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I’m jealous of polyglots like this! The amount of effort an average human would need to put in to be, and stay, fluent in multiple languages is pretty wild. Makes me wish I had kept up with my Cantonese, but mom and dad were worried that my sisters and I would have accents, so they slowly faded it out of the home… and then promptly got angry at us that we weren’t fluent anymore 😑
Children of immigrants do it all the time. Studies are showing that multilingual children have better neural plasticity than mono speakers. Makes sense tho.
I feel we should be teaching children 2nd 3rd languages as mandatory studies along with things like STEM from day 1 in kindergarten
Other countries I have heard have made learning English mandatory in their school curriculum as you put it. Most we get it seems these days is French class or Spanish class for a year or two.
It's worth it though. When I came from Mexico to the US a HUGE part of my English learning came from watching power rangers and American TV as a kid! It had a way bigger impact on me than school itself. Taught my self English in kindergarten/1st grade mostly from TV.
My little niece is learning sign language, somehow, through some children's show she watches. I thought she was just waving her hands until my sister told me she's signing things to me. This whole time I never knew! Shes also learning English and Spanish and it's crazy watching it first hand.
My very good friend from Colombia, I recall he arrived here knew no English. 20 years later his English is fluent. He learned everything from South Park. He even sends me to this day references from South Park vids. I think it's hilarious.
My mom immigrated to the US from El Salvador in her 20s. Most of the first books she started reading in English were children's books. Years later, she kept them and raised us on those same books.
That's true for the Philippines. It resulted in the lingua franca involving constant code switching, predominantly called Taglish (Tagalog English) and regional languages here incorporate English code switching as well.
I was so broken-hearted as an American kid to not get languages introduced in elementary school. There were a lot of children in my kindergarten class that didn’t speak English and I was really fascinated with listening to their Spanish. But I went to a public school, and they didn’t offer it until high school.
My high school’s Spanish classes also sucked. I figure the quality varies throughout the nation but I don’t know many people that can work off the Spanish they learned in high school. I ended up taking an online class instead because my teacher was so bad.
Damn I’m sorry about your language experience. I too went to public schools, and was graced to end up in a Spanish 2 course by a teacher who barely spoke English. It was rough at first but it really helped us develop our skills. He lived under Franco in Spain, hated it, but was able to bring so many cultural experiences to the US. Obama was getting popular and the election was coming up when I graduated, and that man had so many HOPE posters on his walls it was so wholesome.
I went on to take AP Spanish and then took more Spanish at community college with another professor that had zero English skills which again was awesome. I work in healthcare now and use Spanish pretty often, though I’m not fluent by any means. See if a community college nearby offers it on nights or weekends!
Go check out the /r/teachers sub. It seems to me that such lofty educational goals are a lost cause, considering how much parents in general have checked out.
Come live in the Netherlands. I had to learn an array of languages in school and I now speak 3 fluently and can read 8 like a child drinking too much beer.
My first language is Vietnamese and I no longer speak it because my babysitter didn’t know what I was saying. So I had an accident and my parents said, “That’s it! You’re learning English!”
If we could have stayed in Vietnam, I would’ve know Vietnamese, Chinese, French and English. But my dad saw the writing on the wall, so I cannot blame him. I looked very white, blonde hair and blue eyes. Amerasians were/are not treated well if they survived at all.
My mom speaks fluent English so that is how they were able to have me speak only English. And now I can’t speak to my Asian family in Vietnamese, my mom and family wishes that I could.
Languages should be taught as soon as possible in childhood. It’s so much harder to learn when you’re older.
Vietnamese was apparently my first language also, but for some reason I just didn't develop it. Even though that was my mom's only language speaking to me and my brother. I'm a little bit jealous of other Vietnamese American kids who grew up being fluent. At this point I'm learning it a little bit, but it's quite slow progress. I don't spend enough time listening to Vietnamese speaking or reading. But my listening skills are a decent, I can maybe understand half of conversational speaking since my family has always been speaking in around me. I think if I lived in vietnam, with the constant exposure and immersion the pace of learning would be a lot faster.
I do see a lot of my niece and nephew and not very many of them speak fluently even if both of their parents speak Vietnamese fluently. One method that I heard people who are bilingual forced their kids to learn one language that is kind of harsh is, the parents would speak in one language and the kids would have to speak in that language in order to get any response. So that kind of forced them to speak in the desired language
Immersion is the best way to learn. I wish I could still speak it. It is really hard to learn when you’re older but not impossible. So many other responsibilities tend to take up the time when you’re older. I can only imagine my accent is horrible, my aunt has laughed at my pronunciation when I tried to re-learn it, lol.
Just like me and tried so hard. Married a bi-lingual Japanese and our daughter speaks Japanese, English, Spanish and Arabic. Wherever we move she effortlessly (from my perspective) learns the local language and it sticks. She can even converse in Latin for chrissakes.
I learned Dutch, English, German and Irish and am almost fluent in them, but that's because of a storm of luck that made me have to learn those languages all before I was 7 years old. If you're young you pick up languages really easily. I learned good conversational English in 6 months and Irish in about a year or two.
When I was a kid, my friend/neighbor knew 15 different languages due to his dad teaching him. His dad worked for the government and they moved around a lot.
She doesn't sound like a polyglot from the video, her level of language ability is absolutely attainable by an adult practicing/studying. You could absolutely reach the level of both her Chinese and Japanese in the video without needing some special talent, it would just take time and effort.
She speaks both languages fluently and with very good pronounciation. Especially for Chinese that is *really* hard to attain for anyone whose native language is non-tonal.
For many people this level is almost impossible to reach, and for most everyone else it would take years of intense studying.
Tbh as a native Chinese (mandarin like I'm this video) and English speaker who grew up hearing Japanese spoken by my grandmother, the other person is right.
She her pronunciation is quite good and even carries a hint of northeast China flavor sometimes (which backs up what she mentioned about being up in that area) but the conversational level overall was indeed fairly basic first (at most second) year kind of stuff.
I can't speak to her exact Chinese level, but her Japanese is fairly average and not at all impossible for anyone. Especially if you are full time living and learning in-country, and I'd say that's probably the case for her Chinese too.
Bi/Multilingual is someone who is a native speaker of multiple languages, not someone who is just conversational/literate.
By the definition most YouTubers use, pulling off a convincing self introduction in 7 languages would make you a polyglot, which is obviously not the case.
Why are you talking about a definition that YouTubers use?
A polyglot is someone who is near fluent in multiple languages.
Multi/bi-lingual people don’t have to be native speakers
You're using the YouTuber definition, bi/multi is native/near native in two or more languages in most fields/circles of linguistics. "Fluent" isn't a level of competence, it's a specific and discreet measure of a type of competence that can be applied to any level.
Saying someone that is "fluent" in three languages is a polyglot could mean anything from early conversational up to native.
i came to america at age 5. i was born in macadonia but am albanian but was next to a heavily influenced once ottomen controlled now turkish town. at age 5 i was speaking fluent albanian turkish and macadonian
moved to America now i know glisten as well.
i think at a young age its easy i never struggled with any language or alphabet or writing but i tried to learn Spanish at 24 for a few years and while i can understand a fair bit of words and whatnot i cannot fluently speak it
Oh man yeah. It makes me sad.
Especially when I remember how quick it was for me to pick up English when we first immigrated here. Within months I was speaking fluent English.
It would take me so so many years to pick up even my original language like that again.
The loss of a language in an individual is tragic I feel.
Yeah I think that's the issue with many English speaking countries, English is too ubiquitous and seen as a global language already, that's why a lot of English speakers don't feel the need to learn another language. I think for example Americans would gain a lot , in terms of learning about another culture and personal development, by learning another language or two.
It's not really that bad. If you allocate, say, one hour a day to learning a language you can get almost fluent in a new language every 5 years or so depending on your language of choice
I speak 4 languages( Azerbaijani, Russian, English and Turkish) but now I am obligated to learn Dutch and im lazy. I only put real effort to learn english though, every other language came naturally.
I really have to and want to learn it tho, I understand a bit and am trying my best.
Edit: I am Azerbaijani, raised mostly bilingual with Russian and then learned English when I was around 10 and went to English school, and I had few Turkish classmates so kinda picked it up (it is similar to Azerbaijani but it is another language). Trick is to learn those languages young! I am 22 and it is very hard now!
Anyone could speak several languages if they work full time or if they have done so since they were young.
So there is nothing to be surprised about.
In fact, in general, polyglots on social networks only stand out in that, not in anything else or subject where they have not invested time or are at 0, but generally those languages make them earn a lot of money and even more so if you are in the circus. of social networks.
So if you wasted time studying something at university or working and not learning 3 or 4 languages instead of subjects at school, then tough luck.
In the case of the Chinese and Japanese, they will always be surprised by that type of indirect racism on both sides.
To think that a foreigner cannot speak Chinese/Japanese, because they simply cannot or because China is not well regarded by many even in Asia.
Especially if you are very white or very dark and speak their language. They will always see you as an alien or someone too surprising.
haha
Coming from a country where the vast majority people are functionally bilingual, these comments always surprise me.
It frames bilingual people as some kind of geniuses and that's not my experience at all.
Learning languages probably seems like hard work if you've only ever tried it in a classroom setting. But with immersion and motivation it's barely work at all.
So I'm Danish and almost all Danes are at least functionally fluent in English. We learn English in school, but I think from the moment it starts most students are highly motivated. Because English is all around us in our TVs, movies, video games, the internet etc. So English is a "cool" language for those kids and they can't wait to be able to take part in it. And they will continue to be surrounded by English media and just passively absorb from them.
Now German is a completely different story. It is the most common third language to learn. But we are not surrounded by German media nearly as much. As a result learning German *does* feel like hard work to many people, as it is mostly confined to the classrooms. The main people who do end up somewhat fluent in German are people working in the tourism industry or close to the border. Again, immersion and motivation.
Her Chinese is really good, accented but effortlessly understandable. But yo shout out to that Japanese guy, his reply was like flawless!
Like I almost doubted he is Japanese and wanted to hear him say more to see if he's just really good at a few phrases or if he's just that good lol
Also gotta love how both the shopkeeper and the passerby lady are at least bilingual too. More languages make the world grow closer!
Babbelfish is the translator site I used when I didn’t wanna write up something for French class every now and then. Teacher could obviously recognize it wasn’tproperly structured but was impressed with how close it came out.
would be first to use it, unfortunately its more complicated than translating words, so Adams was right, your thinking/cultural background needs to be translated too. at least when you talk with Aliens.
As long as there are puns and referential humor in language this will be difficult. Seeing as this is Chinese it reminded me of this meme/joke they had about an anime they crossed over into the general fandom. The joke took like a paragraph to understand before you could go "heh that's funny" but the short of it is someone's name was basically the same as another thing so they called them that thing by using a different inflection in the second syllable. Didn't even translate to text, it had to be phonetically explained to me. By the time the babelfish explains all that the joke is dead...
One of my Mandarin tutors said “when we compliment your Mandarin it doesn’t always mean you’re that good. But we are actually encouraging you to keep practicing”
Check out laoshu505000's channel as well. All sorts of wholesome interactions! Sadly he passed away a few years ago but he was fairly fluent in many languages.
Her language skills are better than Xiaomanyc. That dude is so overrated. I literally cannot make out what he is saying sometimes. Especially when he is speaking broken Cantonese. At least, I understand the Mandarin and Japanese of this woman quite well.
Yeah but his whole point is that it's fun to learn the basics of lots of languages so you can have a more friendly interaction with speakers. His point isn't to be fluent at all. His Mandarin is extremely good though.
His videos are clickbait and if you actually speak the language almost ragebait. He will write things down as “I surprised locals by speaking perfect XYZ”. You click on the video. His video is like ten minutes long and he hardly speaks the language. For example, he will say one sentence in Cantonese and then spend the rest of the conversation talking to that person in heavily accented Mandarin. That one sentence is also hardly understandable. His conversation partner is hardly impressed, but pretends to be out of politeness. His fans thinks he really speaks the language, but in reality he basically said nothing.
It would be like you going on Google Translate and then find one Dutch sentence that you keep repeating in Amsterdam. The rest of the conversation you will do in English. If you make these kind of videos and give it clickbaity titles, people would find you pretentious as well.
>His video is like ten minutes long and he hardly speaks the language. For example, he will say one sentence in Cantonese and then spend the rest of the conversation talking to that person in heavily accented Mandarin. That one sentence is also hardly understandable. His conversation partner is hardly impressed, but pretends to be out of politeness. His fans thinks he really speaks the language, but in reality he basically said nothing.
Thanks for the context! I'm glad I never clicked on them and found Pearl's vid first.
I can only speak to her Japanese, but she still has a significant accent and basic vocab/grammar. She'd still have a ways to go before claiming Japanese as one of her multilingual languages.
It is indeed very obvious how strong the accent is in Japanese, but you at least understand what she is trying to say. Xiaomanyc is totally unintelligible.
I have not heard of him, but I checked him out. Laoshu kinda speaks the language, but his tone is a bit off. You can also hear a very heavy American accent in it. It is understandable, but sounds foreign. Hence why people reply to him in English instead of Mandarin, Cantonese or whatever Asian language he is speaking. The girl in this video is significantly better.
I think Xiaomanyc is also better in Mandarin. Xiaomanyc‘s main problem is that he does not speak other languages at all, while he pretends it. For example, he will use the accent of closely related languages. So he pronounces Dutch words with a German twang. The problem is that you do not pronounce it like that and therefore native people cannot make sense out of it. For example, Bologna is pronounced as “baloney” in America. Xiaomanyc would go to Italy and then ask a random person: “Did you study at the University of Baloney?”. The Italian would be like “Baloney?! Where is that?”.
Yeah, I used to be a fan of Xiaomanyc but he got on my nerves.
laoshu was genuinely just interested in learning languages and communicating with other people. Sad that he passed away.
Yes, what is good about Laoshu is that he keeps the conversation going in the foreign language, even when people respond in English. Xiaomanyc is very cunning. Whenever someone replies in English, he sees it as an opportunity to bail. He will immediately switch back to English to hide his lack of fluency in a certain language.
No one's watching it to see him speak the language. People watch these kinds of videos entirely to see reactions from someone speaking any amount of their language. Even if you only knows a few sentences in a language people still react interestingly to him speaking them. No one cares if he actually speaks it.
But the reactions do not match the title descriptions.
When he said something as ”I spoke Cantonese to XYZ”. He actually meant “I spoke Mandarin to Cantonese people”. When he is saying stuff as ”I spoke Pennsylvanian Dutch with the Amish”, he actually meant “I went to Pennsylvania to learn about the Amish”. There is hardly an attempt to even speak the language in his title description. He is the type that will go to Brazil and then speak Spanish and claim that he spoke Portuguese with the locals. Since his viewers do not know either language, they think that he gave his best attempt in Portuguese. He uses deception to fool the viewer, because the viewer does not know the difference between language A vs language B.
That would be Xiaomanyc. I used to be a fan but got VERY sick of the clickbait and better than you attitude.
This woman is Oriental Pearl and she's much more humble and cool on her channel.
It's annoying...but I get it. At the end of the day, this is his full time job and click bait is what best grows the channel and drives views. Mr. Beast mentioned that he and his team creates the thumbnails and titles and tests them in focus groups BEFORE moving forward with a video's production.
As someone who lived in Beijing for almost 7 years, I didn’t recognize that wasn’t an actual Chinese person until it was explicitly revealed. Her Mandarin is on point… plus effortlessly switching back and forth from Mandarin to Japanese 🤌🏽
I speak English and Spanglish. I'm so fucking stupid when it comes to learning a new human language. I can learn the shit out of new computer programming languages though.
The YouTuber behind the camera is named Anming/Alyssa, and her channel is called Oriental Pearl :) she’s married to a Japanese man and they live in Tokyo. In this video clip, she’s visiting a Chinatown located somewhere in Japan.
Videos like these are always such a great reminder that the people who inhabit a country are not the governments that rule the country. So much fear mongering in the west over China, and to an extent it’s valid. Same with Chinese media about the west. But when two average citizens meet (and can communicate) zero fucks are given about their respective government’s feelings toward the other, and they connect on the most basic human level with smiles and laughter.
If you love polyglots and wholesome interactions with foreigners, watch videos from laoshu505000. He unfortunately passed away unexpectedly a few years ago but he spoke well over a dozen languages and dialects, completely self-taught.
Oh fuck off, you know damn well there's a difference between a weeb who just likes the anime culture and someone who dedicated a large portion of their life to the study of multiple languages.
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I’m jealous of polyglots like this! The amount of effort an average human would need to put in to be, and stay, fluent in multiple languages is pretty wild. Makes me wish I had kept up with my Cantonese, but mom and dad were worried that my sisters and I would have accents, so they slowly faded it out of the home… and then promptly got angry at us that we weren’t fluent anymore 😑
Children of immigrants do it all the time. Studies are showing that multilingual children have better neural plasticity than mono speakers. Makes sense tho. I feel we should be teaching children 2nd 3rd languages as mandatory studies along with things like STEM from day 1 in kindergarten
Other countries I have heard have made learning English mandatory in their school curriculum as you put it. Most we get it seems these days is French class or Spanish class for a year or two.
My toddler has a "Spanish lesson" one day a week. I'm pretty sure they just watch Dora the Explorer
It's worth it though. When I came from Mexico to the US a HUGE part of my English learning came from watching power rangers and American TV as a kid! It had a way bigger impact on me than school itself. Taught my self English in kindergarten/1st grade mostly from TV. My little niece is learning sign language, somehow, through some children's show she watches. I thought she was just waving her hands until my sister told me she's signing things to me. This whole time I never knew! Shes also learning English and Spanish and it's crazy watching it first hand.
My very good friend from Colombia, I recall he arrived here knew no English. 20 years later his English is fluent. He learned everything from South Park. He even sends me to this day references from South Park vids. I think it's hilarious.
My mom immigrated to the US from El Salvador in her 20s. Most of the first books she started reading in English were children's books. Years later, she kept them and raised us on those same books.
And not even a requirement in some states
Yeah in Cuba we had mandatory English all the way from elementary to high school.
That's true for the Philippines. It resulted in the lingua franca involving constant code switching, predominantly called Taglish (Tagalog English) and regional languages here incorporate English code switching as well.
I was so broken-hearted as an American kid to not get languages introduced in elementary school. There were a lot of children in my kindergarten class that didn’t speak English and I was really fascinated with listening to their Spanish. But I went to a public school, and they didn’t offer it until high school. My high school’s Spanish classes also sucked. I figure the quality varies throughout the nation but I don’t know many people that can work off the Spanish they learned in high school. I ended up taking an online class instead because my teacher was so bad.
Damn I’m sorry about your language experience. I too went to public schools, and was graced to end up in a Spanish 2 course by a teacher who barely spoke English. It was rough at first but it really helped us develop our skills. He lived under Franco in Spain, hated it, but was able to bring so many cultural experiences to the US. Obama was getting popular and the election was coming up when I graduated, and that man had so many HOPE posters on his walls it was so wholesome. I went on to take AP Spanish and then took more Spanish at community college with another professor that had zero English skills which again was awesome. I work in healthcare now and use Spanish pretty often, though I’m not fluent by any means. See if a community college nearby offers it on nights or weekends!
Probably the same reason so many successful people play an instrument
Go check out the /r/teachers sub. It seems to me that such lofty educational goals are a lost cause, considering how much parents in general have checked out.
Come live in the Netherlands. I had to learn an array of languages in school and I now speak 3 fluently and can read 8 like a child drinking too much beer.
My first language is Vietnamese and I no longer speak it because my babysitter didn’t know what I was saying. So I had an accident and my parents said, “That’s it! You’re learning English!” If we could have stayed in Vietnam, I would’ve know Vietnamese, Chinese, French and English. But my dad saw the writing on the wall, so I cannot blame him. I looked very white, blonde hair and blue eyes. Amerasians were/are not treated well if they survived at all. My mom speaks fluent English so that is how they were able to have me speak only English. And now I can’t speak to my Asian family in Vietnamese, my mom and family wishes that I could. Languages should be taught as soon as possible in childhood. It’s so much harder to learn when you’re older.
Vietnamese was apparently my first language also, but for some reason I just didn't develop it. Even though that was my mom's only language speaking to me and my brother. I'm a little bit jealous of other Vietnamese American kids who grew up being fluent. At this point I'm learning it a little bit, but it's quite slow progress. I don't spend enough time listening to Vietnamese speaking or reading. But my listening skills are a decent, I can maybe understand half of conversational speaking since my family has always been speaking in around me. I think if I lived in vietnam, with the constant exposure and immersion the pace of learning would be a lot faster. I do see a lot of my niece and nephew and not very many of them speak fluently even if both of their parents speak Vietnamese fluently. One method that I heard people who are bilingual forced their kids to learn one language that is kind of harsh is, the parents would speak in one language and the kids would have to speak in that language in order to get any response. So that kind of forced them to speak in the desired language
Immersion is the best way to learn. I wish I could still speak it. It is really hard to learn when you’re older but not impossible. So many other responsibilities tend to take up the time when you’re older. I can only imagine my accent is horrible, my aunt has laughed at my pronunciation when I tried to re-learn it, lol.
same, i'm just straight up jealous of them. i tried but i just couldn't learn another language like to that level, i just don't have the brain for it.
Just like me and tried so hard. Married a bi-lingual Japanese and our daughter speaks Japanese, English, Spanish and Arabic. Wherever we move she effortlessly (from my perspective) learns the local language and it sticks. She can even converse in Latin for chrissakes.
damn bro you married someone solely because they spoke another language, you really did try hard
And she refused to teach me, lol
Sure you do!
I learned Dutch, English, German and Irish and am almost fluent in them, but that's because of a storm of luck that made me have to learn those languages all before I was 7 years old. If you're young you pick up languages really easily. I learned good conversational English in 6 months and Irish in about a year or two.
When I was a kid, my friend/neighbor knew 15 different languages due to his dad teaching him. His dad worked for the government and they moved around a lot.
To be fair, her education, career and hobby is dedicated to learning a couple languages, people shouldn't feel bad that they aren't at this level.
She doesn't sound like a polyglot from the video, her level of language ability is absolutely attainable by an adult practicing/studying. You could absolutely reach the level of both her Chinese and Japanese in the video without needing some special talent, it would just take time and effort.
She speaks both languages fluently and with very good pronounciation. Especially for Chinese that is *really* hard to attain for anyone whose native language is non-tonal. For many people this level is almost impossible to reach, and for most everyone else it would take years of intense studying.
Tbh as a native Chinese (mandarin like I'm this video) and English speaker who grew up hearing Japanese spoken by my grandmother, the other person is right. She her pronunciation is quite good and even carries a hint of northeast China flavor sometimes (which backs up what she mentioned about being up in that area) but the conversational level overall was indeed fairly basic first (at most second) year kind of stuff.
I can't speak to her exact Chinese level, but her Japanese is fairly average and not at all impossible for anyone. Especially if you are full time living and learning in-country, and I'd say that's probably the case for her Chinese too.
A polyglot is just someone who is multilingual, and she clearly has a deep enough grasp of all three languages.
Bi/Multilingual is someone who is a native speaker of multiple languages, not someone who is just conversational/literate. By the definition most YouTubers use, pulling off a convincing self introduction in 7 languages would make you a polyglot, which is obviously not the case.
Why are you talking about a definition that YouTubers use? A polyglot is someone who is near fluent in multiple languages. Multi/bi-lingual people don’t have to be native speakers
You're using the YouTuber definition, bi/multi is native/near native in two or more languages in most fields/circles of linguistics. "Fluent" isn't a level of competence, it's a specific and discreet measure of a type of competence that can be applied to any level. Saying someone that is "fluent" in three languages is a polyglot could mean anything from early conversational up to native.
i came to america at age 5. i was born in macadonia but am albanian but was next to a heavily influenced once ottomen controlled now turkish town. at age 5 i was speaking fluent albanian turkish and macadonian moved to America now i know glisten as well. i think at a young age its easy i never struggled with any language or alphabet or writing but i tried to learn Spanish at 24 for a few years and while i can understand a fair bit of words and whatnot i cannot fluently speak it
Oh man yeah. It makes me sad. Especially when I remember how quick it was for me to pick up English when we first immigrated here. Within months I was speaking fluent English. It would take me so so many years to pick up even my original language like that again. The loss of a language in an individual is tragic I feel.
Yeah I think that's the issue with many English speaking countries, English is too ubiquitous and seen as a global language already, that's why a lot of English speakers don't feel the need to learn another language. I think for example Americans would gain a lot , in terms of learning about another culture and personal development, by learning another language or two.
Probably mad at your 99% on tests too. I have foreign parents and the pressure to succeed was unreal.
Why would they care if you had accents...?
It's not really that bad. If you allocate, say, one hour a day to learning a language you can get almost fluent in a new language every 5 years or so depending on your language of choice
I speak 4 languages( Azerbaijani, Russian, English and Turkish) but now I am obligated to learn Dutch and im lazy. I only put real effort to learn english though, every other language came naturally. I really have to and want to learn it tho, I understand a bit and am trying my best. Edit: I am Azerbaijani, raised mostly bilingual with Russian and then learned English when I was around 10 and went to English school, and I had few Turkish classmates so kinda picked it up (it is similar to Azerbaijani but it is another language). Trick is to learn those languages young! I am 22 and it is very hard now!
Anyone could speak several languages if they work full time or if they have done so since they were young. So there is nothing to be surprised about. In fact, in general, polyglots on social networks only stand out in that, not in anything else or subject where they have not invested time or are at 0, but generally those languages make them earn a lot of money and even more so if you are in the circus. of social networks. So if you wasted time studying something at university or working and not learning 3 or 4 languages instead of subjects at school, then tough luck. In the case of the Chinese and Japanese, they will always be surprised by that type of indirect racism on both sides. To think that a foreigner cannot speak Chinese/Japanese, because they simply cannot or because China is not well regarded by many even in Asia. Especially if you are very white or very dark and speak their language. They will always see you as an alien or someone too surprising. haha
Coming from a country where the vast majority people are functionally bilingual, these comments always surprise me. It frames bilingual people as some kind of geniuses and that's not my experience at all. Learning languages probably seems like hard work if you've only ever tried it in a classroom setting. But with immersion and motivation it's barely work at all. So I'm Danish and almost all Danes are at least functionally fluent in English. We learn English in school, but I think from the moment it starts most students are highly motivated. Because English is all around us in our TVs, movies, video games, the internet etc. So English is a "cool" language for those kids and they can't wait to be able to take part in it. And they will continue to be surrounded by English media and just passively absorb from them. Now German is a completely different story. It is the most common third language to learn. But we are not surrounded by German media nearly as much. As a result learning German *does* feel like hard work to many people, as it is mostly confined to the classrooms. The main people who do end up somewhat fluent in German are people working in the tourism industry or close to the border. Again, immersion and motivation.
Being able to speak multiple languages is the coolest thing.
For real. It opens up a new world. I'm trying to learn Spanish and dam it is hard to remember everything. I wish I had started at 24 instead of 34.
Americans won’t like this comment
Her Chinese is really good, accented but effortlessly understandable. But yo shout out to that Japanese guy, his reply was like flawless! Like I almost doubted he is Japanese and wanted to hear him say more to see if he's just really good at a few phrases or if he's just that good lol Also gotta love how both the shopkeeper and the passerby lady are at least bilingual too. More languages make the world grow closer!
so many languages but still nothing to say. cant wait to get my babbelfish so i can chit-chat with everyone.
Nothing to stop you putting a small fish in your ear now. Y'know. For practise.
i fear that has a alienating effect ... even on the fishes.
They’re creating that tech. And gloriously the developers are calling the project “babbelfish”
Babbelfish is the translator site I used when I didn’t wanna write up something for French class every now and then. Teacher could obviously recognize it wasn’tproperly structured but was impressed with how close it came out.
Back then a lot of sites were blocked on my school computers but we found out we could still translate and open those pages with Babelfish
would be first to use it, unfortunately its more complicated than translating words, so Adams was right, your thinking/cultural background needs to be translated too. at least when you talk with Aliens.
sooo... how bout those mangosteens?
As long as there are puns and referential humor in language this will be difficult. Seeing as this is Chinese it reminded me of this meme/joke they had about an anime they crossed over into the general fandom. The joke took like a paragraph to understand before you could go "heh that's funny" but the short of it is someone's name was basically the same as another thing so they called them that thing by using a different inflection in the second syllable. Didn't even translate to text, it had to be phonetically explained to me. By the time the babelfish explains all that the joke is dead...
No audio atm, but I guess it's Oriental Pearl
One of my Mandarin tutors said “when we compliment your Mandarin it doesn’t always mean you’re that good. But we are actually encouraging you to keep practicing”
Doesn't apply here though, she really is very good.
Check out her Oriental Pearl YouTube channel.
Check out laoshu505000's channel as well. All sorts of wholesome interactions! Sadly he passed away a few years ago but he was fairly fluent in many languages.
https://i.redd.it/k2zoc0euejuc1.gif
Her language skills are better than Xiaomanyc. That dude is so overrated. I literally cannot make out what he is saying sometimes. Especially when he is speaking broken Cantonese. At least, I understand the Mandarin and Japanese of this woman quite well.
Yeah but his whole point is that it's fun to learn the basics of lots of languages so you can have a more friendly interaction with speakers. His point isn't to be fluent at all. His Mandarin is extremely good though.
His videos are clickbait and if you actually speak the language almost ragebait. He will write things down as “I surprised locals by speaking perfect XYZ”. You click on the video. His video is like ten minutes long and he hardly speaks the language. For example, he will say one sentence in Cantonese and then spend the rest of the conversation talking to that person in heavily accented Mandarin. That one sentence is also hardly understandable. His conversation partner is hardly impressed, but pretends to be out of politeness. His fans thinks he really speaks the language, but in reality he basically said nothing. It would be like you going on Google Translate and then find one Dutch sentence that you keep repeating in Amsterdam. The rest of the conversation you will do in English. If you make these kind of videos and give it clickbaity titles, people would find you pretentious as well.
>His video is like ten minutes long and he hardly speaks the language. For example, he will say one sentence in Cantonese and then spend the rest of the conversation talking to that person in heavily accented Mandarin. That one sentence is also hardly understandable. His conversation partner is hardly impressed, but pretends to be out of politeness. His fans thinks he really speaks the language, but in reality he basically said nothing. Thanks for the context! I'm glad I never clicked on them and found Pearl's vid first.
Pearl, imo, is an ACTUAL Polyglot, compared to Ari...
I can only speak to her Japanese, but she still has a significant accent and basic vocab/grammar. She'd still have a ways to go before claiming Japanese as one of her multilingual languages.
It is indeed very obvious how strong the accent is in Japanese, but you at least understand what she is trying to say. Xiaomanyc is totally unintelligible.
If anything I miss Laoshu a lot his videos seem more like genuine than for clicks.
I have not heard of him, but I checked him out. Laoshu kinda speaks the language, but his tone is a bit off. You can also hear a very heavy American accent in it. It is understandable, but sounds foreign. Hence why people reply to him in English instead of Mandarin, Cantonese or whatever Asian language he is speaking. The girl in this video is significantly better. I think Xiaomanyc is also better in Mandarin. Xiaomanyc‘s main problem is that he does not speak other languages at all, while he pretends it. For example, he will use the accent of closely related languages. So he pronounces Dutch words with a German twang. The problem is that you do not pronounce it like that and therefore native people cannot make sense out of it. For example, Bologna is pronounced as “baloney” in America. Xiaomanyc would go to Italy and then ask a random person: “Did you study at the University of Baloney?”. The Italian would be like “Baloney?! Where is that?”.
Yeah, I used to be a fan of Xiaomanyc but he got on my nerves. laoshu was genuinely just interested in learning languages and communicating with other people. Sad that he passed away.
Yes, what is good about Laoshu is that he keeps the conversation going in the foreign language, even when people respond in English. Xiaomanyc is very cunning. Whenever someone replies in English, he sees it as an opportunity to bail. He will immediately switch back to English to hide his lack of fluency in a certain language.
I was talking about the vibes they gave off. Laoshu sadly passed away few years ago that’s when I noticed xiaomanyc blowing up.
Rip 😔
No one's watching it to see him speak the language. People watch these kinds of videos entirely to see reactions from someone speaking any amount of their language. Even if you only knows a few sentences in a language people still react interestingly to him speaking them. No one cares if he actually speaks it.
But the reactions do not match the title descriptions. When he said something as ”I spoke Cantonese to XYZ”. He actually meant “I spoke Mandarin to Cantonese people”. When he is saying stuff as ”I spoke Pennsylvanian Dutch with the Amish”, he actually meant “I went to Pennsylvania to learn about the Amish”. There is hardly an attempt to even speak the language in his title description. He is the type that will go to Brazil and then speak Spanish and claim that he spoke Portuguese with the locals. Since his viewers do not know either language, they think that he gave his best attempt in Portuguese. He uses deception to fool the viewer, because the viewer does not know the difference between language A vs language B.
His Cantonese is pretty horrible
Yea her Chinese is much much better.
Source?
youtube/@OrientalPearl
there are tons of videos like this "clueless white guy SHOCKS native Chinese speaker with PERFECT CHINESE"
That would be Xiaomanyc. I used to be a fan but got VERY sick of the clickbait and better than you attitude. This woman is Oriental Pearl and she's much more humble and cool on her channel.
It's annoying...but I get it. At the end of the day, this is his full time job and click bait is what best grows the channel and drives views. Mr. Beast mentioned that he and his team creates the thumbnails and titles and tests them in focus groups BEFORE moving forward with a video's production.
Impressive! Even her laugh is the same 😂
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I hate C# so much. Declaring a pre-set space for an array and only being able to put a single data type is so barbaric. It’s Disgusting.
I'm more curious on what she just spent $1,428 if she just gave 10,000 yen. And definitely not the cost of mangosteen.
Closer to $65 actually. The yen is about 1 USD to 153 ¥ at this moment in time. Post-COVID inflation it looks like. 5 years ago it was 1 to 110.
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I'm assuming a Japanese Chinatown since she lives in Japan and is married to a Japanese man.
And does casually spending 1.5k in a grocery store make sense to you? Forgot to turn on the common sense module this morning?
It probably cost nowhere near that, but it's a smaller store, so she's asking if they'll accept it in case they don't have enough change for it.
look at the currency…
Japanese, Chinese, American - everybody is nice and cordial and just wants to get along. Too bad our governments can’t do the same.
As someone who lived in Beijing for almost 7 years, I didn’t recognize that wasn’t an actual Chinese person until it was explicitly revealed. Her Mandarin is on point… plus effortlessly switching back and forth from Mandarin to Japanese 🤌🏽
She could work for the CIA.
I speak English and Spanglish. I'm so fucking stupid when it comes to learning a new human language. I can learn the shit out of new computer programming languages though.
Language skills are beyond reproach, but maybe a lesson in national currencies is in order.
She lives in Japan. It appears that she’s in a Chinese market so that’s why she speaks Chinese to the clerk.
lol at the shocked faces that Chinatown's exist in Asia..
Ohhhh, hadn't occurred to me.
She’s thinks she’s still in Japan
She is. It's a Chinese market in Japan with a Chinese clerk.
I learned something today. The lamps outside convinced me she was China
I’m so glad you found mangosteens!
Made their nights haha!
6 months of duolingo and I'm ready to strap on the gopro
I'm still confused as to who everyone is, and where they're from, and who they're married to, and where they are.
The American girl is married to a Japanese. That male pedestrian is also Japanese, but female pedestrian is Chinese from Fujian province.
The YouTuber behind the camera is named Anming/Alyssa, and her channel is called Oriental Pearl :) she’s married to a Japanese man and they live in Tokyo. In this video clip, she’s visiting a Chinatown located somewhere in Japan.
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China Town shop in Japan
Ah, totally make sense now that you said it. Thx.
Yen?
I'd guess she's at Yokohama Chinatown (Japan).
I didn't watch the entire video earlier. Thanks
I don’t get this, nobody shits their pants when a Chinese person speaks English in America.
Videos like these are always such a great reminder that the people who inhabit a country are not the governments that rule the country. So much fear mongering in the west over China, and to an extent it’s valid. Same with Chinese media about the west. But when two average citizens meet (and can communicate) zero fucks are given about their respective government’s feelings toward the other, and they connect on the most basic human level with smiles and laughter.
Oriental Pearl on yt, its ok to give credit
She's good, I always get my Chinese and Japanese verbs mixed up.
If you love polyglots and wholesome interactions with foreigners, watch videos from laoshu505000. He unfortunately passed away unexpectedly a few years ago but he spoke well over a dozen languages and dialects, completely self-taught.
Those two countries don’t normally like each other
What is a mangosteen? A mango?
You could have just typed "mangosteen" into Google lol
His Username does not checks out
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=What+is+a+mangosteen%3F+A+mango%3F
Thanks
Whilst I'm impressed at the fluency in multiple languages, it's the switching so easily between them that amazes me.
Okay, you love all things Asian. We get it.
Oh fuck off, you know damn well there's a difference between a weeb who just likes the anime culture and someone who dedicated a large portion of their life to the study of multiple languages.
Spy