfectly within an hour, but it would take me years to get fully conversational that way.
I agree. Being able to communicate in a different language is motivating but the real gold and hard work is in all the time you have to spend listening to people from other cultures trying to understand them. Learning languages, to me, is noble because of the process, but to many people it's because of the result.
It stems from the fact that it is very easy to ''bluff'' that you can speak a language when you actually only have an extremely superficial level of knowledge in it, it's simple as that.
You are incorrect in this thinking. Making the sounds of many languages other than your own is in many cases incredibly difficult and in some cases near enough impossible after a certain age. The same goes for listing. Take German that you reference, many english speakers find the throat based "ch" sound to be impossible. Japanese is another example. If a Japanese native isn't exposed to English early enough they will be unable to hear the difference between R and L and find in nearly impossible to pronounce them as a result. There are many phonemes that are like this across languages. Some people find the rules of a language easier to learn than the sounds and vice versa
You actually can't, by the way. You lost the ability to perceive correct German pronunciation by the time you were 1 year old, so you can learn how to make some sound that SOUNDS like correct German to you and to other non-German people, but that is obviously bad to anyone who is actually fluent in German You need significant amounts of phonetic training and listening practice before you even speak your first word if you want to say something in perfect German
Enjoyed the video. I was in the US Army many years ago and studied Spanish then Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. At the end of the course, you took the standard proficiency test which was two parts - aural and reading comprehension. So you got two scores. The rating was from 1 to 5, and no one who had simply studied the language could get more than a 3-3. In order to score a "4," you had to have a certain amount of experience (years!) in the language. A "5" required that you either be a native speaker or that you had spent years in the country. The government recognized that it was not possible to learn a language quickly. It takes years of constant work and practice. When I got out of the Army, I got a degree in linguistics rather than a language. When you major in a language in the US, it's usually about the literature, not the language. Not that I don't care for literature, but there is a lack of emphasis on practical language use. Linguistics gave me a look at the structure of language, which helped in the languages I studied later. (FYI: your Russian is very good except that you got some stresses wrong...and, yes, I did recognize that you were not speaking Klingon.)
The language studies here (letters graduation) only focus on literature and not on acquiring fluency. You learn grammar, how to read, etc but never how to pronunciate or to speak.
@@Robob0027 The test was about listening, not speaking. We had oral tests during the course in which we had to converse with the instructors, but the proficiency tests were only about listening and reading.
@@katheryns1219 You completely ignored or misunderstood my comment. I was merely pointing out your misspelling of the word oral. I was not commenting on any other section of your comment and am so glad that you now know how to spell the word correctly. Your reply however illustrates that despite going to a US military academy you still have not managed to write English in a form that can be understood. E.G. 'letters graduation' what does that mean in standard English?
@@katheryns1219 Pls disregard the second part of my reply. This somehow got crossed with my reply to another person My original reply was purely to point out your misspelling of oral and not about the content of the course you took.
Just watched a video referencing Steve Kaufman, who allegedly speaks 20 languages fluently. One of these was a clip of German where he made a basic syntactical error “ich glaube nicht dass ich *kann* die Grammatik lernen”. If he does that in a 10 second random clip of a language I happen to know, and he makes an error an intermediare speaker wouldn’t, in a language like German which I presume to be much more accessible to him than Chinese, then I have a hard time buying the idea of 20 fluently. I couldn’t watch the rest. Back to your advice, it is good for language learning generally. Start with phrases and practice them well, long specific phrases.
Ich hatte vor über 10 Jahren ein paar Videos von ihm auf TH-cam geschaut, als ich glaubte Mehrsprachigkeit in solch einer Größe existiere. Nach kurzer Zeit hab ich ihn aber nicht mehr verfolgt, weil ich eher das Gefühl hatte, dass es um Prahlerei und den Verkauf von Lehrprogrammen geht. Also reines Marketing. Das empfand ich als sehr unsympathisch.
@@tomschreiner3717 Ich habe vor anderthalb Jahren angefangen Deutsch zu lernen, und ich bin stolz, dass ich deinen ganzen Kommentar leicht verstehen konnte 😄
I remember watching a video from Benny the Irish "polyglot". He was learning Japanese and decided to have a conversation with a native after studying it for one day! Well, he starts by speaking and it all goes well, then the Japanese asks a few basic questions and he keeps repeating the same thing until he decides to say he doesn't understand and the conversation stoped there.... he wasn't able to speak and understand a normal conversation, but only to repeat what he wrote down to say during the video. Of course it is normal since it was his first day, but he is the one claiming you should speak from day one..... no one should speak from day one, not even babies do that.
I think the question there is does Benny gain anything from speaking from day one. Maybe he learned something or just felt motivation. I don't think Benny claims that you can speak a language to any degree of proficiency on the first day.
@Harry How's it silly? Babies don't just understand language because their brains "develop." Their brains develop, in part, due to language input. (There are also a lot of other developmental tasks that take priority or which speaking depends upon but that's a broader discussion.) Being an adult doesn't allow you to instantaneously understand any language without any input. If it was simply a matter of the development of one's brain, wouldn't that be the case? Adults can imitate language in a way babies can't but they still require a massive amount of input in order to genuinely acquire new languages, which is similar to the manner of language acquisition in babies. Of course, it's different as an adult with all of the structures/grammar/etc. of your native language firmly set and the ability to apply logical thought to the task but that doesn't really make the comparison silly...
@@SeraphsWitness But you can't talk to people without getting a certain amount of vocab and grammar in your head first. And that won't happen on day one. BUT you should try to actually say the things out load while learning from day one, because your mental pronunciation is maybe seems to be good, but in reality you need lot of practice in action (if it's 1000000% different from your native language's phonology then it is extra important).
@@tovarishchfeixiao well that's not technically true. If it was, then two foreign cultures would never be able to communicate for the first time. Classic history example is Squanto and the pilgrims.
This is the best exposed video I've ever watched! 🤣 Thank you for sharing these important info! It really annoys me people faking being a polyglot, because they don't really know it takes litters of blood, sweat and tears, plus money and unslept nights to become a real polyglot (actually, they know, that's why they go for the easy route 👀 lol). Some people might get encouraged to study languages by watching their content, but it seems most people feel frustrated and discouraged, because they weren't able to "learn as fast as them". To all language lovers that make real efforts to get there, don't give up, you can do it! 💪🏼
Most importantly it takes years. Literally long years, not weeks, not months but years. And each newly learned language to be taken to a decent level is at least 6 years long serious time commitment/investment. Do some people do it for real? Oh yes, some find this fascinating. But most adults do not have enough time to do so, next to their other obligations. Whereas some yes, do so but it comes at the cost. And yes, such adults do invest their free time in making the effort.
*VERY VERY LONG COMMENT* Information, classification, examples and rants about most TH-cam polyglots these days. Please read it if you have some time :) I'm a Northeast Indian (which means that I don't have the typical Indian accent. We Northeasterns have a very neutral accent and a lot of foreigners and even Mainland Indians often refuse to believe that we 're Indians due to our looks and our spoken English) who speaks fluent English, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish(because I've lived in all those places for a combined duration of 13 years). I speak these at either C1 or C2 levels. I've always loved languages and am currently learning Spanish(B1), Swedish(B1) and Mandarin(A2, I just started 4 months ago) as well. I was born and raised in Manipur, so I speak Paite(native dialect), Manipuri(State language), Nagamese(State language of Nagaland, a neighbor of Manipur) and Hindi. So in total, I speak 11 languages (if we include my Mandarin, which only stands at A1 level as of right now). I am baffled and have always wondered just how gullible people really are . I meant the people who get easily impressed by some TH-cam "polyglot" who simply learns about 10-15 basic introductory phrases in a language, goes to a busy market area, finds native speakers and uses those 10-15 phrases. Look at Xiaoma : His Mandarin is GREAT, no doubt on that. But his other videos where he spoke Mayan, Yoruba, Jamaican, etc. are just pure tomfoolery. "WHITE GUY BUSTS OUT PERFECT xyz LANGUAGE!!!! SHOCKS LOCALS!!!!" Like BRUHHH, you're a million steps away from speaking it perfectly. Many other "Omegle/OmeTV polyglots" simply meet new people online and repeat the same phrases in every single video. Some of the phrases they always repeat are : "I study *X* language because I love languages and culture" , "I have been studying for *X* months" , "I speak *X* number of languages"(and then they list the languages that they BARELY speak), "I practice with natives on this app" , compliments like "you're smart/ beautiful/ cool, nice, etc." and maybe a few more memorized lines. I wrote those lines in English for y'all to understand but obviously those phrases were said in the target language. And the funniest part is that such Omegle videos always end abruptly and cuts to a new convo with new people, new language. And why is that? That's because those "polyglots" cut the part of the video where they failed to/ where they no longer understand what the other person is saying. Hence the Omegle interaction ends suddenly and cuts to the next interaction with another random stranger. Lemme list 5 examples each on the three main type of polyglots I've watched and heard. Straight-up NAME DROPS hahahaha. Omegle/OmeTV polyglots who in actuality, are mostly bilingual and just learnt a lot of phrases in 5-8 other languages : 1. Ryan Hale : Decent Mandarin and Korean coz he used to live in both countries, but the rest is mehhh. His Bahasa Indonesia is almost decent tho. But he keeps repeating the same 💩 like a parrot. 2. Fiki Naki : Good Russian and decent Spanish but basically repeats memorized phrases for other languages like Romanian, Ukrainian, Arabic, German, French and Kazakh. He's currently learning Turkish from his sort-of girlfriend and is actually improving a lot on that one. 3. Kazu Languages : Sorry to say this but pretty much all of the foreign languages he speaks are on A2 level or barely B1 at most. His Egyptian Arabic accent is pretty good for a Japanese guy. 4. Santiglot : As a Spanish guy, he has good knowledge on Latin derived Romance languages but BRUH you gotta watch him struggle with Filipino and other Asian languages (even though his titles claim to be pretty confident in those languages) LOL. 5. Turah Parthayana : This guy lived in Russia and speaks Russian but you HAVE GOT TO watch his vids. His accent is so wrong that I, and a lot of Russians he talks to, find it hard to understand him. He speaks with a heavy Indonesian accent and does not put correct stresses on words and pronunciation. Mind you, putting the correct stress on any Slavic language is an absolute must. If not, the meaning could totally change. For example, the Russian words "to write" and "to pee" are written the same exact way, the only difference lies on where you put the stress. "To write" is pronounced "Pisaat" and "to pee" is pronounced "piisat" Side Note : No hate on a specific nationality, but ALMOST every Indonesian OmeTV polyglot is on A2 level at most. Hate to say it but that's the truth. They get a lotta views because 95%+ of their countrymen don't speak foreign languages and hence are easily impressed. There's a LOTTTTT of Indonesian "polyglots", look them up. Some polyglots (not on Omegle) who pretend to know more than they actually do are : 1. Laoshu505000 : May his soul rest in peace, but he claims to speak 50 languages at least to some extent. His Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese are great but the rest are so bad. Just watch his vids to know what I'm talking about. Really a try-hard. 2. Xiaoma : As mentioned earlier, good Mandarin but he stutters and struggles with the rest. And as for his titles.... are they really necessary? If that's perfect Yoruba, then I'm more perfect-er-er-er than you. 3. Wouter Corduwener : He is the definition of ABSOLUTE CRINGE. He simply memorizes really random phrases and says those to foreigners. It's so weird that even the people he speaks to are super confused. He just starts a conversation with phrases like "I like barbecued chicken" to some Chinese people in Mandarin. In another conversation, he opened with "I like Boerenkool with a sausage. Do you also like it?" to a random stranger. Like dude, what kind of a convo starter is that?????????? 4. Frankie Light : He works really really hard to learn and I respect him for that. But he's too impatient, as in not waiting to be at least on B1 conversational level before making a vid. He learnt Mandarin by working as a barber in Chinatown, Flushing, New York. That's impressive....VERY IMPRESSIVE. But dude, try to be a bit more fluent before making those Burmese, Russian Yiddish and Arabic videos hahaha. 5. Steve Kaufmann : Yes, I know that he's a very well-known polyglot worldwide but this list is about people who 'pretend to know more than they actually do'. Steve claims he's pretty good at Russian and Ukrainian but me and my Slavic friends have seen it and he speaks Amerussian LOL. He Americanized the pronunciation and accent way too hard to the point that it's an uphill battle to understand if you don't listen to it while giving the utmost, unwaivering attention. He does that with every language btw. Now, for the people who I truly respect as actual POLYGLOTS, people who fully deserve to use that word in their video titles : 1. GOLUREMI LANGUAGES (Will John) : He's an African-American football(soccer) player who has travelled to and lived all over Europe. Dude speaks fluent Swedish, Croatian, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish and German to name a few. He doesn't really flex about it and just chills with random people on Omegle/OmeTV. He fully understood those languages and can hold a conversation for a really long time. 2. Laoma Chris : He speaks fluent Spanish(well his mom is a native Honduran and dad is German-Chilean) and Mandarin with an almost authentic Beijing accent. He also speaks German really well(4 yrs in high school and was an exchange student in Germany). Other languages he speaks include Italian, French, Portuguese and Cantonese. The reason I put him on this list is because he never claims to be good at any language besides Mandarin and Spanish. 3. Oriental Pearl (Anming) : She has lived most of her life in multiple East Asian countries and speaks great Mandarin, Japanese and is learning Korean (I'm not sure if she's good at it by now, I haven't watched her vids the last few months. Sorry😅). She makes great vlogs and also talk about fake polyglots in a couple of her videos. 4. Raul Camarena : This guy dominates the Romance languages. One thing I love about him is his simple setup. He doesn't try to act real smart, just talking normally like a normal person would on a normal Omegle chat. Straight like that. 5. Christine (Polyglot Stories) : She speaks 12 languages, most of which she does so on a pretty fluent level. The video they shot in Korea was by far the most impressive. Okay guys, i'm gonna end my lengthy comment here. I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion so feel free to disagree on any/all points that I made. In short, a 'POLYGLOT' to me is someone who can hold a conversation for as long as it takes in at least 5 languages, not someone who learnt a few dozen phrases and taught himself/herself how to say those few phrases perfectly. Oh and btw, I loved the vid @languagejones , keep em coming! Stay blessed.
Thanks for your comment! I've been quite disappointed with the fake polyglots online, too. I want to suggest Lindi Botes and Vladimir (I forgot his last name but his video "European speaks 12 languages"? has a few million views. He's Slovak) as legit polyglots. Good luck on your language learning journey! 😁💪
Xiaoma is very good at Chinese and his Spanish is good too, but other than those he's not fluent in any other languages (other than English, obviously). I really like Oriental Pearl and have talked to her before. She's a legit polyglot and is pretty honest and smart too.
I have only watched Xaioma, but I did notice he stutters/repeats the same word over and over, even in Mandarin. However, he is usually very transparent about being new to a language, and he admits he prioritizes learning the usual responses to questions like "where did you learn X," "How long have you been speaking X," "why did you want to learn to speak X," etc. but there are plenty of improvised conversations too, so it's kind of obvious he isn't totally faking or trying to be deceptive. I don't think his clickbait titles necessarily mean he's pretending to be more knowledgable than he actually is; in fact, he's pretty damn transparent about his entire video filming process IMO.
As someone who has been studying Chinese for like a year and a half and still struggling, it's a bit relieving to hear that some of the people who claim to be fluent in a couple of months aren't always legitimate, or at least that our definition of "fluency" differ
They aren't legitimate at all. Unless they are youtubers full time and have those 8 hours in a day to learn the language. Even I could learn CHinese to fluency in trwo years. Alas, I have a normal job that takes a lot of time and can't afford learning for 8 hours a day.
Lately I watched a video of a "polyglot" who was "speaking" italian (my language) following many of your rules. He was "talking" to a cook in a restaurant in Italy, yelling much of the time, saying basic phrases most of all. He was talking for the 90% of the conversation. A guy like this could seem fluent to foreigners who don't know the language, but globally he said almost nothing.
I remember when I moved to China having the same impression of one of the trainers. He was honest enough to point out that he wasn't really saying much, it just sounded so good to somebody who didn't yet know how to say those things. And he was right, the Mandarin that I used for things like buying things and getting fed is still very well developed, but a bunch of other areas that I didn't spend a ton of time repeating isn't particularly good.
I really appreciate this video. Over the past few months I have been desperate to learn Polish in time to visit my family in a year. It’s my mother’s native language which most of my family speaks exclusively, and it is HARD. In searching for tips I found myself on the “polyglot” side of TH-cam being bedazzled by their performances. They always felt off and it is refreshing and comforting to see an actual expert speak on the topic. I was starting to feel so inadequate for not being able to learn languages to fluency in a matter of months.
The biggest tips I have kind of depend on your level, but learn the grammar, a whole lot of vocabulary, and then find podcasts/stories/videos of (native) people speaking that language. I’ve always thought reading kids books would be a rly good help since they’re written specifically for those who aren’t as well versed in the language
As a Polish native working as American English interpreter I can tell you: take it easy! Polish is really hard thanks to its sounds, cases and verbs to list a few reasons. Most Poles will be very impressed if you could be able to write or speak basic sentences, as many of us make mistakes despite being native speakers 😛 Let's not even talk about how foreign accents sound mixed with Polish, hilarity ensues 😆
Don't get too desperate. Poles will never tell you that you speak horribly but will appreciate the effort of learning basic stuff, though I understand you want to learn the language to speak to your family.
@@PolishPolackski That is very true! I can say something as simple as “jestem głodna” and my aunts start applauding and kissing me on the cheek. I just hope someday to speak with them at a higher level. They’re from a generation taught only Russian as a second language, so I only have one young cousin who speaks English. Thank you for your encouragement!
@@dansunsomeil oh, once you are in PL, your ears will catch it and your tongue, this psysical one, will naturally move forward toward your front teeth. You'll be fine - where is a will, there's a way!
9:41 something I’ve noticed is some languages have a phrase for “you speak good” that isn’t genuine cuz they don’t want to discourage you or be mean and they’ll have a different phrase for the same thing that’s ***actually*** genuine
Been studying Japanese fairly seriously for about four years, still suck at it. I actually realized that when I first started going online to practice with native Japanese that I was railroading them, I was making sure to talk as much as possible and control the conversation. It probably took me over a week or maybe even a month before I realized I was doing it and it was hindering me. Now I try to be a much better listener and conversation partner not just for my own improvement, but to be kind.
@@Dalabombana I was subconsciously insecure about my ability, I found that once I started to listen, I learned new things and got much better in Japanese conversation but only after getting over the massive roadbump of being able to hear the language properly.
I am an American living in Japan for many years. I think you've hit on an important hint that will help you. As long as you are doing all the talking you will not improve too much. Hang in there, you'll improve bit by bit.
Im also in deep study of Japanese for a few years. You are probably better at it than you realize. You are almost certainly better at it than any borderline monolingual weeaboo
@@Freeaviator I'm a part time online English Tutor, I actually got the chance to tutor a real Polyglot two nights ago. They are an interpreter at their company, their English was very good especially when it came to business English. They told me they were currently looking to work abroad, they had three countries in consideration, Columbia, Ecuador, or Brazil. I didn't ask them this directly, but one can infer they must also speak Portuguese and Spanish at quite a high level as well if their company is going to send them there as an interpreter.
My son read Mandarin at uni and is very fluent now. However, he had been learning at school for 5 years previous. Some people just take to languages and his teacher was astonished at his pronounciation. She asked him and us whether he had spent any time in China...no. He travelled over the country and loved chatting to everyone. He had a massive go at a taxi driver in Shanghai, who was trying to scam a white tourist (i don't think he expected a tongue lashing) when my wife visited him there...my wife's jaw dropped at his outpouring ! That said, my wife is fluent in two other languages apart from her native tongue.
I would add that a lot of people can find some languages easier to grasp than others. I, myself found Danish, Dutch and German easier to pick up than Spanish or French.
What really puzzles me when I watch polyglot channels, is kids in their early 20s saying they are fluent in 5-6 languages - how the heck is that even possible unless you've grown up around those languages? It's not just about the basics of grammar, prononciation and basic vocabulary - there are so many life situations and so much phraseology in every language that take years of exposure and active use to absorb. I have pretty good aptitude with languages and am near-native level in one more language in addition to my native tongue (excepting the accent :) ). Even so, I've been studying Italian (not the hardest of languages) on and off for years now and am comfortable in most social situations and even some political discourse (am probably a high B2). That said, if you asked me how to say that there is a gap between the skirting board and the floorboards, I'd be lost. And there are hundreds and thousands of everyday situations like this.
There are a lot of people who believe that "conversational" (as in, you can make yourself understood in most every-day situations, even though you make lots of mistakes) is fluent.
This is why I say that I only am fluent in three. I have studied several more, but since I haven't kept these language skills up to date, I only understand the languages but can't really speak them anymore. It's important to tell the truth to not make a fool of oneself by mistake if you encounter a native speaker 🤣
I know quite a few people who speak 3 or 4 languages natively when growing up (mixtures of English, Russian, French, German, Amharic, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Mandarin in different combinations in different people). If you have grandparents from multiple cultures and a language in the home and a language (or even languages) of the country and you have a natural ability and interest in languages it isn't that extreme. Then one of them I am thinking of specifically learned some related languages while at university, including going on exchange. So I think that they spoke 6 languages truly fluently by 20 including accent, but this person is one of the smartest people I am friends with
On a 1-5 range for language proficiency "fluent" would be somewhere around 2-3 so it's actually not that impressive. It may be good enough to chat with friends about everyday topics but It's quite far from business fluent which means you can use technical terms and can apply nuance. Let alone being on a native speaker level. So "fluent" isn't actually all that impressive.
Arabs will tell him he's wrong if he is. Unless he's playing the Islam card then people will save face and keep quiet. Source: I'm a non muslim Arab and I know
I always look forward to a new video of yours. I’m finishing up my BA in Spanish, of which has of course involved taking several linguistics classes, and I feel like your videos make the study of linguistics much more interesting, engaging, and applicable to the real world. I will say, when I started learning Spanish on my own several years ago, it was the polyglot videos on TH-cam that inspired me to believe that learning a second language as an adult was actually possible, and led me to purchase a subscription to Babbel and Pimsleur, which brought me to the B1/B2 level before I enrolled in school to pursue a degree in the language.
Love the channel, great work! Tip 3 got me a 25/25 in oral part of the DELF B2 back in school (I would have barely passed without making a list of random intellectual quotes the evening before, which I threw in the conversation very casually, without even acknowledging they weren't shit I was saying on the spot). The most hilarious was on the subject of texting with mobile phones, "ecrire, c'est une facon de parler sans etre interrompu".
Just a tip to improve your Dutch: “Omdat” en “want” are synonymous as conjunctions that denote “because”, but the ensuing word order will be different based on which of the two you use, which is where you erred. “Ik studeer Nederlands *omdat* ik de cultuur leuk vind” “Ik studeer Nederlands, *want* ik vind de cultuur leuk” Dutch definitely isn’t that difficult of a language to learn the basics of, but It does have a lot of these little vagaries you’re gonna have to get used to. Veel plezier met het oefenen
I remember years ago, in China of all places, being in a coffee shop with a ton of Dutch books. I was surprised as to the degree that it looked like somebody was code switching between German and English. Even without any study of Dutch, I could already grasp the very basics of what had been written.
Great video! Thanks for raising awareness on this. It's become so prevalent especially in my line of work (language teaching). There are so many grifters in the space that learn the basics, then convince would be students that they can achieve fluency in a matter of weeks "too", all to sell them an overpriced course, of course, that uses a "unique methodology" they invented. In some of the language courses the "polyglot teacher" never uses the target language save for a phrase or two. It's really causing issues for genuine teachers as students are finding it hard to trust them.
That’s wild to hear! I just released a video on three months of Persian - the basic gist is that you can learn a lot in a few months, but “fluent in three months” is extremely unlikely.
I love this video! my friend was really into polyglot videos and I was very impressed, until I heard them speak a language I knew. once you hear that the tricks they are pulling become very clear.
Great tips. I usually pay attention to how the person holds the dialogue. A fluent person normally acquires the ability to expand on a subject or conversation simply because they have more vocabulary and resources. Usually, a scammer will try to stay away from longer and deeper conversations. Their conversations are usually scripted, which means that if you ask very specific questions, they will have to cheat, change the subject, or end the conversation. To summarize: 1 - Fluent people usually stretch the subject or conversation. 2 - They are comfortable having longer and deeper conversations. 3 - They figure out ways to answer specific questions.
Fun fact: I learned Dutch as a kid when I lived in the Netherlands. I never took classes, but it was around me and they didn’t dub English TV. I learned by reading the subtitles and my best friend is half Dutch. It made so much sense then. Now, 30 years later, other languages have taken over and Dutch feels odd now. I’ve known around 6 polyglots in my life. But I love it when people learn other languages. But you don’t need to have a ton of languages under their belt. It’s so difficult to keep a language up organically if you live outside of that country or community. My parents used to have to study up on Japanese before we would go there, despite all my grandparents being able to speak Japanese.
Sadly now they don't dub so much, they just put English subtitles which makes it harder to learn Dutch by trying to watch a familiar movie. I end up just listening to the English and ignoring the subtitles :(
Fun fact: I learned Dutch as a kid when I lived in the Netherlands (because I'm Dutch) - I learned English off MTV and films and later school (same for German). Them moved to Paris and learned French, now in the UK for over a decade and you what? Dutch feels odd now. I'm constantly second-guessing the language I spoke for 3 decades..
Ngl I'd be happy knowing 4, maybe 5 languages. (I don't count sister languages of my native language in that, cause as a slavic person I can *theoretically* hold a real conversation in 5ish languages already + English; but what I'm really doing is talking one language and guessing at what they're replying, not speaking 5 languages).
I had to do a double take when I read your comment because I thought I wrote it for a minute. I also learned Dutch from reading the subtitles when I lived there as a child. 😊
Thanks for all this. Let me share this.. Turkish is kind of popular among "them".. To prove they speak turkish they all say "I am learning turkish" .. in turkish.. who would watch them as native turkish.. almost none.. beside for turkish people if you just say "hello how are you" we melt down by joy.. that is it! you are acceppted as turkish speaker.. the challenge would be sayig the answer "I am fine - iyiyim" generally hard to pronounce.. I really wonder why it matters these polygot shows.. I am happy to discover your channel.. subscribed and liked..
I speak some Hebrew and noticed you said "ani lilmod ivrit" but it means "I to learn Hebrew". What you wanted to say is "ani lomed ivrit". And, by the way, yeah, I knew it wasn't Klingon but it really made me laugh 😂
I don't speak or read Hebrew, but I've heard enough of it to immediately recognize it. I would never believe someone who claimed to speak Na'vi or Klingon or something...
I'm a native Hebrew speaker and I couldn't recognize you were speaking it... Also the sentence would be reversely translated as: ' I to learn Hebrew because I like A Hebrew culture and food'.
The best way to know you're good at a language is when you stop receiving a compliment and they just talk to you. It's nice to receive a compliment, dont get me wrong. It keeps you going! But, it's even nicer to simply talk to people.
For sure! It's the perfect compliment when a native speaker thinks you are also a native and they ask what part of their country you grew up in when you've actually never even been to their country! Then it's even more of a compliment when they argue with you that you are lying about not being "one of them"! 🤭
@@LAKGE7 It's an amazing feeling! I'm sure you will experience it if you wish...Just listen intently to all the nuances of the language you want to speak so that you can copy the sounds authentically, and pay attention how native speakers phrase things and parrot them...
Yeah, Dutch is the language where if I see a tweet in that language, I'll be about 60% of the way through before realizing that I don't actually understand what I'm reading. It's a wild experience
It was about 23-25 years ago, when I was about 10 years old. A friend of mine got a microphone for his computer and asked me to set it up. I opened sound recorder (it was in the Windows 98 days), clicked record and started to speak into the microphone: "This is the test of the digital audio wave device on your multimedia computer. If you can hear this message, your system is working properly." My friend's cousin (he was about 15 years old) was also present during this and he was wondering how did I learn English this well. They have no idea to this very day, that I have learnt that sentence from my sound card's diagnostic software :D
Your soundcard works perfectly Your soundcard works perfectly Your soundcard works perfectly It doesn't get any better than this I miss the old days when Blizzard entertainment was awesome.
As someone speaking Greek... I can say that when these polyglots "speak" my language is like hearing someone read a specific paragraph on repeat "yes i speak your language... my name is... I learned this language at...., i love your country... I love souvlaki...i like this, i love that" the reason they look real is how confident they are when speaking which do be impressive. Only Moses was the real G who would leave the whole convo in the video.
This video was so great! The part about learning how to sound like you're thinking was hilarious. And please tell us about the story of how you worked for Rosetta Stone!
Wouter is so annoying. I want to say the only languages he actually speaks at any level of proficiency are Dutch and English. The rest of his languages hit every check mark on this list.
That filler trick is solid. In fact, the French are famous for using it just in their own regular speech. Once at a dinner party a native French person was telling a story. Instead of saying “Um”, he literally said this: “Et en plus? Et puis alors donc....” meant nothing & contributed to the story. 😂
I'm so glad you pointed out that Chinese people do not often directly criticize bad mandarin - in fact they will often give compliments and register surprise when you can say ANYTHING in Chinese, and it is actually a very real impediment to improving if you aren't getting the feedback you need because people are culturally inclined NOT to say anything they feel might be insulting or make you lose face, which is a big thing in Chinese culture. I have learned and spoken Mandarin for now 13 to 15 years depending on when I consider my true start to be (was extremely casual from 2008-2010, barely learned a thing in that time frame) - my wife is a native speaker of Mandarin, I have lived and worked and gone to university in China at this point and do you know what has changed in how people respond to my Chinese over the years DESPITE that my vocabulary is exponentially greater than 10 years ago, my pronunciation is better, my grasp of grammar structure is better, and I am FAR more comfortable communicating in Chinese now than 10 or 11 years ago when I could barely stutter "could you get my a pair of chopsticks" at restaurant in Chinese because it felt so unnatural and it was terrifying to say it to a native speaker and have them look confused as they tried to figure out what I was saying - because uncertainty and hesitation changes your TONE - and mandarin is a tonal language - so being nervous has an impact on how well you speak it early on. ANYWAY, in all of that time, the reaction is this: "Wow! You can speak Chinese!?" or "Wa! Your Chinese is so good! Where did you learn it?" or something along very similar lines almost every SINGLE time someone DOES show surprise or comment on it it is one of those - and it was exactly the same back when I had a vocabulary of less than 100 words and could barely ask where the bathroom was (and couldn't understand the response if in Chinese and longer than a word or two) - now I have a vocabulary of thousands of words, and still the exact same reaction if I get one. The ONLY exception to this is my wife and mother in law, who have said at times that my Chinese keeps getting better and better, which, combined with the marked decrease in puzzled looks by Chinese people I used to get when they couldn't understand my shaky Chinese, are the ONLY indicators beyond my own improved knowledge of pronunciation, tone and grammar that I am, in fact, far beyond where I used to be. So yeah, when you see that famous video of Mark Zuckerberg "speaking fluent Mandarin" or you see XiaomaNYC as "white guy speaks PERFECT Chinese, stuns locals" - for those who don't know because the Chinese people in the comment section are often extremely forgiving for accents or tonal mistakes...Zuckerberg's Mandarin in that video is EMBARRASSINGLY bad - really painful to hear honestly as someone with many years of experience with the language including in China - and XiaomaNYC has a very obvious American way of pronouncing everything - I'd immediately be able to tell if I only heard him without seeing him that this was not a native speaker and very likely could tell he's American in all probability (believe it or not, French people for instance speak Chinese very often with French inflections - and to me it sounds hilarious - Italians with an Italian inflection and so on- it's very hard for a lot of people to lose their accent when speaking Chinese even if they speak fluently and structure the sentences well, just as it's almost impossible for someone born and raised in Germany to go to the U.S. at age 25 and completely lose their accent - they'll most likely always HAVE an accent, and that's OK but it's ALSO why it irritates me when guys like XiaomaNYC go around calling it "perfect Chinese" - that and I REALLY can't stand the "white guy shocks locals" headline first of all because I loath colour-coding instead of simply saying you are Europan-American, Italian-American, or even with less focus on ethnic heritage, JUST American - "American guy shocks locals by speaking passable but DEFINITELY not perfect Chinese" simply doesn't have the same ring to it, so you know WHY he does it. He's relying on the 90% of the audience who doesn't fluently speak Chinese but aspires to learn to one day - the people who don't KNOW any better because they literally cannot hear the difference between real Mandarin and his proto-American version - in other words the same people who can't identify what tones were off in THIS video when languagejones gives the Chinese example (no offence - some tones aren't spot on and that's ok because you never claimed they were unlike XiaomaNYC). Same goes for Orientalpearl - who does WELL but has a distinct American accent in Chinese as well. Da Shan they are not (he MIGHT fool a native speaker over the phone into thinking he's from China). And don't get me started on John Cena's pronunciation BUT the thing is John Cena never CLAIMED to speak it fluently or perfectly - unlike some on youtube. And yeah, all because the Chinese people in the audience avoid saying "actually it's not that great - it's like if a guy with a pretty thick Russian accent said 'Russian guy speaks PERFECT English, shocks Americans" - except that Americans WOULD tear that claim to pieces and laugh at his thick accent. Anyway there's ONE way to tell if your Chinese is improving when talking to native speakers: When you start using Chinese with them early on, pay attention to how often they switch to English to respond, and compare that to years later down the road. Many Chinese will always default to English when they see a non-asian face - if they speak English - but you should still notice whether there's an increase in the number of responses in Chinese - are they speaking back to you in Chinese? Do they look confused? Did they simply say "Shenme?" (what?) - or are they casually speaking quickly in Chinese to you without seeming like they are dumbing it down or slowing it down for your benefit? If so you probably have improved or else they would speak English which most younger people under 50 or so CAN speak some of. NEVER rely on "Woah, your Chinese is so good!" comments - even if your Chinese sounds like someone is gargling pigeons, they'd still say that. Pay attention to the switches to english or lack thereof (though do it somewhere like Shanghai where many more people speak some English than out in the villages in the west of the country where they may not respond in English because they don't know any - my mother in law for instance cannot speak any English so our conversations are always fully in Chinese).
I can heavily relate to this. I'm in a very small town in China where virtually no one speaks english. I'd go as far to say that your Chinese has improved when people *don't* remark that you speak good Chinese and just talk to you as they would any local. That's not to say their compliments aren't always genuine, but it's not a good benchmark for measuring your actual language ability since, as you said, you could literally be any level and people would still say you speak well.
Great summary of how anyone can make one of these "polyglot" videos. Also using "filler words" and not saying anything really of value is extremely telling, there were many students I met who had a habit of doing this. Unfortunately, these kinds of videos are always what grab audiences attention the most often. It is hard to not fall into the trap of wanting to "keep" up with others and how many languages they claim to speak when in reality we all cannot truly see all of the layers people have or have not truly dedicated to language learning
Mister Wouter Cordewener from Holland "speaks 29 languages". In fact he uses all those ten tricks and much more and speaks not more than three sentences in 25 of his languages. He is a classic TH-cam polyglot fake.
When you were speaking Klingon I thought “i didn’t realize Klingon sounded so much like Hebrew” (even though I only know the general sounds of Hebrew) But I thought “well he’s the language expert!” 😂
This reminds me of the movie "Train of life" and one scene form this movie in which the Rabbi says "German sounds just like Hebrew but with no sense of humor". ;-) Maybe this also applies in this case .
As someone who has been learning Chinese since i was a kid, the idea that duolingo is going to teach you fluent Chinese is hilarious. It'll teach you to appear to have proficiency in basic conversations, but never an actual mastery of the language. I've been learning Chinese for 11 years in school and I still have so much to learn. I still feel like my vocabulary consists of 100 words, even though I know that's not true. Learning one language takes true dedication.
that's really what happens with all languaged for me. When I guess how many words do i know, I'll guess a few 0's benwth what i know. Even though I'm working hard to learn more words.
@@forstuffjust7735 ya knowing 2,000 out of 6,000 characters is actually plenty. right now I'm at about 500. character count is not necessarily a bad metric it's just important to understand knowing the most used 1,000 character is enough to read about 95% of Chinese text, and the other 5% you can usually guess the meaning based of the radicals used and the context. There just isn't a practical reason to learn all 6,000ish characters.
@@dissraps 11 years is misleading since 6 of those years were during elementary school. And I haven't been learning English for 4 years, since English is my first langue I've actually been exposed to English my entire life. Learning Chinese has been a struggle, but I don't think I'm slower in this area than my peers. What has your experience been learning a 2nd language?
9:15 Yes ! Since I'm French, foreigners regularly tell me that they "learned some French at school... but can't say a word in French anymore... etc.". * Why ? Because 1°) people often had a hard time learning languages at an early age - as I have -, and 2°) yes, the French society is very much judgemental. --> What do I do ? I stay cool, I start to speak French genuinly yet very slowly, using words that are transparent in the person's native language (usually Eng / Ger / Ita / Spa) ; then I allow them time to respond ; and I end up telling them : Well, you speak French very well, see ! We spent 5 minutes discussing your travel anw your work, all in French ! I generally get huge smiles and thanks for doing this. This becomes a railroad for me xD as I have the sentences at hand now. --> Why do I do this ? Cuz I very much love the French language, which is very poetic : indeed, there is little vocabulary and only few synonyms in French (especially compared to Russian), which gives words a strong evocative power, I find. #baguette
Merci pour your effort!! I have a French surname, but my father grew up in England... and didn't want to hastle his kids with extra language burdens (I didn't grow up in England). I look forward to meeting a Frenchman like you one day. Knowing you exist helps a great deal. Keep up the good work, en bon chance!
That's nice. Not everyone can do that since, I guess you'd have to be familial with the similarities between french and those other languages. I'm sure you have made many people happy.
I'm guilty of learning sister languages. LOL I learned Spanish the hard way .... middle school, high school, college, then 15 years of work as an occasional interpreter at work. Then I went to Italy on vacation this spring, and found out I understood a LOT of Italian with zero formal education in it. So now, I'm doing DuoLingo and learning ... Italian, French, and Portuguese. :)
I don't think he's saying that learning sister languages is bad. I think he's saying that people can downplay the fact that learning a sister language is a lot easier once you have a solid foundation in one. Which means that you might put in less work and therefore actually speak the sister language to a lower level. That might not necessarily be as impressive as learning languages from different families. Like you, I learned French the hard way. As a result, I understand a lot of spoken Italian, written Spanish, some Portuguese, and many words in Latin and even Greek. I keep trying to learn Spanish and Portuguese, but without a strong why, I am very lazy and never make it very far. I could claim to know Romance languages, but that wouldn't be the full picture: I have a leg up from learning French for years, but I cannot actually speak any other Romance tongue.
Interesting. There is definitely a difference between "knowing a language" and "performing in a language". The latter would be something actors are trained to do for movies.
I learned English as a kid in school and later in life I started to learn Dutch after I moved to the Netherlands. Even though I knew how to speak English it took me a year and a half (10 hours per week) to learn to talk Dutch well enough so people could understand me and communicate with me reasonably easily. Learning to speak any language is very hard if you want to be good at it. Switching between languages is also not easy sometimes.
@@sblijheid Typical Dutch answer...Dutch are really tolerant and don't care if your Dutch is not perfect. That is why I love living in the Netherlands.
That also depends on how early you learned another language in your life. The earlier you do, the better. I was properly bilingual by the age of four, thanks to growing up in a multilingual environment and that really helped me with languages. Today, I can claim to speak 4 languages: Latvian, Russian, English and German. Although admittedly, my German is pretty rusty. Also, the mutual intelligibility of languages is a big factor. The closer the language, linguistically, the easier it is to learn.
I've been taking Japanese for fun during the pandemic after picking up some words / constructions from sheer repetition of playing the massive Yakuza games with Japanese audio/ Eng subtitles. Every semester for this one specific teacher has kind of a set script for the first assignment, a video of you speaking basic biographical sentences + some topical ones. You can tell the parts I've memorized from doing five times over versus the new stuff. The formulaic polyglots, like the one that says he speaks 20 languages, are usually some variant of "Where did you learn ____? Where are you from ? Why did you learn ____? How much is this?" Meanwhile I'm over here stressing over verb endings and trying to keep French brain (started at 14) and Spanish brain (started 3 years ago) from throwing in random words.
Thanks so much for telling the truth!! When I see some you. tubers who claim to be able to speak more than seven languages, I really wonder how they define "speaking one language". Coz to say a few sentences of a small talk is to speak, to be able to read a novel and talk about it fluently with other native speakers is also to speak. I doubt what they mean with their being able to speak so many languages, means only small talks. Nobody can get it checked anyway.
Even though you didn’t mention names, we all know who they are by this point. I can tell you that some “ polyglots “ did impress me at first but after seeing videos of people claiming to have learned X language in a couple weeks I knew it was for the TH-cam views. My native language is Spanish and I speak English, Portuguese and I’m still working in my Italian and I can tell you I take my time with languages because I’m not rushing to learn.
@@he_lives_in_apineapple_und9743 I know who you're talking about, but I don't know if he really counts? He's pretty upfront about only learning basic phrases in other languages and only having Chinese as a main language.
There's one American starting by X.... and another European I'm not sure from where originally starting by W..... These 2 are the worst, I can't stand them
@@he_lives_in_apineapple_und9743 he's pretty clear about his proficiency levels. And he's certainly a mandarin and Spanish speaker with some great fluency. Also, just say names. Let's not pussy out. This isn't 5th grade recess. Nobody's honor is in jeopardy.
I have seen a few of those hyperpolyglots videos. I already suspected this kind of scam. As a native French i always realised theirs is almost always abysmal and covers only the basic stereotypical conversation sentences. Thanks for the detailed review on this subjetc, quite interesting.
I always thought that Canadian French is pretty close to Klingon. Also, note that the amount of case endings and prepositions that demand specific cases (for no logical reason) keep the less committed souls from German. You can see this clearly in the amount of XP points the polyglots have on Duolingo. French 345,000, Spanish 478,000, Chinese 67,000 German 48 …
One thing I've noticed in some of the polyglot videos is the propensity to ask open-ended questions. What does that mean? Well the polyglot will ask a question in the target language to the native speaker, but the native's answer is basically ignored and the polyglot continues with more questions.
My husband had a close South Asian friend who owned multiple locations of retail stores. His store manager, also South Asian, often tried to impress their fellow countrymen by speaking Spanish to the customers. I heard it a few times. The conversations consisted of him asking the regular customers the same questions every time: what was their name, what was their age, where were they from. I kept this knowledge to myself.
I do not find number four to be that easy of a trick. I speak Spanish very fluently, and I am invested in learning Italian. While I understand the grammar, I end up mixing the two languages when I am tired. You really need to watch out with these sister languages.
In school I learnt German. After graduating as an electronics engineer I was offered a job in the Netherlands an moved there. I learnt Dutch, that is very close to German. Suddenly I could not speak German anymore. A good German friend had his parents visiting him in the Netherlands, the only spoke German. It was embarrassing, I wanted to answer their questions. It took seconds for the German words to surface in my memory. After two years, I finally took an evening course to learn German again, together with Dutch adults. It worked, I finally spoke both languages and could switch between them.
In such case usually the language you already know better takes over, perfectly normal. It has to do with something known as "cognitive acessibility" of well-memorized material and how fast we are able to move it from hippocampus or basal ganglia to prefrontal cortex. Since this is in fact what "active recalling " is.What we do when we speak or perform activities. And whether we like it or not this requires constant repetition, starting form aprroximately 40 times or repeating the same "chunk" of material which we want to store for good for later in what we call our "active memory". This is why learning anything, languages too, is mostly about constant recycling, constant repetition. I was where you are some time ago, knowing Spanish better than Italian and learnign Italian from a scratch and yes, I was doing precisely this to my Italian with my Spanish but at least I knew why I was doing this probably why I had enough patience to continue with learning Italian any way. Now they already do seem very distant and distinct to my brain. I think it's due to lots of listening input but also due to in depth study of grammar and plenty of reading .
Believe it or not, but I learned Norwegian well enough to start working as an engineer after a 12 weeks course and with 20 hours instruction, supported with a good deal of homework. My native tongue is Polish, and I already spoke advanced English and intermediate German, French, Russian and Spanish, and simple Finnish. However, I never call myself a polyglot, and I would never make any You tube recording.
I really like Wouter, he’s a cool guy. But he definitely takes the railroading technique to a new level. He talks and talks and rarely has to respond to anything anybody says 😂
And in coversations where he uses multiple languages he says the same thing 20 times. I always cringe when he repeats how he likes the food and to speak with people the 7th time but in Italian.
@@perryschnabel Every time I watch him I hope he has learned something new,but it's always the same. "I also want to say that...." "very interesting" " I want to travel to many countries" "I want to learn many languages" I dont understand how people think this guy is a genius. I guess people want and need heroes to look up to.
Every Polyglot Video on TH-cam where they meet other Polyglots: "Hey! My Name is [name], I learned [language] when I was in [place], I have many friends who are speaking [language]. Yes, I like speaking [language] very much. Do you also speak [language]?" - "Oh yes, I learned [language] when I was in [place], I like speaking [language] a lot!"
*changes language* "but can you speak [language]? I learned [language] when I was in [place] and I also like [language] a lot. Can you speak [language]? Do you like [language]?"
All those videos seem to have the same script lol
I think Wouter has started a new secret business of selling those scripts because he sure isn't making money on TH-cam anymore. @@hldo00
Sounds like XiaomaNYC
Yes, that's exactly what it is. Maybe they do that to get hits on their channel or to make themselves feel better. I don't know. But it's very disingenuous.
Thanks man! Gonna use these tips!
yes
Bruh
the goat
For your ancient West-Albanian sign language, I suppose ??
I bet you're a beginner who scam us by faking proficiency in American language . I have good hope to expose you one day. I warn you.
There's a certain TH-cam polyglot I saw speaking Spanish in a couple of videos. He was not actually saying what he wrote in the subtitles, not even close. He would say very basic things, sometimes even getting those things wrong, but then write something much more advanced in the subtitles. I'm left to assume he is probably doing that with other languages as well, and mostly trusting people won't pick up on it.
Just say Wouter, we all know it's him 😂
@@AlvarM Yes. Name and shame. I'm tired of the fake polyglots out there making it look so easy and using tricks to make tons of money off innocent viewers.
Most "polyglots" get to a certain level of proficiency in a language and then real progress slows down at the higher levels so they switch to another language and call themselves a polyglot. Largely they are a bunch of frauds because it takes a lifetime really to learn 2 or possibly 3 languages well. I'm a C2 tested Spanish speaker and still I'm learning new things all the time and I use the language on a daily basis. These polyglots so-called attain a certain level of proficiency but rarely if ever really know more than 1 or 2 languages even close to the level of a native speaker. I have yet to see a true case of someone speaking more than 3 languages fluently at near native fluency. Better to focus on one or 2 and really learn it.
@@AlvarMYeah. I think he claims to know 29 languages. Once I saw him speaking Hindi which is my first language and it was looking like he doesn't know even basics and just memorised what he's saying because he was making many errors in every sentence. But if someone like him comes across me and I don't know who he actually is, I'd be very appreciative of him for trying to speak my language and that's where people fall for guys like these.
Gonna try to find this cause I speak Spanish haha.
Number 4, I studied Russian and accidentally learned 6 other Slavic language without Realizing I was side questing
Interslavic would be the best option in this case, despite of being an artifical language.
Ah, Russian... Learn Bulgarian and Serbian. It's healthy for you.
Russian is actually not so similar to other Slavic languages. Even to Ukrainian and belorusian not very similar
LOL! I speak Ukrainian but everyone thinks I'm speaking Russian. Of course, I lived in an eastern city in Ukraine so I'm sure I know more Russian than I'm aware of.
@@rakhatthenut3815depends on the criterion of similarity, to be honest. But as for mutual comprehension, yes: I am a native Russian speaker, and my ability to comprehend other Slavic languages (especially Ukrainian and Belarusian) became tolerable only when I learned Polish on more or less acceptable level.
“You might as well speak Portuguese, which is Spanish spoken in French.”
I completely lost it.
To me (French-speaking), Portuguese looks more like Polish, as far as nasal sounds are concerned, because both have nasal diphthongs while the French nasal sounds are not diphthongs; quite a difference to my ears ;-)
Same 😅😅😅😅
To me a portuguese from Portugal, it seems spanish speaking is just speaking portuguese with your tongue out.
@@morbidi haha what? 😅😅
😂😂😂 or it sounds like a mashup of a Slavic language , French and Spanish 😂
The only language I have studied quite a lot and read a lot is Spanish. When I check these ''polyglot speaks 15 languages'' I normally go to the part where they speak Spanish and find that not only is it very basic, but they make a lot of mistakes that people generally stop once they leave absolute beginner level. The trick is simply that when you meet a new person the conversation is almost always exactly the same, so if you just learn how to follow those rails in that initial-type conversation, you could easily pretend to speak ten languages.
Woooo tu aprendiste español interesante me gustaría saber el porqué I've been studying English during 1 Year am here... I think that had to do it because it's a important language from the planet perhaps the most...y es verdad yo quiero profundizar mucho más en mí segunda lengua ya sabes cultura su historia su gente etc when I pretended to learn another language i mean Italian I got that I must focus on my second one first la verdad la vida en colombia es una esclavitud pero como amo aprender saco tiempo para estudiar y practicar con migo mismo inglés... that's all....see ya
Yep. There’s one whose name I won’t mention, has “conversations” with random people on the street in different languages. I listened to his “Greek” - he said something like “Hi how are you? I like Greek foods. Souvlaki.” 🤨
yea by knowing only the so called "fluent makers" people think you are fluent
I can relate, he estado aprendiendo español por algún tiempo sola. So I've been coming across many polyglots and like you i like to skip to their Spanish. I also noticed that what they say is usually something "generically general". They are also aware that most foreigner will appreciate or be surprised when you know a few lines in their language.
@@sazji "I learned Greek for two weeks in Crete"
The hyperpolyglot interactions always remind me of the Kids in the Hall sketch "I Speak No English," where the clerk speaks to the customer in perfect English: "I've learned this sentence phonetically, but I know nothing of its syntax or grammar. I assure you, I speak no English."
I remember Family Guy did a similar bit where the guy literally only knew how to answer that on specific question and a short speech explaining that it's the only thing he knows how to speak in English.
hello (sorry for bad english)
I wish I'd gone that far when I went to Russia over a decade ago, but all I memorized was "nee penemayou parouskye" (approximately), meaning "I don't understand Russian". Was never an impediment in street markets - the merchant would respond with something like "English? Deutsch?", I'd say "English", and they'd describe their wares in pretty good English.
In college, when I was waiting at O'Hare airport for my flight to a summer archaeological program in Israel, I tried to use my time at the gate to study from my newly purchased Hebrew phrase book. I quickly realized that if I got good at reciting the phrases listed in it, I would only succeed in tricking people into responding to me in a language I still would not understand. I looked up the sentence, "I speak only a little Hebrew. I speak English," then used a few other sentences to figure out how to change it to "I do not speak Hebrew. Do you speak English?" Had that memorized in five minutes, and it served me better than the whole phrase book would have.
@@trishoconnor2169 what's the point though? You could literally say that in English because the people who can speak English also understand it, and the rest won't be of any help. I guess one benefit is that it serves as an icebreaker and shows some respect by making an effort to learn that one phrase, but from a utilitarian point of view, it does nothing.
I recommend the film "Persian Lessons" about a Jewish young man in a concentration camp who pretends to know Persian. A German officer takes him as his language tutor. The plot has a great script, both suspenceful and cleverly entertaining.
I can’t wait to check that out
@@languagejones6784 high stakes fake polyglots
Number 9, I spent a summer in US in a Russian immigrant bungalow colony. My spouse is a native Russian speaker. Any attempt of mine to speak Russian in the colony, was always answered in English, by the colony members. If I tried it in our bungalow , I was told (most likely correctly) that my Russian was terrible. If I tried speaking Russian to our 18 month old child, the child would burst out laughing. I think the child gave me the most accurate review.
Well, it's very hard to listen to English accent for long tbh, but I can advise you next time to start with asking people if they wish to help you with your skills, cause if you don't they may assume you find it too hard to speak in their language and they want to spare you that "torture". The video author would pass as a Russian in an American movie as they always speak that way, lol.
P.S. Many "colonies" who migrated long enough have language that is quite different from the modern one.
Fuck all those people. Watch Bald and Bankrupt. My guy has the strongest English accent and doesn't much care for grammar, but has wonderful conversations with people regardless!!! Don't be discouraged by mean babies and silly bungalow dwelling Ruskis. I would be glad if someone took the time to learn my language even if the grammar or fluency wasn't top notch!
terrorussian*
@@somerandomvideos645 Get the hell outta here u .... of a ...
@@somerandomvideos645 cry about it
I didn't have a French person tell me I was speaking horribly, but they did switch to English right after I said bonjour. Then again, I can't blame them. Working at a gas station in Quebec, on the border of Ontario, I'm sure they hear all sorts of anglophones butchering their language. It still made me appreciate the folks in Mexico who appreciate you trying to speak Spanish and will even help you out.
The Quebec border has lots of English. I studied French in uni and went to rural France where they also switched to English after my greeting. 😂 in Tulum they thought I was fluent in Spanish even though I know ten words. Guy stopped talking about his bribe to a cop and pointed to me saying I speak Spanish.
Many French people would assert that Quebecois also butcher the French language.....😂
@@BonMooney Except that by the same measure you can also claim that Parisians butcher the French language, since neither group speaks it how it used to be spoken before Quebec was colonized but they give the impression that Quebecois started as modern Parisian and then degraded.
@@BonMooney I was going to type the same thing. lol
Yeah, it’s a nice thing about speaking Spanish as a second language that Mexicans and other Spanish speakers will try to help you. ❤ I found the same thing in Italy when I visited Rome. People were really nice about trying to help me when I tried out the elementary stuff.
I will respect the channel’s desire not to name and shame TH-camrs who at best exaggerate their polyglot capabilities. But I can say that he’s spot on about what they do. I frequent an Indian restaurant that a well known Polyglot TH-camr visited after claiming to learn the regional Indian language in a few hours. The owner was surprised and happy to see a white American speaking our language. However the TH-camr made a lot of mistakes and asked the staff to translate when he couldn’t understand, and asked them how to say things. The video clip apparently edited all that out and just made it look like he was much more proficient in the language then he really was.
That's 100% how I expect all of those videos to be in reality. Honestly it's sad. Because I'm sure said youtuber (and I'm sure I know which one you're talking about) could legitimately learn the language, but they push this lie that they can do it in hours when that's just not how that works.
@@RingsOfSolace I figured that anyone who'd watch this video and then read the comments would have a pretty good idea of whom I was referring to. To be fair the owner of said restaurant was happy to have someone make a video in his restaurant and to hear a foreigner trying to speak our language. But again the idea that he learned the language at all, let alone in a few hours, is a joke at best and probably closer to a scam. There's a reason why he never does any live videos with speakers of the native American, Indian and African languages he claimed to learn so quickly.
Haha. I think I also know of said TH-camr. In his defence (if you could call it that), he was inspired to learn from another TH-camr who died recently and I think he's taken it upon himself to continue in his footsteps.
I'm okay with him giving it a shot. Hopefully he becomes more proficient.
This is why I enjoy the more honest variety, who leaves in the part where the locals correct his grammar, teach him new words, etc. that is so much more wholesome
@@johnbensin2203 who died
Richard Fenyman told a story in his autobiography about a time he went to Brazil as ... I think it was basically a guest lecturer for a semester? So he spent some time trying to learn to speak (Brazilian) Portuguese even though he was told he could lecture in English because he figured the students would learn better if they weren't trying to learn and translate at the same time. He was later on an airplane with a Portuguese couple and was talking to them and they were amazed that he spoke even a little bit of Portuguese, so he started to explain how/why he knew it, and realized partway into a sentence that he'd forgotten how to say "so" in Portuguese. However, he also realized that, when there's an English word derived from Latin, the Romance languages will quite frequently have a close cognate, so he thought "consequently = consequentemente" and used that. Which impressed them even more that he knew such long words.
É o Feyman pae 😎
Genius. One of my favorite people ever. I love that his interests were so broad and varied. He just seemed to have been engaged with life, whether that was playing the bongos or doing physics.
Feynman meteu o pau no ensino àquela época, and still goes on…
Hum being portuguese im kinda pissed off by that portuguese and brazilian are too diferent languages
@@cmmmmmmmw He was a great physicist for sure, but aside from that, not somebody to look up to.
Brilliant! Finally someone talked about these things! I see “polyglots” speaking Spanish TERRIBLY with so much confidence. It’s insane. And my own audience is often really good at English, but they just don’t have the confidence when they speak. Confidence is so powerful.
And Spanish is one of the languages they tend to know better too due to its popularity. When I see them pretend to speak German or Turkish (my two best languages) they're unintelligible.
my family is 🇩🇴 & 🇵🇷 and language learners and non-caribbean latinos who are from the US have told me my spanish is wrong or that i’m saying things “incorrect” referring to my grammar and phrase usage.
most people don’t understand that there’s more to spanish than just spaniard and mexican spanish lol i find that most learners who are as fluent as possible in the mexican dialect are even unfamiliar with caribbean spanish and will correct learners who are learning a dialect like, for example, puerto rico.
Like Peggy Hill? 🤣
Languages aren't sacred entities... You just can master a language when you practice it. What's the problem if people speak a foreign language terribly? Better than be a proud monolingual "because my language is better than the others!".
@@vervideosgiros1156 there's no problem with speaking a language terribly. The problem is, when they try to trick you into thinking they are great at it for clicks
I've been learning a new language intensively for a year and a half, practising every day, and I honestly feel like those videos where people "sneezed and suddenly became fluent in a new language" are making light of the time and effort it actually takes.
they also just don't speak it. they learn to say some phrases, that's not difficult.
exactly!! same with fake musicians ....denigrating all the work it takes 🙄
I think it's somewhat possible to pick up a language quickly, but it was probably preceded by a lot of unconscious practice. When I started studying Japanese I would often just 'know' the meaning of words even though it was my first time studying it. I didn't even know that I knew them, but I have watched a lot of anime over the years. Some of it has clearly rubbed off, because when it came to writing, my ability to memorize things was significantly worse.
But when I say quickly, I'm still talking months and years.
@@Aerroonit's easy to learn similar languages, like German and English, for me as Russian speaker it is hard to learn English, and much more easier to learn Polish.
@@overgrownkudzu This is what a lot of people from English-speaking countries like the US and Australia think "learning a language" amounts to because their schooling gives them this impression. I've met so many people who told me they "studied German" at high school and it turned out they could say "Guten Tag" but had forgotten "Auf Wiedersehen" already.
As a blunt and rude Russian I will say it bluntly and rudely: your Russian is very good! The American accent is very strong of course, but there are no mistakes. The switch from the formal "you" to the informal "you" is a little surprising but I can assume that you have created a strong bond with the other person during the short dialogue. 🤣
Honestly though, it fits *very* well with the role of someone who can't actually speak russian and simply memorized stock phrases without understanding what they mean haha
@@floppyearfriend You are right. Recently I have watched a video in which Ikenna talks to his girlfriend in a bunch of languages. When he speaks in Russian, the phrases with one or two words are ok, but when he tries to say a three word sentence, he makes a mistake.
ага, особенно вопрос "что вы делаете?" вместо "чем вы занимаетесь?" или что-то типа того. русский иностранный как русский иностранный. ничего больше.
Even if I could form sentences properly, i'd still be constantly mixing up endings and messing up formal/informal.
I am learning Russian but as a Czech I dont have much trouble with it. Only I thought I would be able to watch movies and understand pretty much everything right away but there are surprisingly many more different words than I expected. The basic words are generally the same but I will likely need another 6 months to learn enough new words to watch a movie without stopping every 5 seconds and looking into a dictionary what half of the words in a sentence mean. Moreover sometimes you pronounce words bit differently than how they are written which is uncommon in czech language. Like пожалуйста where you cant really hear уй.
#11 Be very generous with the level of linguistic complexity, nuance and detail you put into subtitles
I speak native Russian, C2 (native-like proficiency) English, C1 (advanced) Spanish and Turkish, B1 Portuguese and
Learning Japanese and Ukrainian. And it took me 15 years to be able to switch between 4 languages in a natural way and hold a profound conversation. Like when you can talk to natives for hours. I know the eye are people out there who are better and faster learners and speakers than me but I still think 4 languages at that level is a great achievement :)
It absolutely is! Having small talk is nice but it feels so rewarding to really connect with people in other languages and have actual conversations. To me speaking about opinions or telling longer anecdotes/stories is the hardest.
It is. When someone claims to know more than 6 languages, I wonder what level of proficiency they count as "knowing" a language. Anything more than ten, I think they're lying. I say this because I've actually studied a few languages and know what a huge, intractable undertaking each one is.
@@loisavci3382agreed. i knew a girl in the past who claimed to know ten languages. these included some of the hardest languages, such as chinese and thai. i speak mandarin fluently so i would try to ask her to speak mandarin but she always avoided demonstrating any sort of ability in any of the ten languages she claimed to know. needless to say, she most likely did not know ten languages lol.
@@loisavci3382 I agree how one determines language competency, which is quite often exaggerated with bilinguals (those not raised by parents fluent in a different language than their residency), who than actual polyglots. However, you cannot compare your perceived difficulties with others having similar problems.
English C2, Russian C1, Spanish B2 and basic Italian and French... all good fun... sometimes!
Very interesting because I follow a European polyglot here who claims to speak a lot of languages and he IS good at identifying them. I've watched dozens of his videos and it struck me that he always uses the same phrases with people in their language. "I like [country] very much, I like the food especially. I like to make new friends. It's fun to meet new people." And when they invariably ask him how he can speak [language], he says, "I speak [language] because I have a friend here who speaks it." It's always the same phrases. But he never gets into a real discussion with them (unlike a couple of others I follow here, who can tackle any subject and respond intelligently). You've given me a lot to think about.
Is it W..... ??? If it's his, he's the worst
@@lawtraf8008 Yup.
@@pjperdue1293 I knew it. As soon as you said European polyglot I knew it was him. When I first discovered that guy, I was impressed and fascinated by him. Then when I heard him said that he speaks 29 languages, I was like "Stop your BS". That's when I found one of his video where he interviews random people and give them prizes if they speak a language that he doesn't speak. In that video he stumbled upon a French lady, I was very excited to hear him speak French because 1) French is one of my 2 native languages and 2) I saw him in another video listing French as one the languages that he speaks. The French girl told him " I'm enjoying my summer here, I usually come to Amsterdam every year" and that guy replied " I love French people, the cheese in Paris is very delicious, I visited the Eiffel Tower a year ago", I was like wtf... What does that has to do with anything she said ?? Why isn't he asking her what she usually does in Amsterdam and keep the conversation going ??? That's when I realised that he actually can't hold a general conversation in French. It looks like he just memorised a few words/sentences and be using them everytime he want to show that he speaks French. I saw a similar comment from an Italian who said the exact same thing. Apparently the guy was butchering a bunch of random sentences in Italian. Like you said, he's good at identifying languages but doesn't speak 90% of the languages he claim to speak. I actually wonder how many languages does he actually speak.... I genuinely can't stand these fake polyglot.
@@lawtraf8008 exactly. I liked him at first as well but as I watched more videos it was clear from the subtitles that he just repeats the same phrases over and over. I know a bit of French and Spanish, I definitely wouldn't list them as languages I actually speak but when I saw him speaking those, even I could tell he's pretty bad at them.
@@Starkiller935 We're the same. I don't claim to speak a language if I can't actually understand everything and hold a conversation. I speak 3 languages fluently: Comorian (native language of the island where I'm from), French ( second official language of my country) and then English ( I'm 21, I learned and started speaking English 3 years ago when I moved to an English speaking country to study). Those are the 3 languages that I claim to speak when someone asks me because I actually do speak them. I started learning Spanish recently and I would say I'm doing quite well and can understand and converse quiet a bit but still wouldn't claim that I speak Spanish. The funny thing is that my spanish is atleast 5 times better that the French he claim to speak.
Btw, where are you from and how many languages do you speak ?
My husband trained as an interpreter nearly fifty years ago although he ended up in a completely different profession. His French, although without a trace of an English accent, is now quite ropey because he rarely gets a chance to speak it. The language he knew least well (Latin American Spanish) is now exceptional because there's a Latino community in London and he uses it often. Immersion in a language is the best way and use it or lose it is totally true.
No such thing as latin American Spanish
@@dukewilliam3660 I speak that shit
@@dukewilliam3660could you elaborate on this somewhat controversial statement?
@@dukewilliam3660 well, there are many latin american spanishes :) None sound like castiliano. maybe colombian.
I like the use of the word ropey
I could not t agree more on your comment of "do not pick Hungarian with all the cases". A bilingual (English - German) guest specialist at my work place once proudly announced that he cracked the code of Hungarian language by studying the menu in the cafeteria and catefully analyzing the elevator security tab for 2 weeks. He explained us what he made of the endings and the sentence structure. None of them were correct or even slightly close to what was really happening. He then made up his mind to impress the cafeteria lady by asking for milk for his coffee in Hungarian. He said it was a great thing thst cow and milk starts with the same two letters in Hungarian so it would be easy to remember. Well, it was easy to mix up so he asked for a coffee with a cow (sometimes with THE cow when he accidentally used a definitive article). The cafeteria lady acted like nothing happened, did not bat an eyelid and gave him milk and he was so happy.
but what is the elevator security tab?
he’s a bit confused but he’s got the spirit
ok
@@arawilson i guess its the paper brief talking about how you must not use elevator in fire, not allow children alone, call help if gets stuck and all of that stuff
The cafeteria lady is the real MVP here
I've noticed this many years ago, when polyglot videos started coming up. I'm fluent in 4 languages, and it really bothered/frustrated me that some "polyglots" who obviously do not know how to speak the language pretends to speak it. I wrote a comment on one of those videos and was downvoted into oblivion for calling them out. So, thank you very much for making this video and exposing the truth of these languages grifters.
Yeah, the worse is that the audiences are usually simping them very strongly and prasing those fakers into heavens for nothing and if you not do that then they will bite down your head.
I am highly proficient in 4 languages and still find myself learning after many decades - and that includes my native tongue! Still, I am slow so I am quite impressed with folks who master basic vocab, grammar patterns and passable accents in days or weeks.
You were downvoted to oblivion? On TH-cam?
@@_P2M_ you must be new to TH-cam. There was a downvote system long ago.
@@ghmj2607
I know there was. I've been on TH-cam for many years. It's just that there's been no such thing since Google+ wormed its way into TH-cam, which was in 2013.
To think you'd still remember something like that after a decade. Just wow.
As someone who was born and raised in Portugal, "You might as well speak Portuguese, which is Spanish spoken in French" made me laugh. What a simple and effective way to describe it. 😂
Haha! I just came back from Portugal and a waiter basically told me that.
As Spanish native speaker I'm totally agree with that description 😂
I'll raise my chapeu to you for that.
While this is less true for my Brazilian accent, I broke when I heard that one.
I'll remember that one!:-) haha
Your French person saying it is terrible was funny to me. French is my first language from my mother and father. I went and lived in Japan for four years to translate Japanese and English for the military. When I came home, I answered my mother in French... with a Japanese accent. 😆🤦 She smacked me. In public. Yelled at me in French to just speak my horrible English and not butcher her language. I was careful for the rest of my 2 weeks visit at home before returning to Japan. 🤣
T'as une mauvaise mère
Did you work for a US military base?
@@MrBreaknet Yes. I went to a few bases, but worked with one command for most of the time.
If that is a true story thats hilarious!
sounds like amean mom
I've noticed that some of these youtubers sometimes use a kind of fake stutter, where they repeat a few words over and over whilst they are thinking of the next part of the sentence, to make it look like they are more fluent than they are, because if you don't understand what they're saying, you just hear them talking fast!
Finally someone says this. I lived in Shanghai for 7 years, so whenever I see TH-camrs speak Chinese and get a typical “wow you speak so well” responses, it’s underwhelming to me.
And listening further, the accent sounds exactly like a typical American speaking Chinese with a heavy accent.
And you hit it on the head, a lot of the phrases I hear are the exact same. It’s doing the most basic things for a shock.
I agree. You can't be fluent without being immersed in the language and I don't see how you can be immersed in a few languages in a short amount of time
What's impressive is a foreigner learning Shanghainese
There was a guy on TH-cam who did that
@@anpleidhceeireannach9498 I don’t know if it’s the same guy but I do remember someone who was married to a shanghainese and I think he might have been from Germany. He used to do comedy skits
@@anpleidhceeireannach9498 Funny you mention Shanghainese.. l lived in Singapore and studied Mandarin… Then, later lived in Hong Kong, married a woman who was born there, but whose parents were from Shanghai and spoke Shanghainese… I tried to learn Cantonese, it my mother in law would mix her Shanghainese in with Cantonese… Not to mention, I would forget words in Cantonese so would use, or be more comfortable with pronouncing, Mandarin words… So now, when speaking Cantonese, I still wind up mixing without realizing some words are Mandarin (or even Shanghainese)… Kind of made me want to give up on continuing to learn more…
Yes I was wondering why youtubers love to make this "white guy speak Chinese in Chinatown" video but I would rarely see similar content for other major language like Russian or Arabic that's also considered hard to Westerners. Turns out it's because Chinese typically react very generously to other people making an attempt to speak their language. The same applies to the Japanese who also tend to give very generous feedback, but more white people have actually learnt Japanese so it's harder to fake to the youtube audience.
Dad would try to learn "please" "thank you" and 1-10 in as many languages as possible. It really doesn't take a huge vocabulary to impress people that you're trying to relate to them and that their English is better than your second language.
Dad's favorite trick was "do you mind if I listen?". Made people unsure if they could get away with saying things in front of him.
Real polyglots can be easily identified by how much depth they go into.
For example, a fake polyglot in Chinese would probably only do videos where they go to a supermarket in Flushing and talk with strangers. A real polyglot in Chinese does comedy skits, talk about some specialty subject... basically the same stuff you'd expect a TH-camr to do if everything was in English.
Loic Suberville comes close to that. He makes comedy skits in English, French, and Spanish. Sometimes all three in the same video. He can have long conversations in those languages, too. But being a polyglot means knowing four or more languages fluently so you would call him trilingual which is still impressive.
Dogen has entered the chat.
Think it also depends on their channel and the videos they like to make and people like to see. If a certain niche is your calling cars and you have millions of subs , why change ? Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken. I enjoy seeing polyglots of all abilities be brave and talk to strangers. I find it scary to try to practice my Spanish even in my Uber or to a co worker. I am far from fluent but I know enough to get by and much much more than someone who hasn’t studied Spanish or done hundreds of hours of lessons
@@AZ-ty7ub Dogen is brilliant and I love him and his content, but it feels weird to bring him up in a discussion about polyglots. To my knowledge he only speaks 2 languages. His overall phonetic prowess is obviously stunning so the word "only" is also weird here, but I think linguist or somesuch would be a more fitting title as to me Polyglot is at MINIMUM 3 languages and I'd usually expect 4-5+, while hyperpolyglot is nothing more than exaggeration unless you can at least *claim* to have some level of ability in 7+ languages or smth.
@@simone8172 Man Dogen speaks his TL so well to a point so few of us ever reach that he's an honorary polyglot in my eyes.
I’m so glad someone made this video. Thank you. I’ve been studying mandarin for over 10 years and I’ve been doing it without any formal classes. It’s been a slog. And you are right, my family is Dutch and that language is technically much easier to speak but the Dutch are a lot harder to please than the Chinese. And so thanks to the wonderful kindness of all the poor people who have suffered through conversations with me, I have persisted. For better or worse.
But it’s really something else to see how many TH-camrs have mastered mandarin in 6 months. And I’m still over here trying to ask the shop keeper where they keep the honey but I keep asking her where they keep their bees. And you’re telling me you learned to read in 6 months? Really? Reaaaallly? Those people definitely exist because I’ve met them, but those people are beautiful freaks of nature but they know they are special. They aren’t out their telling everyone “you can achieve the same thing my elite athlete brain can do… if you just study more and do some productivity hacks”
It’s not really how many years you’ve been learning that matters. It’s how many HOURS of learning you’ve put in, and what kind of learning and how focused you were while learning. Will Hart (on TH-cam) reached a level that could pass as a native Chinese speaker in just two years, but he put a lot of time and effort into it, and had lots of Chinese friends who were willing to speak with him in Chinese and correct his mistakes. I’ve been learning for about 6 years, and have reached a decent conversational level. My wife and I pretty much only talk in Chinese, so it’s good enough to talk about day to day stuff. But I barely put any effort into it after the first couple years. Now I just learn new words passively while listening or reading or looking up words in Pleco, and that’s it.
Of course, it’s true that some people are smarter than others, better at languages than others, have better methods for learning, and/or a better environment. But for the most part, the most important factors are simply the amount of input and output, that is, the amount of focused time spent on reading, writing, listening and speaking. Ideally, the input should be comprehensible and the output should be corrected when mistakes are made. And you have to use it consistently. If you are doing alright, and then you don’t speak Chinese for a couple months, you might have forgotten some of what you learned.
If you’ve been learning for ten years and still mix up basic vocabulary words, I would guess that you probably were either not focused in your learning, not consistent, haven’t had the ideal environment, or haven’t been using the best methods.
@@artugert It's not unusual for people to learn japanese in around 2 years, but they had to read many books, and listen to it from morning to night everyday. Most people will never do that so they don't know what's truly possible.
Argh -- I am one of those kids who came to the northeastern US from China as a toddler and promptly forgot all her Chinese. I was visiting some family around 2010 -- we met at a fairly international Hainan resort -- and I wanted some maple syrup with the pancakes and waffles they were serving.
I'm sure there's a way to say 'maple syrup', but at the time, 'feng tang' was only getting me 'honey' from the waiter. (not 'oh honey' either).
@@life_is_the_proof_of_god lmaoo i only realized op was mixing up 'honey' and 'bees' after i read your comment. for some reason i misread the original comment and thought they were mixing up *money* and 'bees'. i was so confused trying to figure out an expression for 'money' that even came close to sounding like 蜜蜂 lol.
Is it really that the Dutch are harder to please? I'd argue their English is on average just so good that they'd rather have a smoother conversation for both participants by switching to it
Pretty good video, you're spot on.
Also, the more languages a faker pretends to speak, the less likely a single person will expose all of them. For example, if I claim to speak only a handful of languages, I might meet someone who can properly assess my level of fluency in all of them, and expose me. If, however, I claim to speak like two dozen languages, not a single person in the world can assess my level in all of them. I've seen some of Wouter Corduwener's videos, who pretends to speak 29 languages, and people regularly comment: "Being an X-speaker I can tell his X is very bad, but it's still impressive he speaks so many other languages."
I can sorak English, Portuguese anf French, and some Italian and Spanish, as well as having a good oassive knowledge of Catalan. He seems a bit limited in all of them, as far as I know. His Portugyese accent is very bad, but he doesn't claim proficiency in all of those languages.
@@RogerRamos1993 No, he doesn't claim high proficiency in most languages, but he has a VERY broad definition of speaking a language.
@@PetraStaal If you can communicate in a language beyond the badics, you can speak the language.
That guy exposed himself in his own video speaking with a genuine polyglot who wanted to talk about his experiences studying languages and their respective literatures
@@jadwiga220 which video?
I can relate with point 9. I speak both Dutch and Japanese, and the response to non-native speakers is very different in both cultures. Dutch people will often switch to English on the first hint of you making a mistake, whilst most Japanese people will almost always respond with "日本語上手" (your Japanese is great) even if the only thing you did was say one Japanese word really badly.
I think it's also because:
-most japanese can't speak english well so they won't switch to it
-most japanese won't assume you can speak english well unless they know you're from english speaking country
-most japanese are flattered by people speaking their language at all as it's very hard
same here in poland. when I see a foreigner trying to speak polish, I'd compliment them for effort.
@@wilhelmu Well yea, I'm already aware of all of this; it's exactly the point that that was being made in the video. Different cultures exist within different circumstances, and these generally affect people's response to non-native speakers. I was simply adding my own related anecdote.
@@wilhelmu Most Japanese don't have many opportunities to practice speaking in school. I saw the same sort of thing in China where reading and writing English is mandatory to pass their school and get into college, but listening and speaking are barely covered.
There probably are other cultural differences that lead to it, but that's a big one. Nobody gets comfortable speaking a language without conversing, and if they do get comfortable, it's usually not quality language use.
How was it learning Japanese vs learning Dutch? I spent 6 years studying Spanish in school, but just from playing several Japanese video games and watching various anime I feel like it's much easier for me to actually listen to the language and process each word for Japanese than Spanish.
I can even kind of tell how simple or complex Japanese translation for a show/game is and notice for some words where the direct translation isn't used to make it fit the context better.
I've been watching One Piece lately and it's so interesting as I understand so much of it whereas while watching Hunter X Hunter I didn't get nearly as much.
@@HairyJuan japanese is super easy to learn to speak and understand, it's the writing that is hard. if you want a recommendation for anime that has simple language for beginner, watch Precure. If that floats your boat, of course.
My cousin is a polyglot, although I'm not sure if she would fit the definition of a hyperpolyglot. She speaks, reads and writes German, Polish, Russian, Greek, and Khmer fluently. She also has a basic reading and conversational level of Hebrew, Spanish, Portugese and Italian. The thing is though you wouldn't know she was a polyglot unless you asked, or unless you were a family member who knew her well enough to know how many languages she spoke. She doesn't go around waving her language proficiency in people's faces, she's not on TH-cam trying to sell courses, she just happens to a) be able to learn new languages fairly easily and b) loves to travel and engage with different cultures. I am always highly suspicious of people making claims like being a hyperglot when they are either doing it to make money off people, or doing it for views and attention. This was good information you presented here.
Thats amazing. I speak Khmer by mother tongue. Also Russian by mother tongue, but im learning German has a hobby. These languages are so different in structure and tone, to speak them all fluently is no easy feat! Shes amazing!
I'm guessing she can also do English fluently as well.
What's the problem with views and attention? People do it with music, gym, politics, philosophy, religion, etc... That's natural.
By Greek do you mean ancient Greek or modern Greek because those two are extremely different
@@RogerRamos1993 Making money off a talent is not bad. What is bad is cutting corners and speedrunning a discipline for the end goal of making money. You can fake having philosophical knowledge or going to the gym for clout and attract the ire of those communities as well.
Actually, using fillers to stall while you try to figure out how to phrase your response is super useful when you learn a language. For example, I really used a lot of "it's like... you know", "you know what I mean", and "you know what I'm saying" as I was learning English. It made me feel more confident when having conversations.
I think the obvious thing is that even though fillers are very useful, both for getting more time to think and to be relatable to native speakers, that fillers are just that--fillers. It can't be the only thing you know. It's like how people complain their meat is full of "fillers" rather than real meat. You need to be interested in having a genuine conversation with the other person. You must have something to say of substance. Wait long enough and people will surely pick up on it. Fillers in and of themselves are not bad.
THIS, YES!
I've studied Chinese as a hobby for years and I was very aware that I never got much more than getting by, but never fully able to hold a very consistent conversation. Strangers and friends would say "Oh wow, you were speaking Mandarin, you sounded so proficient", but once you always use the same conversation patterns, it'll get very easy to repeat the same "mind script". So I never dared to say that I could really speak a language if I couldn't hold a fluid conversation in it.
You can always say that you are beginner or intermediate (depending on your self assessment). You can always, "Oh I really suck at vocabulary, they are my weak points" stuffs like that.
I was exactly the same for years, you have to force yourself to go out of your comfort zone, like choose random topics with an italki teacher, consume a variety of content in Chinese and constantly note down words you're not familiar with. After sometime of doing this I really can say I can speak the language outside of very specialised or complicated topics. It just takes time, 加油！
There’s nothing wrong to start out that way. All language learning begins somewhere. It’s when you have a reason to speak to people in that language, like being in sales, acting as a translator, or marrying someone that speaks that language is when you become fluent. Otherwise, it’s really hard to get passed basic level.
@@jshurt1814 More deep interaction = more learning opportunity.
Also, the more the necessity, the more it forces you to learn. If you can get away with broken language, you are likely to progress slowly rather than speeding up.
Honesty still remains the best policy. It’s necessary to put our egos on a diet.
I refuse to claim that I really speak Spanish, but I'm also the only person at work who speaks ANY Spanish so... catch me asking the patient if she needs a refill on her "medicine for the sads" because I don't know how to say "antidepressants" 😂 I'm genuinely not even close to fluent but I speak well enough to get by in a casual conversation or short interaction and my accent is so on point that I definitely COULD trick people into thinking I'm fluent.
Oh my god, it’s the worst being the person with the most knowledge about a language when that knowledge isn’t fluent lol
I learned a little bit of Italian as a kid (emphasis on a little) due to living there briefly. Moved to Texas where there was a kid that only spoke Spanish in one of my classes. The teacher asked me if I learned Italian, and I said yes. So then they told me to be this students partner for the class and translate things since Italian and Spanish are so similar. I was 7 or 8 lmao. I’d learned simple phrases, counting, letters, colors, animals, stuff like that. I was able to communicate one sentence lmao. So glad ways to translate in real time are a thing now
Antidepresivos
Next time, if you're trying to say a word that sounds like it might come from Latin (long word and related to medicine are two strong signs), then just wing it and say it in a Spanish-sounding way: "antidepresantes" or something like that. It's actually "antidepresivos" but you would have been understood no problem.
@@joavim People trying to say they "were embarrassed" by using "embarazar" 💀💀💀
#9 is so true. I was told multiple times in Moscow to speak English when I mispronounced Russian words. I learned a rather old form of Russian with a weird accent from my great-grandparents who immigrated from western Russia but were born in Belarus, and then tried to learn both Belarusian and Russian at various times, mainly from watching TH-cam videos. Russians were not impressed and let me know very quickly. I've been trying to do genealogical research in Russia and Belarus (probably won't be able to continue that for a very long time now) so reading old records including some written in cursive has been my main goal. So, I couldn't care less about being conversational, but in small towns where few speak English, having some ability to communicate is important.
Oh, the Cyrillic cursive is something else. Lots of people have beautifully regular handwriting shapes that make it extra hard to, you know, tell different letters apart. Plus genealogy means looking at church registers and stuff, where the titles and headings are in Church Slavic. That's always fun.
On the ground there's something of a language continuum between western Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and southern Russian. The grammars, vocabularies, and pronunciations get mixed and matched. This way of speaking takes a lot of guff for not being one of the standard languages, but lots of people do it, probably including your great-grandparents.
You might be able to find the shortest path from what you know now to a pretty consistent and widely understandable speech by steeping yourself in Russian-language audio from cities in that area. (City residents tend to speak Russian, even in Minsk and Kyiv, where the surrounding countrysides speak Belarusian and Ukrainian.)
Or you could say to heck with all national standards anyway and learn Medžuslovjansky jezyk / Interslavic :)
Guys, thank you both for your efforts in learning languages of this part of the World. Sorry that Russians are so harsh with their critics. I know it can be really tough for a person from Europe or North America.
@@eritain Personally, I quite enjoyed learning to write Cyrillic cursive. It's not so bad once you accept the unusual quirk that it's a write-only script. ;)
Well, Moscow is noticeably different culture to the rest of Russia (and even more so compared to Belarus, even if we share same language and are of the same USSR origin). They are significantly more xenophobic and gatekeeping in many aspects. Sometimes it gets as stupid as breaking ties with their own family because if they not live in Moscow they are inherently worse people, lol.
A lot more people would be genuinely impressed if a foreigner speaks any Russian at all (even though English native pronunciation sounds funny af), because we are taught everywhere that Russian is the_most_complicated_language_to_ever_exist. Cheers from Minsk :)
@@Nworthholf being a Moscowite myself I admit that many Moscowites are snobs. Sorry for that! This character is not our best.
This is so on point. I studied Thai language at the School of Oriental and African Studies and subsequently worked as a interpreter for the International Red Cross about a decade ago. Thai is one of those languages that is often used by "Polyglots" to illustrate their fluency and they are without fail going for the first trick whilst butchering the pronounciation.
I just know that all the other interpreters that I have got to know that speak these more obscure languages such as Pashtun, Farsi or Thai like I did, have been embedded ( and I am using the term embedded loosly when speaking about Thailand 😂 ) for many years ( 4-6 years ) and put in countless hours and lifetime. The effort it takes is truely mindboggling. There is just no way one can be "fluent" in one year in anything other than Portuguese, Italian or Spanish and even that demands every fiber of your being.
I think there are so many points worth mentioning when it comes to fluency as well which would deserve their own video.
Embedded? Sounds like an operative, how about "immersed?"
Embedded because language takes root and grows in your brain.
You can be "fluent" in spanish in one year only if you don't account for the regional variants. If you try... you are done.
@@juntapiezas All spanish dialects sound the same to me, dunno what the big deal is
@@smoothjazz2143 the deal is the difference between "que te coja un toro" y "comerte una concha". And we are just starting.
2:28 Number 1 - Memorize the basics
3:53 Number 2 - Railroad
4:47 Number 3 - Learn to stall
5:52 Number 4 - Sister languages
7:20 Number 5 - Go easy or go home
7:52 Number 6 - Obscure through obscurity
8:28 Number 7 - Edit deceptively
8:40 Number 8 - Use stereotypes!
9:16 Number 9 - Social engineering
10:00 Number 10 - Shadowing gone wrong
So true! Russians will analyze hard core
I speak several languages fluently and have the degrees to prove it.
I've not encountered anyone who is not in fact at least functional in their claimed target language.
Some people DO claim to speak "just like a native" but don't. I know of no one on youtube who claims to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently who does not.
Did number 10 surprise you?
@@QuizmasterLaw I only speak Chinese up to HSK3, with a few words of HSK4, but I can't pass HSK4 because I don't like to study reading/writing Chinese. I've never claimed I'm fluent in Mandarin, but I've said I can talk "daily life" and live in China (Which I've done!). Is HSK3 proof to claim I speak, "daily life" Chinese? I believe I speak enough Chinese to be a waiter / hostel host, since customers in those jobs will always ask you the same questions, but I definitely could NOT hold a college level job and speak only Chinese at my level
@@QuizmasterLaw really? You've either been really lucky or just not on the internet much.
Certified professional medical interpreter here! 👋 I have a degree in Chinese language, and lived in China for 12 years. You just ruined my whole world because my patients _always_ tell me my Mandarin is better than theirs. 😞
haha it depends on the context, if you're really bad and they say that it's just to sound nice, but when you're actually good the really mean it. it's the same with every other culture in my experience, even Russian believe it or not, I've had Russians tell me my Russian is really good even though I'm only an A2 in Russian lol.
Context 😉
In Turkey if you speak even a little Turkish people will say “Ah, you speak such good Turkish!” They say you know when you’re getting somewhere when they start correcting you. :-)
But if you’re a certified medical interpreter, I’d say you’ve done the work. :-)
@@sazji Wow that's funny because I recently started dabbling in Turkish.
It sounds like a linguistic "bless your heart".
Well said! I'm an Indonesian with Chinese decent. It's always been painful to see TH-cam "polyglots" claiming to speak Indonesian harshly or barely understand how our spoken languages are drastically different than the written one. Nice content!
Edited: thank you for 150 likes
Yeah and they keep saying that it's a very easy language, of course any language is easy if you only study a few basic things
Ada Indonesia coy!!
Yoi betul vs ya benar
That's how drastically different the formal text book official Indonesian language as "easiest language in the world" compare to unofficial colloquial style which vary greatly across the country. And yet many polyglot pretenders are still proudly speaking the text book version that spoken by almost nobody
that's obvious. foreigners will learn standard indonesian and nobody really speaks standard indonesian in our daily lives. we all speak in our respective regional dialects. my aunt is married to a german for more than 20 years and he still doesn't understand us when we speak in our local dialect. just like how people from jakarta won't understand us.
Bro I legit cringe whenever people introduce themselves like "selamat siang, nama saya Pak John" lmao
Thank you - I love that TH-cam has brought out a new issue that didn't exist prior to the monetisation of a video. My Grandfather probably qualified as a hyper polyglot. he was born in Paris with a Norman (not French) Mother and British Father, oh and a German nanny/governess so tri-lingual from birth. In the 1939 British army list he was listed as a class 1 interpreter in 12 languages and a class 2 in 11 further languages. The funny side is that when he was talking to someone in any language other than English and they had some kind of speech impediment - he would acquire it ... very embarrassing.
It's actually very easy to catch a fake polyglot when they started to speak Chinese languages like Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin etc. Because we have different speech patterns like in English, whether it's news report speech, formal cooperate speech or imperial speech. They might catching bits and pieces but can't fully grasps the entire sentences. Plus, Chinese and Japanese have a lots of daily idioms and proverbs we'll be using in a casual conversation, if a real polyglot sure learned a few of them prior.
i learned better japanese watching japanese reality shows than any other way. so many repeated words and phrases that you don’t see in scripted stuff.
I love your sense of humour and your dry delivery… hilarious! #9 Social Engineering was my favourite. In bilingual Canada, I just can’t even forcibly make myself study French. It is so discouraging to get the negative feedback at the outset when I attempt French and then be ignored out of disgust. I am learning Spanish because love, kindness, and friendship is what they show me. They encourage me to continue speaking their language.
As a French national I salute you and encourage you to learn Spanish instead of french. You are right not to put up with us.
French insults transcend nationality. A French friend who was visiting Canada was rudely told by a Quebecker, "Stop trying to use your American High School French!" A Canadian friend used to tell me, all the time, "Votre accent est terrible!" (Which it probably is.)
Mexicans are, on the other hand, mostly polite and supportive, asking, "How long did you live in Mexico to learn Spanish so well?" I have to tell them, "No hablo español. No se muchas palabras, pero tengo la pronunciasion buena. And I've never been to Mexico. Mexico came here." They say, "No, you speak it very well. But how did you learn it?" "Del buen pueblo mexicano."
As a Canadian, i cant upvote this enough!
And to think! You are ina France-light area and getting that disgust. Imagine trying to speak French to someone in Paris, and having the smell of piss waft over you as they sneer at your feeble attempts at communication.
but English people can be super rude. probably because. Canada is predominantly English they do not have to really care about french. i gave you that french people seem to be rude also even in France rudeness is there toward French Canadians. if you are English in France it might even be the worst because the level of a don't give an f is god tier sometimes.
So glad you're back. You gave me the idea of calling myself a 'linguaphile' for which I am very grateful. So much less pressure!!
I think we all needed that, to separate ourselves from the title of polyglot
I am glad you articulated how easy it is to get the basics down. The only real way to become fluent is to make a fool of yourself 1000 times in front of native speakers. Important to point out the differences in levels and how much more effort it takes to become an advanced speaker. I got conversational in Ukrainian within 6 months and could go to a store and a bar and impress people with conversations based mostly around the fact I was a foreigner studying the language. Then I cracked open a book, started translating song lyrics, and was put into University classes with other Ukrainians in Ukrainian and then it turned into Hard Mode.
This is so true ... just go for it! "The only real way to become fluent is to make a fool of yourself 1000 times in front of native speakers."
Mexico and Latin America were great - they would just repeat what I should have said, or calmly tell me what my error was.
In some ways, I think it's better to make a fool of yourself in front of native speakers than to appear more fluent than you are. I got into difficulties more than once as a tourist by asking a phrasebook question passably well, but then I was clueless as to what their answer meant - like the time I only realized *after* I had unpacked my bike and rolled out my sleeping bag, that the campsite owner had probably been saying "Sure, you can camp anywhere here, I'd avoid that spot there though, it's full of big-arse ants that are going to chew you to pieces as soon as you sit down." She must still be scratching her head over why I went straight to that very spot.
@lazygardens i have social anxiety and making a mistake while speaking another language would make me feel like I died
@@DaniZeAlmighty I get that it's a whole different type of obstacle for some people. I have def felt embarrassed a lot in front of people but I would be lying if I said I knew coping strategies for those with legit social anxiety. Speaking a language so few foreigners know definitely gives me a boost of confidence though.
@@DaniZeAlmighty That would make it a bit harder.
This whole genre of videos probably stems from the fact that people think speaking a foreign language is hard. In reality it's usually the learning part that's hard, not the making of mouth sounds. I can probably learn to speak a single phrase in German almost perfectly within an hour, but it would take me years to get fully conversational that way.
I agree. Being able to communicate in a different language is motivating but the real gold and hard work is in all the time you have to spend listening to people from other cultures trying to understand them. Learning languages, to me, is noble because of the process, but to many people it's because of the result.
It stems from the fact that it is very easy to ''bluff'' that you can speak a language when you actually only have an extremely superficial level of knowledge in it, it's simple as that.
You are incorrect in this thinking. Making the sounds of many languages other than your own is in many cases incredibly difficult and in some cases near enough impossible after a certain age.
The same goes for listing.
Take German that you reference, many english speakers find the throat based "ch" sound to be impossible.
Japanese is another example. If a Japanese native isn't exposed to English early enough they will be unable to hear the difference between R and L and find in nearly impossible to pronounce them as a result. There are many phonemes that are like this across languages.
Some people find the rules of a language easier to learn than the sounds and vice versa
@@iniehawk4472 agreed 100% it’s unbelievable how much people overestimate their linguistic prowess.
You actually can't, by the way. You lost the ability to perceive correct German pronunciation by the time you were 1 year old, so you can learn how to make some sound that SOUNDS like correct German to you and to other non-German people, but that is obviously bad to anyone who is actually fluent in German
You need significant amounts of phonetic training and listening practice before you even speak your first word if you want to say something in perfect German
Enjoyed the video. I was in the US Army many years ago and studied Spanish then Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. At the end of the course, you took the standard proficiency test which was two parts - aural and reading comprehension. So you got two scores. The rating was from 1 to 5, and no one who had simply studied the language could get more than a 3-3. In order to score a "4," you had to have a certain amount of experience (years!) in the language. A "5" required that you either be a native speaker or that you had spent years in the country. The government recognized that it was not possible to learn a language quickly. It takes years of constant work and practice. When I got out of the Army, I got a degree in linguistics rather than a language. When you major in a language in the US, it's usually about the literature, not the language. Not that I don't care for literature, but there is a lack of emphasis on practical language use. Linguistics gave me a look at the structure of language, which helped in the languages I studied later. (FYI: your Russian is very good except that you got some stresses wrong...and, yes, I did recognize that you were not speaking Klingon.)
The language studies here (letters graduation) only focus on literature and not on acquiring fluency. You learn grammar, how to read, etc but never how to pronunciate or to speak.
But that military school you attended did not teach you English. If they did then you would know that the word is ORAL not aural.
@@Robob0027 The test was about listening, not speaking. We had oral tests during the course in which we had to converse with the instructors, but the proficiency tests were only about listening and reading.
@@katheryns1219 You completely ignored or misunderstood my comment. I was merely pointing out your misspelling of the word oral. I was not commenting on any other section of your comment and am so glad that you now know how to spell the word correctly. Your reply however illustrates that despite going to a US military academy you still have not managed to write English in a form that can be understood. E.G. 'letters graduation' what does that mean in standard English?
@@katheryns1219 Pls disregard the second part of my reply. This somehow got crossed with my reply to
another person My original reply was purely to point out your misspelling of oral and not about the content of the course you took.
Love your reference to Albert Camus. "The literal meaning of life is whatever you're doing that prevents you from killing yourself."
Camus. I always found Sartre & de Beauvoir more interesting :)
BRB gonna learn everything about camus
I can’t remember much of “The Outsider”, but I remember the main character saying that he slept to pass away the time in prison.
Just watched a video referencing Steve Kaufman, who allegedly speaks 20 languages fluently. One of these was a clip of German where he made a basic syntactical error “ich glaube nicht dass ich *kann* die Grammatik lernen”. If he does that in a 10 second random clip of a language I happen to know, and he makes an error an intermediare speaker wouldn’t, in a language like German which I presume to be much more accessible to him than Chinese, then I have a hard time buying the idea of 20 fluently.
I couldn’t watch the rest.
Back to your advice, it is good for language learning generally. Start with phrases and practice them well, long specific phrases.
Ich hatte vor über 10 Jahren ein paar Videos von ihm auf TH-cam geschaut, als ich glaubte Mehrsprachigkeit in solch einer Größe existiere. Nach kurzer Zeit hab ich ihn aber nicht mehr verfolgt, weil ich eher das Gefühl hatte, dass es um Prahlerei und den Verkauf von Lehrprogrammen geht. Also reines Marketing. Das empfand ich als sehr unsympathisch.
@@tomschreiner3717 Ich habe vor anderthalb Jahren angefangen Deutsch zu lernen, und ich bin stolz, dass ich deinen ganzen Kommentar leicht verstehen konnte 😄
I remember watching a video from Benny the Irish "polyglot". He was learning Japanese and decided to have a conversation with a native after studying it for one day!
Well, he starts by speaking and it all goes well, then the Japanese asks a few basic questions and he keeps repeating the same thing until he decides to say he doesn't understand and the conversation stoped there.... he wasn't able to speak and understand a normal conversation, but only to repeat what he wrote down to say during the video.
Of course it is normal since it was his first day, but he is the one claiming you should speak from day one..... no one should speak from day one, not even babies do that.
I think the question there is does Benny gain anything from speaking from day one. Maybe he learned something or just felt motivation. I don't think Benny claims that you can speak a language to any degree of proficiency on the first day.
@Harry How's it silly? Babies don't just understand language because their brains "develop." Their brains develop, in part, due to language input. (There are also a lot of other developmental tasks that take priority or which speaking depends upon but that's a broader discussion.) Being an adult doesn't allow you to instantaneously understand any language without any input. If it was simply a matter of the development of one's brain, wouldn't that be the case? Adults can imitate language in a way babies can't but they still require a massive amount of input in order to genuinely acquire new languages, which is similar to the manner of language acquisition in babies. Of course, it's different as an adult with all of the structures/grammar/etc. of your native language firmly set and the ability to apply logical thought to the task but that doesn't really make the comparison silly...
Well you should be talking with people on the first day. That's literally the fastest way to learn.
Babies don't learn by picking up a textbook.
@@SeraphsWitness But you can't talk to people without getting a certain amount of vocab and grammar in your head first. And that won't happen on day one.
BUT you should try to actually say the things out load while learning from day one, because your mental pronunciation is maybe seems to be good, but in reality you need lot of practice in action (if it's 1000000% different from your native language's phonology then it is extra important).
@@tovarishchfeixiao well that's not technically true. If it was, then two foreign cultures would never be able to communicate for the first time. Classic history example is Squanto and the pilgrims.
This is the best exposed video I've ever watched! 🤣 Thank you for sharing these important info! It really annoys me people faking being a polyglot, because they don't really know it takes litters of blood, sweat and tears, plus money and unslept nights to become a real polyglot (actually, they know, that's why they go for the easy route 👀 lol). Some people might get encouraged to study languages by watching their content, but it seems most people feel frustrated and discouraged, because they weren't able to "learn as fast as them". To all language lovers that make real efforts to get there, don't give up, you can do it! 💪🏼
Most importantly it takes years. Literally long years, not weeks, not months but years. And each newly learned language to be taken to a decent level is at least 6 years long serious time commitment/investment. Do some people do it for real? Oh yes, some find this fascinating. But most adults do not have enough time to do so, next to their other obligations. Whereas some yes, do so but it comes at the cost. And yes, such adults do invest their free time in making the effort.
Oh I think they know... which is why they don't do it, they just do a few phrases that give the illusion that they studied hard.
*VERY VERY LONG COMMENT*
Information, classification, examples and rants about most TH-cam polyglots these days. Please read it if you have some time :)
I'm a Northeast Indian (which means that I don't have the typical Indian accent. We Northeasterns have a very neutral accent and a lot of foreigners and even Mainland Indians often refuse to believe that we 're Indians due to our looks and our spoken English) who speaks fluent English, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish(because I've lived in all those places for a combined duration of 13 years). I speak these at either C1 or C2 levels. I've always loved languages and am currently learning Spanish(B1), Swedish(B1) and Mandarin(A2, I just started 4 months ago) as well.
I was born and raised in Manipur, so I speak Paite(native dialect), Manipuri(State language), Nagamese(State language of Nagaland, a neighbor of Manipur) and Hindi. So in total, I speak 11 languages (if we include my Mandarin, which only stands at A1 level as of right now).
I am baffled and have always wondered just how gullible people really are . I meant the people who get easily impressed by some TH-cam "polyglot" who simply learns about 10-15 basic introductory phrases in a language, goes to a busy market area, finds native speakers and uses those 10-15 phrases. Look at Xiaoma : His Mandarin is GREAT, no doubt on that. But his other videos where he spoke Mayan, Yoruba, Jamaican, etc. are just pure tomfoolery. "WHITE GUY BUSTS OUT PERFECT xyz LANGUAGE!!!! SHOCKS LOCALS!!!!" Like BRUHHH, you're a million steps away from speaking it perfectly. Many other "Omegle/OmeTV polyglots" simply meet new people online and repeat the same phrases in every single video. Some of the phrases they always repeat are :
"I study *X* language because I love languages and culture" , "I have been studying for *X* months" , "I speak *X* number of languages"(and then they list the languages that they BARELY speak), "I practice with natives on this app" , compliments like "you're smart/ beautiful/ cool, nice, etc." and maybe a few more memorized lines. I wrote those lines in English for y'all to understand but obviously those phrases were said in the target language.
And the funniest part is that such Omegle videos always end abruptly and cuts to a new convo with new people, new language. And why is that? That's because those "polyglots" cut the part of the video where they failed to/ where they no longer understand what the other person is saying. Hence the Omegle interaction ends suddenly and cuts to the next interaction with another random stranger. Lemme list 5 examples each on the three main type of polyglots I've watched and heard. Straight-up NAME DROPS hahahaha.
Omegle/OmeTV polyglots who in actuality, are mostly bilingual and just learnt a lot of phrases in 5-8 other languages :
1. Ryan Hale : Decent Mandarin and Korean coz he used to live in both countries, but the rest is mehhh. His Bahasa Indonesia is almost decent tho. But he keeps repeating the same 💩 like a parrot.
2. Fiki Naki : Good Russian and decent Spanish but basically repeats memorized phrases for other languages like Romanian, Ukrainian, Arabic, German, French and Kazakh. He's currently learning Turkish from his sort-of girlfriend and is actually improving a lot on that one.
3. Kazu Languages : Sorry to say this but pretty much all of the foreign languages he speaks are on A2 level or barely B1 at most. His Egyptian Arabic accent is pretty good for a Japanese guy.
4. Santiglot : As a Spanish guy, he has good knowledge on Latin derived Romance languages but BRUH you gotta watch him struggle with Filipino and other Asian languages (even though his titles claim to be pretty confident in those languages) LOL.
5. Turah Parthayana : This guy lived in Russia and speaks Russian but you HAVE GOT TO watch his vids. His accent is so wrong that I, and a lot of Russians he talks to, find it hard to understand him. He speaks with a heavy Indonesian accent and does not put correct stresses on words and pronunciation. Mind you, putting the correct stress on any Slavic language is an absolute must. If not, the meaning could totally change. For example, the Russian words "to write" and "to pee" are written the same exact way, the only difference lies on where you put the stress. "To write" is pronounced "Pisaat" and "to pee" is pronounced "piisat"
Side Note : No hate on a specific nationality, but ALMOST every Indonesian OmeTV polyglot is on A2 level at most. Hate to say it but that's the truth. They get a lotta views because 95%+ of their countrymen don't speak foreign languages and hence are easily impressed. There's a LOTTTTT of Indonesian "polyglots", look them up.
Some polyglots (not on Omegle) who pretend to know more than they actually do are :
1. Laoshu505000 : May his soul rest in peace, but he claims to speak 50 languages at least to some extent. His Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese are great but the rest are so bad. Just watch his vids to know what I'm talking about. Really a try-hard.
2. Xiaoma : As mentioned earlier, good Mandarin but he stutters and struggles with the rest. And as for his titles.... are they really necessary? If that's perfect Yoruba, then I'm more perfect-er-er-er than you.
3. Wouter Corduwener : He is the definition of ABSOLUTE CRINGE. He simply memorizes really random phrases and says those to foreigners. It's so weird that even the people he speaks to are super confused. He just starts a conversation with phrases like "I like barbecued chicken" to some Chinese people in Mandarin. In another conversation, he opened with "I like Boerenkool with a sausage. Do you also like it?" to a random stranger. Like dude, what kind of a convo starter is that??????????
4. Frankie Light : He works really really hard to learn and I respect him for that. But he's too impatient, as in not waiting to be at least on B1 conversational level before making a vid. He learnt Mandarin by working as a barber in Chinatown, Flushing, New York. That's impressive....VERY IMPRESSIVE. But dude, try to be a bit more fluent before making those Burmese, Russian Yiddish and Arabic videos hahaha.
5. Steve Kaufmann : Yes, I know that he's a very well-known polyglot worldwide but this list is about people who 'pretend to know more than they actually do'. Steve claims he's pretty good at Russian and Ukrainian but me and my Slavic friends have seen it and he speaks Amerussian LOL. He Americanized the pronunciation and accent way too hard to the point that it's an uphill battle to understand if you don't listen to it while giving the utmost, unwaivering attention. He does that with every language btw.
Now, for the people who I truly respect as actual POLYGLOTS, people who fully deserve to use that word in their video titles :
1. GOLUREMI LANGUAGES (Will John) : He's an African-American football(soccer) player who has travelled to and lived all over Europe. Dude speaks fluent Swedish, Croatian, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish and German to name a few. He doesn't really flex about it and just chills with random people on Omegle/OmeTV. He fully understood those languages and can hold a conversation for a really long time.
2. Laoma Chris : He speaks fluent Spanish(well his mom is a native Honduran and dad is German-Chilean) and Mandarin with an almost authentic Beijing accent. He also speaks German really well(4 yrs in high school and was an exchange student in Germany). Other languages he speaks include Italian, French, Portuguese and Cantonese. The reason I put him on this list is because he never claims to be good at any language besides Mandarin and Spanish.
3. Oriental Pearl (Anming) : She has lived most of her life in multiple East Asian countries and speaks great Mandarin, Japanese and is learning Korean (I'm not sure if she's good at it by now, I haven't watched her vids the last few months. Sorry😅). She makes great vlogs and also talk about fake polyglots in a couple of her videos.
4. Raul Camarena : This guy dominates the Romance languages. One thing I love about him is his simple setup. He doesn't try to act real smart, just talking normally like a normal person would on a normal Omegle chat. Straight like that.
5. Christine (Polyglot Stories) : She speaks 12 languages, most of which she does so on a pretty fluent level. The video they shot in Korea was by far the most impressive.
Okay guys, i'm gonna end my lengthy comment here. I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion so feel free to disagree on any/all points that I made. In short, a 'POLYGLOT' to me is someone who can hold a conversation for as long as it takes in at least 5 languages, not someone who learnt a few dozen phrases and taught himself/herself how to say those few phrases perfectly. Oh and btw, I loved the vid @languagejones , keep em coming! Stay blessed.
Thanks for your comment! I've been quite disappointed with the fake polyglots online, too. I want to suggest Lindi Botes and Vladimir (I forgot his last name but his video "European speaks 12 languages"? has a few million views. He's Slovak) as legit polyglots. Good luck on your language learning journey! 😁💪
@@ayszhang Vladimir Skultety🙂
An absolutely fascinating comment. Well worth reading.
Xiaoma is very good at Chinese and his Spanish is good too, but other than those he's not fluent in any other languages (other than English, obviously). I really like Oriental Pearl and have talked to her before. She's a legit polyglot and is pretty honest and smart too.
I have only watched Xaioma, but I did notice he stutters/repeats the same word over and over, even in Mandarin. However, he is usually very transparent about being new to a language, and he admits he prioritizes learning the usual responses to questions like "where did you learn X," "How long have you been speaking X," "why did you want to learn to speak X," etc. but there are plenty of improvised conversations too, so it's kind of obvious he isn't totally faking or trying to be deceptive. I don't think his clickbait titles necessarily mean he's pretending to be more knowledgable than he actually is; in fact, he's pretty damn transparent about his entire video filming process IMO.
As someone who has been studying Chinese for like a year and a half and still struggling, it's a bit relieving to hear that some of the people who claim to be fluent in a couple of months aren't always legitimate, or at least that our definition of "fluency" differ
They aren't legitimate at all. Unless they are youtubers full time and have those 8 hours in a day to learn the language. Even I could learn CHinese to fluency in trwo years. Alas, I have a normal job that takes a lot of time and can't afford learning for 8 hours a day.
Just curious, what do you struggle with? Like the 汉字, pronunciations or just in general?
Lately I watched a video of a "polyglot" who was "speaking" italian (my language) following many of your rules.
He was "talking" to a cook in a restaurant in Italy, yelling much of the time, saying basic phrases most of all. He was talking for the 90% of the conversation.
A guy like this could seem fluent to foreigners who don't know the language, but globally he said almost nothing.
who was it?
@@littledevil8146 the video is this th-cam.com/video/i9pUJAVEa5s/w-d-xo.html
@@massimolisoni4990 thank you
@@littledevil8146 who
I remember when I moved to China having the same impression of one of the trainers. He was honest enough to point out that he wasn't really saying much, it just sounded so good to somebody who didn't yet know how to say those things. And he was right, the Mandarin that I used for things like buying things and getting fed is still very well developed, but a bunch of other areas that I didn't spend a ton of time repeating isn't particularly good.
I really appreciate this video. Over the past few months I have been desperate to learn Polish in time to visit my family in a year. It’s my mother’s native language which most of my family speaks exclusively, and it is HARD. In searching for tips I found myself on the “polyglot” side of TH-cam being bedazzled by their performances. They always felt off and it is refreshing and comforting to see an actual expert speak on the topic. I was starting to feel so inadequate for not being able to learn languages to fluency in a matter of months.
The biggest tips I have kind of depend on your level, but learn the grammar, a whole lot of vocabulary, and then find podcasts/stories/videos of (native) people speaking that language. I’ve always thought reading kids books would be a rly good help since they’re written specifically for those who aren’t as well versed in the language
As a Polish native working as American English interpreter I can tell you: take it easy! Polish is really hard thanks to its sounds, cases and verbs to list a few reasons. Most Poles will be very impressed if you could be able to write or speak basic sentences, as many of us make mistakes despite being native speakers 😛
Let's not even talk about how foreign accents sound mixed with Polish, hilarity ensues 😆
Don't get too desperate. Poles will never tell you that you speak horribly but will appreciate the effort of learning basic stuff, though I understand you want to learn the language to speak to your family.
@@PolishPolackski That is very true! I can say something as simple as “jestem głodna” and my aunts start applauding and kissing me on the cheek. I just hope someday to speak with them at a higher level. They’re from a generation taught only Russian as a second language, so I only have one young cousin who speaks English. Thank you for your encouragement!
@@dansunsomeil oh, once you are in PL, your ears will catch it and your tongue, this psysical one, will naturally move forward toward your front teeth.
You'll be fine - where is a will, there's a way!
This reminds me of the guy who always orders food in Chinese to the amazement of Chinese people but he never seems to have a conversation with them
9:41 something I’ve noticed is some languages have a phrase for “you speak good” that isn’t genuine cuz they don’t want to discourage you or be mean and they’ll have a different phrase for the same thing that’s ***actually*** genuine
As far as I’ve heard, if you are good at the language, they stop saying that you’re good at it.
Actually, I just remembered - allegedly they say “You’ve been in (Japan) for a long time, no?”
Been studying Japanese fairly seriously for about four years, still suck at it. I actually realized that when I first started going online to practice with native Japanese that I was railroading them, I was making sure to talk as much as possible and control the conversation. It probably took me over a week or maybe even a month before I realized I was doing it and it was hindering me. Now I try to be a much better listener and conversation partner not just for my own improvement, but to be kind.
Well conversation is an art. Otherwise you are just giving a speech 😂 Though to be fair I know a lot of people who do this in English.
@@Dalabombana I was subconsciously insecure about my ability, I found that once I started to listen, I learned new things and got much better in Japanese conversation but only after getting over the massive roadbump of being able to hear the language properly.
I am an American living in Japan for many years. I think you've hit on an important hint that will help you. As long as you are doing all the talking you will not improve too much. Hang in there, you'll improve bit by bit.
Im also in deep study of Japanese for a few years. You are probably better at it than you realize. You are almost certainly better at it than any borderline monolingual weeaboo
@@Freeaviator I'm a part time online English Tutor, I actually got the chance to tutor a real Polyglot two nights ago. They are an interpreter at their company, their English was very good especially when it came to business English. They told me they were currently looking to work abroad, they had three countries in consideration, Columbia, Ecuador, or Brazil. I didn't ask them this directly, but one can infer they must also speak Portuguese and Spanish at quite a high level as well if their company is going to send them there as an interpreter.
My son read Mandarin at uni and is very fluent now. However, he had been learning at school for 5 years previous. Some people just take to languages and his teacher was astonished at his pronounciation. She asked him and us whether he had spent any time in China...no. He travelled over the country and loved chatting to everyone. He had a massive go at a taxi driver in Shanghai, who was trying to scam a white tourist (i don't think he expected a tongue lashing) when my wife visited him there...my wife's jaw dropped at his outpouring ! That said, my wife is fluent in two other languages apart from her native tongue.
I would add that a lot of people can find some languages easier to grasp than others. I, myself found Danish, Dutch and German easier to pick up than Spanish or French.
@@timothyclark803 You are an English speaker so ... duh
What really puzzles me when I watch polyglot channels, is kids in their early 20s saying they are fluent in 5-6 languages - how the heck is that even possible unless you've grown up around those languages? It's not just about the basics of grammar, prononciation and basic vocabulary - there are so many life situations and so much phraseology in every language that take years of exposure and active use to absorb. I have pretty good aptitude with languages and am near-native level in one more language in addition to my native tongue (excepting the accent :) ). Even so, I've been studying Italian (not the hardest of languages) on and off for years now and am comfortable in most social situations and even some political discourse (am probably a high B2). That said, if you asked me how to say that there is a gap between the skirting board and the floorboards, I'd be lost. And there are hundreds and thousands of everyday situations like this.
There are a lot of people who believe that "conversational" (as in, you can make yourself understood in most every-day situations, even though you make lots of mistakes) is fluent.
This is why I say that I only am fluent in three. I have studied several more, but since I haven't kept these language skills up to date, I only understand the languages but can't really speak them anymore. It's important to tell the truth to not make a fool of oneself by mistake if you encounter a native speaker 🤣
They’re lying. That’s why. They’re blatantly lying 🤥 🤥 🤥
I know quite a few people who speak 3 or 4 languages natively when growing up (mixtures of English, Russian, French, German, Amharic, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Mandarin in different combinations in different people). If you have grandparents from multiple cultures and a language in the home and a language (or even languages) of the country and you have a natural ability and interest in languages it isn't that extreme. Then one of them I am thinking of specifically learned some related languages while at university, including going on exchange. So I think that they spoke 6 languages truly fluently by 20 including accent, but this person is one of the smartest people I am friends with
On a 1-5 range for language proficiency "fluent" would be somewhere around 2-3 so it's actually not that impressive. It may be good enough to chat with friends about everyday topics but It's quite far from business fluent which means you can use technical terms and can apply nuance. Let alone being on a native speaker level.
So "fluent" isn't actually all that impressive.
Now I understand why Kaufmann stopped claiming that he can speak Russian and switched on Chinese and Arabic
Arabs will tell him he's wrong if he is. Unless he's playing the Islam card then people will save face and keep quiet.
Source: I'm a non muslim Arab and I know
I always look forward to a new video of yours. I’m finishing up my BA in Spanish, of which has of course involved taking several linguistics classes, and I feel like your videos make the study of linguistics much more interesting, engaging, and applicable to the real world. I will say, when I started learning Spanish on my own several years ago, it was the polyglot videos on TH-cam that inspired me to believe that learning a second language as an adult was actually possible, and led me to purchase a subscription to Babbel and Pimsleur, which brought me to the B1/B2 level before I enrolled in school to pursue a degree in the language.
Ay qué bonito, cómo me encantan los extranjeros que aprenden nuestro idioma 🥺
Love the channel, great work! Tip 3 got me a 25/25 in oral part of the DELF B2 back in school (I would have barely passed without making a list of random intellectual quotes the evening before, which I threw in the conversation very casually, without even acknowledging they weren't shit I was saying on the spot). The most hilarious was on the subject of texting with mobile phones, "ecrire, c'est une facon de parler sans etre interrompu".
I saw tip 3 and immediately thought it would be a good tip to ace the oral part of the Delf.
Just a tip to improve your Dutch:
“Omdat” en “want” are synonymous as conjunctions that denote “because”, but the ensuing word order will be different based on which of the two you use, which is where you erred.
“Ik studeer Nederlands *omdat* ik de cultuur leuk vind”
“Ik studeer Nederlands, *want* ik vind de cultuur leuk”
Dutch definitely isn’t that difficult of a language to learn the basics of, but It does have a lot of these little vagaries you’re gonna have to get used to.
Veel plezier met het oefenen
Ben je Nederlands?
@@spellandshield uiteraard
@@heethanthen dan ben je waarlijk gezegend!
hmm interesting how it's the same with weil/da/denn in german but the german "because" words are completely different to the dutch ones
I remember years ago, in China of all places, being in a coffee shop with a ton of Dutch books. I was surprised as to the degree that it looked like somebody was code switching between German and English. Even without any study of Dutch, I could already grasp the very basics of what had been written.
Great video! Thanks for raising awareness on this. It's become so prevalent especially in my line of work (language teaching). There are so many grifters in the space that learn the basics, then convince would be students that they can achieve fluency in a matter of weeks "too", all to sell them an overpriced course, of course, that uses a "unique methodology" they invented. In some of the language courses the "polyglot teacher" never uses the target language save for a phrase or two. It's really causing issues for genuine teachers as students are finding it hard to trust them.
That’s wild to hear! I just released a video on three months of Persian - the basic gist is that you can learn a lot in a few months, but “fluent in three months” is extremely unlikely.
I love this video! my friend was really into polyglot videos and I was very impressed, until I heard them speak a language I knew. once you hear that the tricks they are pulling become very clear.
Great tips. I usually pay attention to how the person holds the dialogue. A fluent person normally acquires the ability to expand on a subject or conversation simply because they have more vocabulary and resources. Usually, a scammer will try to stay away from longer and deeper conversations. Their conversations are usually scripted, which means that if you ask very specific questions, they will have to cheat, change the subject, or end the conversation.
To summarize:
1 - Fluent people usually stretch the subject or conversation.
2 - They are comfortable having longer and deeper conversations.
3 - They figure out ways to answer specific questions.
Fun fact: I learned Dutch as a kid when I lived in the Netherlands. I never took classes, but it was around me and they didn’t dub English TV. I learned by reading the subtitles and my best friend is half Dutch. It made so much sense then. Now, 30 years later, other languages have taken over and Dutch feels odd now.
I’ve known around 6 polyglots in my life. But I love it when people learn other languages. But you don’t need to have a ton of languages under their belt. It’s so difficult to keep a language up organically if you live outside of that country or community. My parents used to have to study up on Japanese before we would go there, despite all my grandparents being able to speak Japanese.
Sadly now they don't dub so much, they just put English subtitles which makes it harder to learn Dutch by trying to watch a familiar movie. I end up just listening to the English and ignoring the subtitles :(
Fun fact: I learned Dutch as a kid when I lived in the Netherlands (because I'm Dutch) - I learned English off MTV and films and later school (same for German). Them moved to Paris and learned French, now in the UK for over a decade and you what? Dutch feels odd now. I'm constantly second-guessing the language I spoke for 3 decades..
Ngl I'd be happy knowing 4, maybe 5 languages. (I don't count sister languages of my native language in that, cause as a slavic person I can *theoretically* hold a real conversation in 5ish languages already + English; but what I'm really doing is talking one language and guessing at what they're replying, not speaking 5 languages).
@@TonyKenny-u5h The comment is about how it's not dubbed? In any case, all children's media is dubbed.
I had to do a double take when I read your comment because I thought I wrote it for a minute. I also learned Dutch from reading the subtitles when I lived there as a child. 😊
Thanks for all this. Let me share this.. Turkish is kind of popular among "them".. To prove they speak turkish they all say "I am learning turkish" .. in turkish.. who would watch them as native turkish.. almost none.. beside for turkish people if you just say "hello how are you" we melt down by joy.. that is it! you are acceppted as turkish speaker.. the challenge would be sayig the answer "I am fine - iyiyim" generally hard to pronounce.. I really wonder why it matters these polygot shows.. I am happy to discover your channel.. subscribed and liked..
I speak some Hebrew and noticed you said "ani lilmod ivrit" but it means "I to learn Hebrew". What you wanted to say is "ani lomed ivrit". And, by the way, yeah, I knew it wasn't Klingon but it really made me laugh 😂
I don't speak or read Hebrew, but I've heard enough of it to immediately recognize it. I would never believe someone who claimed to speak Na'vi or Klingon or something...
I'm a native Hebrew speaker and I couldn't recognize you were speaking it... Also the sentence would be reversely translated as: ' I to learn Hebrew because I like A Hebrew culture and food'.
The best way to know you're good at a language is when you stop receiving a compliment and they just talk to you.
It's nice to receive a compliment, dont get me wrong. It keeps you going! But, it's even nicer to simply talk to people.
For sure! It's the perfect compliment when a native speaker thinks you are also a native and they ask what part of their country you grew up in when you've actually never even been to their country! Then it's even more of a compliment when they argue with you that you are lying about not being "one of them"! 🤭
@@GaleMarie Wow, you must have felt like you grew wings! Hehe, I wish to experience this one day.
@@LAKGE7 It's an amazing feeling! I'm sure you will experience it if you wish...Just listen intently to all the nuances of the language you want to speak so that you can copy the sounds authentically, and pay attention how native speakers phrase things and parrot them...
@@GaleMarie Thanks alot for the tips 😀 😊 👍
@@LAKGE7 Sure! Have fun with it!
Yeah, Dutch is the language where if I see a tweet in that language, I'll be about 60% of the way through before realizing that I don't actually understand what I'm reading. It's a wild experience
It was about 23-25 years ago, when I was about 10 years old. A friend of mine got a microphone for his computer and asked me to set it up. I opened sound recorder (it was in the Windows 98 days), clicked record and started to speak into the microphone: "This is the test of the digital audio wave device on your multimedia computer. If you can hear this message, your system is working properly."
My friend's cousin (he was about 15 years old) was also present during this and he was wondering how did I learn English this well. They have no idea to this very day, that I have learnt that sentence from my sound card's diagnostic software :D
Your soundcard works perfectly
Your soundcard works perfectly
Your soundcard works perfectly
It doesn't get any better than this
I miss the old days when Blizzard entertainment was awesome.
As someone speaking Greek... I can say that when these polyglots "speak" my language is like hearing someone read a specific paragraph on repeat "yes i speak your language... my name is... I learned this language at...., i love your country... I love souvlaki...i like this, i love that" the reason they look real is how confident they are when speaking which do be impressive. Only Moses was the real G who would leave the whole convo in the video.
This video was so great! The part about learning how to sound like you're thinking was hilarious. And please tell us about the story of how you worked for Rosetta Stone!
I also would love to hear about the Rosetta Stone job
Wouter is so annoying. I want to say the only languages he actually speaks at any level of proficiency are Dutch and English. The rest of his languages hit every check mark on this list.
The one that pissed me off is Wouter Corduwener. The SAME conversation pattern but cannot have a legit conversation the second you go off script.
That filler trick is solid. In fact, the French are famous for using it just in their own regular speech. Once at a dinner party a native French person was telling a story. Instead of saying “Um”, he literally said this: “Et en plus? Et puis alors donc....” meant nothing & contributed to the story. 😂
I'm so glad you pointed out that Chinese people do not often directly criticize bad mandarin - in fact they will often give compliments and register surprise when you can say ANYTHING in Chinese, and it is actually a very real impediment to improving if you aren't getting the feedback you need because people are culturally inclined NOT to say anything they feel might be insulting or make you lose face, which is a big thing in Chinese culture. I have learned and spoken Mandarin for now 13 to 15 years depending on when I consider my true start to be (was extremely casual from 2008-2010, barely learned a thing in that time frame) - my wife is a native speaker of Mandarin, I have lived and worked and gone to university in China at this point and do you know what has changed in how people respond to my Chinese over the years DESPITE that my vocabulary is exponentially greater than 10 years ago, my pronunciation is better, my grasp of grammar structure is better, and I am FAR more comfortable communicating in Chinese now than 10 or 11 years ago when I could barely stutter "could you get my a pair of chopsticks" at restaurant in Chinese because it felt so unnatural and it was terrifying to say it to a native speaker and have them look confused as they tried to figure out what I was saying - because uncertainty and hesitation changes your TONE - and mandarin is a tonal language - so being nervous has an impact on how well you speak it early on.
ANYWAY, in all of that time, the reaction is this:
"Wow! You can speak Chinese!?"
or
"Wa! Your Chinese is so good! Where did you learn it?"
or something along very similar lines
almost every SINGLE time someone DOES show surprise or comment on it it is one of those - and it was exactly the same back when I had a vocabulary of less than 100 words and could barely ask where the bathroom was (and couldn't understand the response if in Chinese and longer than a word or two) - now I have a vocabulary of thousands of words, and still the exact same reaction if I get one. The ONLY exception to this is my wife and mother in law, who have said at times that my Chinese keeps getting better and better, which, combined with the marked decrease in puzzled looks by Chinese people I used to get when they couldn't understand my shaky Chinese, are the ONLY indicators beyond my own improved knowledge of pronunciation, tone and grammar that I am, in fact, far beyond where I used to be.
So yeah, when you see that famous video of Mark Zuckerberg "speaking fluent Mandarin" or you see XiaomaNYC as "white guy speaks PERFECT Chinese, stuns locals" - for those who don't know because the Chinese people in the comment section are often extremely forgiving for accents or tonal mistakes...Zuckerberg's Mandarin in that video is EMBARRASSINGLY bad - really painful to hear honestly as someone with many years of experience with the language including in China - and XiaomaNYC has a very obvious American way of pronouncing everything - I'd immediately be able to tell if I only heard him without seeing him that this was not a native speaker and very likely could tell he's American in all probability (believe it or not, French people for instance speak Chinese very often with French inflections - and to me it sounds hilarious - Italians with an Italian inflection and so on- it's very hard for a lot of people to lose their accent when speaking Chinese even if they speak fluently and structure the sentences well, just as it's almost impossible for someone born and raised in Germany to go to the U.S. at age 25 and completely lose their accent - they'll most likely always HAVE an accent, and that's OK but it's ALSO why it irritates me when guys like XiaomaNYC go around calling it "perfect Chinese" - that and I REALLY can't stand the "white guy shocks locals" headline first of all because I loath colour-coding instead of simply saying you are Europan-American, Italian-American, or even with less focus on ethnic heritage, JUST American - "American guy shocks locals by speaking passable but DEFINITELY not perfect Chinese" simply doesn't have the same ring to it, so you know WHY he does it. He's relying on the 90% of the audience who doesn't fluently speak Chinese but aspires to learn to one day - the people who don't KNOW any better because they literally cannot hear the difference between real Mandarin and his proto-American version - in other words the same people who can't identify what tones were off in THIS video when languagejones gives the Chinese example (no offence - some tones aren't spot on and that's ok because you never claimed they were unlike XiaomaNYC). Same goes for Orientalpearl - who does WELL but has a distinct American accent in Chinese as well. Da Shan they are not (he MIGHT fool a native speaker over the phone into thinking he's from China). And don't get me started on John Cena's pronunciation BUT the thing is John Cena never CLAIMED to speak it fluently or perfectly - unlike some on youtube.
And yeah, all because the Chinese people in the audience avoid saying "actually it's not that great - it's like if a guy with a pretty thick Russian accent said 'Russian guy speaks PERFECT English, shocks Americans" - except that Americans WOULD tear that claim to pieces and laugh at his thick accent.
Anyway there's ONE way to tell if your Chinese is improving when talking to native speakers:
When you start using Chinese with them early on, pay attention to how often they switch to English to respond, and compare that to years later down the road. Many Chinese will always default to English when they see a non-asian face - if they speak English - but you should still notice whether there's an increase in the number of responses in Chinese - are they speaking back to you in Chinese? Do they look confused? Did they simply say "Shenme?" (what?) - or are they casually speaking quickly in Chinese to you without seeming like they are dumbing it down or slowing it down for your benefit? If so you probably have improved or else they would speak English which most younger people under 50 or so CAN speak some of. NEVER rely on "Woah, your Chinese is so good!" comments - even if your Chinese sounds like someone is gargling pigeons, they'd still say that. Pay attention to the switches to english or lack thereof (though do it somewhere like Shanghai where many more people speak some English than out in the villages in the west of the country where they may not respond in English because they don't know any - my mother in law for instance cannot speak any English so our conversations are always fully in Chinese).
I can heavily relate to this. I'm in a very small town in China where virtually no one speaks english. I'd go as far to say that your Chinese has improved when people *don't* remark that you speak good Chinese and just talk to you as they would any local. That's not to say their compliments aren't always genuine, but it's not a good benchmark for measuring your actual language ability since, as you said, you could literally be any level and people would still say you speak well.
Do you think all Americans are white? Saying “American guy shocks locals..” ignores the millions of Chinese Americans we have.
Same for Thai.
why do you type random words in capitalize it is cringe
GARGLING PIGEONS
Great summary of how anyone can make one of these "polyglot" videos. Also using "filler words" and not saying anything really of value is extremely telling, there were many students I met who had a habit of doing this. Unfortunately, these kinds of videos are always what grab audiences attention the most often. It is hard to not fall into the trap of wanting to "keep" up with others and how many languages they claim to speak when in reality we all cannot truly see all of the layers people have or have not truly dedicated to language learning
I was sure leaving the "b'seder" in at the beginning would give it away, but I was pleased that it seems not to have, for many people!
Still waiting for "White Guy SHOCKS ACCOUNTANT By Filing Taxes In Perfect Mandarin"
Mister Wouter Cordewener from Holland "speaks 29 languages". In fact he uses all those ten tricks and much more and speaks not more than three sentences in 25 of his languages. He is a classic TH-cam polyglot fake.
When you were speaking Klingon I thought “i didn’t realize Klingon sounded so much like Hebrew” (even though I only know the general sounds of Hebrew) But I thought “well he’s the language expert!” 😂
This reminds me of the movie "Train of life" and one scene form this movie in which the Rabbi says "German sounds just like Hebrew but with no sense of humor". ;-) Maybe this also applies in this case .
As someone who has been learning Chinese since i was a kid, the idea that duolingo is going to teach you fluent Chinese is hilarious. It'll teach you to appear to have proficiency in basic conversations, but never an actual mastery of the language. I've been learning Chinese for 11 years in school and I still have so much to learn. I still feel like my vocabulary consists of 100 words, even though I know that's not true. Learning one language takes true dedication.
that's really what happens with all languaged for me. When I guess how many words do i know, I'll guess a few 0's benwth what i know. Even though I'm working hard to learn more words.
11 years is like four times longer than you learned English in school. Maybe you're just slow lol
With chinese thats a really bad metric, since even people soon in retirement know only about 70% of the words
@@forstuffjust7735 ya knowing 2,000 out of 6,000 characters is actually plenty. right now I'm at about 500. character count is not necessarily a bad metric it's just important to understand knowing the most used 1,000 character is enough to read about 95% of Chinese text, and the other 5% you can usually guess the meaning based of the radicals used and the context. There just isn't a practical reason to learn all 6,000ish characters.
@@dissraps 11 years is misleading since 6 of those years were during elementary school. And I haven't been learning English for 4 years, since English is my first langue I've actually been exposed to English my entire life. Learning Chinese has been a struggle, but I don't think I'm slower in this area than my peers. What has your experience been learning a 2nd language?
9:15 Yes ! Since I'm French, foreigners regularly tell me that they "learned some French at school... but can't say a word in French anymore... etc.".
* Why ? Because
1°) people often had a hard time learning languages at an early age - as I have -, and
2°) yes, the French society is very much judgemental.
--> What do I do ? I stay cool, I start to speak French genuinly yet very slowly, using words that are transparent in the person's native language (usually Eng / Ger / Ita / Spa) ; then I allow them time to respond ; and I end up telling them : Well, you speak French very well, see ! We spent 5 minutes discussing your travel anw your work, all in French !
I generally get huge smiles and thanks for doing this.
This becomes a railroad for me xD as I have the sentences at hand now.
--> Why do I do this ? Cuz I very much love the French language, which is very poetic : indeed, there is little vocabulary and only few synonyms in French (especially compared to Russian), which gives words a strong evocative power, I find.
#baguette
Merci pour your effort!!
I have a French surname, but my father grew up in England... and didn't want to hastle his kids with extra language burdens (I didn't grow up in England).
I look forward to meeting a Frenchman like you one day.
Knowing you exist helps a great deal.
Keep up the good work, en bon chance!
That's nice. Not everyone can do that since, I guess you'd have to be familial with the similarities between french and those other languages. I'm sure you have made many people happy.
Je te félicite pour ton effort! C'est vrai: la langue française est une des plus belles langues du monde!
I'm guilty of learning sister languages. LOL I learned Spanish the hard way .... middle school, high school, college, then 15 years of work as an occasional interpreter at work. Then I went to Italy on vacation this spring, and found out I understood a LOT of Italian with zero formal education in it. So now, I'm doing DuoLingo and learning ... Italian, French, and Portuguese. :)
I don't think he's saying that learning sister languages is bad. I think he's saying that people can downplay the fact that learning a sister language is a lot easier once you have a solid foundation in one. Which means that you might put in less work and therefore actually speak the sister language to a lower level. That might not necessarily be as impressive as learning languages from different families. Like you, I learned French the hard way. As a result, I understand a lot of spoken Italian, written Spanish, some Portuguese, and many words in Latin and even Greek. I keep trying to learn Spanish and Portuguese, but without a strong why, I am very lazy and never make it very far. I could claim to know Romance languages, but that wouldn't be the full picture: I have a leg up from learning French for years, but I cannot actually speak any other Romance tongue.
Interesting. There is definitely a difference between "knowing a language" and "performing in a language". The latter would be something actors are trained to do for movies.
I learned English as a kid in school and later in life I started to learn Dutch after I moved to the Netherlands. Even though I knew how to speak English it took me a year and a half (10 hours per week) to learn to talk Dutch well enough so people could understand me and communicate with me reasonably easily. Learning to speak any language is very hard if you want to be good at it. Switching between languages is also not easy sometimes.
Don't beat yourself up. Dutch is hard to learn.
@@sblijheid Typical Dutch answer...Dutch are really tolerant and don't care if your Dutch is not perfect. That is why I love living in the Netherlands.
That also depends on how early you learned another language in your life. The earlier you do, the better.
I was properly bilingual by the age of four, thanks to growing up in a multilingual environment and that really helped me with languages. Today, I can claim to speak 4 languages: Latvian, Russian, English and German. Although admittedly, my German is pretty rusty.
Also, the mutual intelligibility of languages is a big factor. The closer the language, linguistically, the easier it is to learn.
@@ronrocker7131 how similar are Russian and Latvian? And do you understand Lithuanian?
Hetdezelfde voor me, ik kan wel praaten maar voel mij nog als een kleintje 😢
I did not know what a Polyglot was, but now I know how to watch out for fake ones.
I've been taking Japanese for fun during the pandemic after picking up some words / constructions from sheer repetition of playing the massive Yakuza games with Japanese audio/ Eng subtitles. Every semester for this one specific teacher has kind of a set script for the first assignment, a video of you speaking basic biographical sentences + some topical ones. You can tell the parts I've memorized from doing five times over versus the new stuff.
The formulaic polyglots, like the one that says he speaks 20 languages, are usually some variant of "Where did you learn ____? Where are you from ? Why did you learn ____? How much is this?" Meanwhile I'm over here stressing over verb endings and trying to keep French brain (started at 14) and Spanish brain (started 3 years ago) from throwing in random words.
Thanks so much for telling the truth!! When I see some you. tubers who claim to be able to speak more than seven languages, I really wonder how they define "speaking one language". Coz to say a few sentences of a small talk is to speak, to be able to read a novel and talk about it fluently with other native speakers is also to speak. I doubt what they mean with their being able to speak so many languages, means only small talks. Nobody can get it checked anyway.
Even though you didn’t mention names, we all know who they are by this point. I can tell you that some “ polyglots “ did impress me at first but after seeing videos of people claiming to have learned X language in a couple weeks I knew it was for the TH-cam views. My native language is Spanish and I speak English, Portuguese and I’m still working in my Italian and I can tell you I take my time with languages because I’m not rushing to learn.
I can't say names but there is at least one we all know of who lives in NYC and most Polyglots live in NYC and frequent Flushing NY, too.
@@he_lives_in_apineapple_und9743 I know who you're talking about, but I don't know if he really counts? He's pretty upfront about only learning basic phrases in other languages and only having Chinese as a main language.
There's one American starting by X.... and another European I'm not sure from where originally starting by W..... These 2 are the worst, I can't stand them
@@he_lives_in_apineapple_und9743 he's pretty clear about his proficiency levels. And he's certainly a mandarin and Spanish speaker with some great fluency.
Also, just say names. Let's not pussy out. This isn't 5th grade recess. Nobody's honor is in jeopardy.
I have seen a few of those hyperpolyglots videos. I already suspected this kind of scam. As a native French i always realised theirs is almost always abysmal and covers only the basic stereotypical conversation sentences.
Thanks for the detailed review on this subjetc, quite interesting.
I always thought that Canadian French is pretty close to Klingon. Also, note that the amount of case endings and prepositions that demand specific cases (for no logical reason) keep the less committed souls from German. You can see this clearly in the amount of XP points the polyglots have on Duolingo. French 345,000, Spanish 478,000, Chinese 67,000 German 48 …
On y va, qaplaH!
One thing I've noticed in some of the polyglot videos is the propensity to ask open-ended questions. What does that mean? Well the polyglot will ask a question in the target language to the native speaker, but the native's answer is basically ignored and the polyglot continues with more questions.
That part about Chinese speakers saying "you speak Chinese better than I do" was illuminating. I definitely had a certain HUGE TH-camr come to mind.
"learn a language that is close to your native language" *crying in Hungarian*
My husband had a close South Asian friend who owned multiple locations of retail stores. His store manager, also South Asian, often tried to impress their fellow countrymen by speaking Spanish to the customers. I heard it a few times. The conversations consisted of him asking the regular customers the same questions every time: what was their name, what was their age, where were they from. I kept this knowledge to myself.
super glad your back. 100% on rosseta stone stories
I do not find number four to be that easy of a trick. I speak Spanish very fluently, and I am invested in learning Italian. While I understand the grammar, I end up mixing the two languages when I am tired. You really need to watch out with these sister languages.
In school I learnt German. After graduating as an electronics engineer I was offered a job in the Netherlands an moved there. I learnt Dutch, that is very close to German. Suddenly I could not speak German anymore. A good German friend had his parents visiting him in the Netherlands, the only spoke German. It was embarrassing, I wanted to answer their questions. It took seconds for the German words to surface in my memory. After two years, I finally took an evening course to learn German again, together with Dutch adults. It worked, I finally spoke both languages and could switch between them.
In such case usually the language you already know better takes over, perfectly normal. It has to do with something known as "cognitive acessibility" of well-memorized material and how fast we are able to move it from hippocampus or basal ganglia to prefrontal cortex. Since this is in fact what "active recalling " is.What we do when we speak or perform activities. And whether we like it or not this requires constant repetition, starting form aprroximately 40 times or repeating the same "chunk" of material which we want to store for good for later in what we call our "active memory". This is why learning anything, languages too, is mostly about constant recycling, constant repetition. I was where you are some time ago, knowing Spanish better than Italian and learnign Italian from a scratch and yes, I was doing precisely this to my Italian with my Spanish but at least I knew why I was doing this probably why I had enough patience to continue with learning Italian any way. Now they already do seem very distant and distinct to my brain. I think it's due to lots of listening input but also due to in depth study of grammar and plenty of reading .
Believe it or not, but I learned Norwegian well enough to start working as an engineer after a 12 weeks course
and with 20 hours instruction, supported with a good deal of homework. My native tongue is Polish, and I already spoke advanced English and intermediate German, French, Russian and Spanish, and simple Finnish. However, I never call myself a polyglot, and I would never make any You tube recording.
I really like Wouter, he’s a cool guy. But he definitely takes the railroading technique to a new level. He talks and talks and rarely has to respond to anything anybody says 😂
And in coversations where he uses multiple languages he says the same thing 20 times. I always cringe when he repeats how he likes the food and to speak with people the 7th time but in Italian.
@@perryschnabel and how he says he learnt the language because he has a friend from there 😆
@@perryschnabel Every time I watch him I hope he has learned something new,but it's always the same. "I also want to say that...." "very interesting" " I want to travel to many countries" "I want to learn many languages"
I dont understand how people think this guy is a genius. I guess people want and need heroes to look up to.
Lol this videos is like screaming at his cringy vids
I still think it's impressive that he's remembered all that stuff even if it's basic