Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring this vid & go to buyraycon.com/xiaomanyc for 15% off your order! Ben is such a nice guy, and to see him speak more Chinese and give you a tour of Australia, go give his channel some love! www.youtube.com/@redrooben520
From time to time I’ve heard you speak out against what the United States is doing in other countries and here at home, but for some reason I never ever hear you throw a dig in at the Chinese government for what they do to their people and around the world, is there a reason for that?
CLARIFICATION: He spoke mandarins BEFORE the accident. He was pretty immersed in the language. His brain just went primarily to Mandarian after he woke up.
thank you. i was literally so confused for the last 10 minutes googling trying to figure out the context. it didnt make any sense at all how someone could automatically "know" all of it without exposure somewhere in the past. thanks. still amazing and bizarre but less unexplainable.
The accident and language change isn't nearly as interesting as what he did with that gift. Woke up speaking fluent Chinese and made a substantial career for it. What an amazing human.
Hate to tell you this but the guy is faking it. That level of memory isn't hiding somewhere in your DNA. Just look at him, he's Very much the type to study a second language (no offense) and who doesn't like attention lul
@Kansas City Slim Not sure what you mean by faking it. He clearly states in the video he studied Chinese in school and university. The accident just jarred his brain into his primary language being Chinese. Took him awhile before he could even speak English again.
Not really, he was living and studying Chinese before hand. He just carried on doing what he was doing before the accident. Lucky he survived that's all.
I remember when my grandfather had a mini stroke. He was in the navy when he was 20 ish years old, stationed in Japan. So he learned Japanese while he was there. But throughout the years he forgot it. Fast forward 60 years when he had the mini stroke, he could speak fluently. He even helped the nursing home by talking to the Japanese ladies there.
This happened to my dad. He has since passed but he had a catastrophic brain event that caused him to go into a coma and when he woke up he no longer spoke japanese and spoke English with a deep southern drawl. It was really weird and he even started liking Nascar and my dad was a native Osakan with really bad English. REALLY BAD.
@@username_undefined shared consciousness. We are all one conscious identity trying to separate ourselves into individuals using the meta physical world.
I was skeptical until I found out he had studied the language before. That makes a lot of sense! The brain and neural connections formed after TBI’s are crazy
Thank you i was looking for a comment explaining it. I thought it would be another bullshit story about someone with head trauma with zero knowledge about a certain language and then waking up from a coma speaking it fluently.
@@aj897 You can't wake up one day and speak a language you have never spoken before. We don't have a language database of every language in the world in our brain. You can't be hit in the head and then randomly wake up and speak a language that was spoken 5000 years ago. It has never happened because it's impossible.
I've heard of this a few times before but they were in a different country. My friend was in a coma for 7 or so months and after coming out he said he could hear everything we said to him and was sick of hearing us speak.
The same thing happened to my cousin. If I hadn’t witnessed it personally, I would have never believed it. He was in a terrible car accident and was in a coma for 5 1/2 months. He woke up speaking fluent Spanish. He had taken Spanish for 2 years in high school, but never spoke it outside of class.
His story is fascinating, but honestly makes a lot of sense. I moved to Taiwan and started learning Chinese when I was 23, and the biggest obstacle to me speaking fluently was my previous mastery of English and the worrying that went on inside my brain. What if I mispronounce that word? What if the grammar is incorrect and I sound like an idiot? Actively thinking of all of those questions slowed me down a lot, even after learning enough vocabulary. The times that my true fluency came out were when I had a few beers or was discussing a question that I absolutely had to know the answer to, so that side of my brain “the doubts” was turned off and the language could just flow. A coma is a very extreme example of that side of the brain being turned off, but I can see how that would impact fluency in a previously learned language. I am sure Xiaoma would agree, we are oftentimes our own greatest barrier to success in languages, so this story makes a lot of sense to me! Keep going Ben!
So interesting to read your experience! I had a similar experience back in 1983. I visited Germany and Austria, taking a year of conversational German before going. After a couple of weeks, I was picking up the language well and able to understand my surroundings well. I visited the Munich Oktoberfest and managed to get myself a couple of sheets to the wind. I was walking between two tents and stumbled across a man taking a piss in the dark against a tree. We started talking. He was a local from a nearby village. We chatted for awhile, then he asked where I was from. He was astonished to discover I was from the USA and he wondered how I was able to speak his thick Bavarian dialect so clearly, and understand it. As soon as he said that, and I realized it, I could no longer speak or understand it well at all. We were both amazed at how my brain had temporarily worked "under the influence". I guess I had been hearing it around me and picking it up subconsciously. Who knows?!
@@WhiteTiger333 Wow. I can relate! As soon as someone compliments me on my language abilities, I become self-conscious and my speech goes down south!!! It's amazing how connected languages and emotions are in our brains.
@@quinncreel6091 Right?! When I got to the country the first time, my ability to communicate the first week or so depended so much on the feedback from who I was talking to. If they became impatient, my language ability just went right out of my head and I became a babbling idiot - LOL.
too add to this i feel that because of being in a coma his brain could’ve gone into temporary long term memory amnesia and since his brain had recently learned chinese it resorted to last language learned
That's insane to see someone speak fluent Chinese after recovering from a coma. He sure has a vast mind. The level of knowledge and skills he has is certainly admirable in many ways.
The interesting thing is the man ever since he was a little boy his family member said he’s been fascinated with the language and ever since high school he’s immersed himself in speaking Mandarin full time and if you go not just a couple years like in high school and a few trips here and there to China, but he literally has been speaking primarily Mandren for over a decade, so the fact that he woke up speaking Mandarin after a head injury isn’t a stretch by any means because that’s the language that he primarily spoke up until the accident. Yes he did speak English with his parents, but he didn’t live with his parents he was overseas a majority of the time and his family member said that he literally spoke Mandren full-time for years and after a head injury one would think you would wake up speaking the language that you primarily spoke.
@Taylor yea,he already knew mandarin I think it's just that he spoke it after the coma without having to think about it,it's almost like the coma made him think in Chinese without the mental translation
My mother suffered dementia and for a time, if she'd get upset or agitated, she'd forget English and could only speak Greek. She hadn't used it since she was about 7. I had learned Greek myself during my teens, so the nurses would call me up to translate. What was really interesting was, when I had heard her use Greek in her better days, it was very limited. But when it was all she had, I heard her using words that I never dreamed she would've known. It was still seven-year-old Greek, but it was a lot closer to fluent in anything I had heard during her life. Eventually they changed her medication's and that stopped.
That's very common for people with dementia, that they can forget the second language even if that's a language they've been speaking it fluently for 30 years.
My brother was in a coma for a month and woke up speaking Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as well. Love this guys disposition, living with a TBI can be so humbling and mentally exhausting to the point of depression. So happy for you and rooting for you!
I think your native language gets in the way of learning a second, third (whatever) language as an adult. As a child when you acquire your first language, you've no choice but to use the tools (i.e. the words and phrases you know) at your disposal, because that's *all* you know. What I've found learning Polish is that there's a massive gap between how I can express myself in English, vs the 5,000 odd words I know in Polish. And that's a problem. My native inner dialog knows this rich vocabulary for expressing itself, not so any of my second languages. What if you could flip a switch, and your second language was all you knew? I think that's part of what's happened here. You're forced to work with what you've got, because temporarily that's all you've got.
Agree. It’s like immersion but even more because you aren’t translating from English to target language but going directly to that language. Just 24 hours of your interior monologue being exclusively in that language will greatly advance your ability. And if you have some sort of outside exposure too ( nurse, tv,etc)
@@Tameemterminator - lots of Polish people at work and my local gym. It started off as 'just learning a few phrases' and spiralled out of control from there!
My grandfather had a stroke and when he woke up and only spoke Norwegian but he had spoken it when he was a child (born 1918). When he was a child, his 1 room school house required all children to learn English so he had to stop speaking Norwegian at school. Thankfully, my grandmother had kept up her Norwegian through lessons and was able to understand him-thankfully. It took him a few weeks to get back to speaking English but he was also recovering from a stroke too.
As a Norwegian I find this interesting. I have read much about Scandinavian migration to North America at the end of the 19th century. Boating and farming Norwegians settled in communities, and kept their cultural heritage frozen in time for a century or more. The language, like Dutch, is very similar to English. A good chunk of the vocabulary translates 1:1 into Anglish and modern English too.
@@___xyz___ my grandmother was full Norwegian. Her parents migrated to the US and she was born in Minnesota. She never taught me Norwegian, but I know she spoke it fluently.
@@___xyz___ it makes sense for immigrants to live near others with the same language and familiar culture. Many immigrants from non-English speaking countries did and still do this. I can especially see this happening when there was not really too much of a chance of ever being able to afford to travel back to where you were from. I can see why so many immigrant families from all over the planet would want to hold on to that in that era.
Xiaoma you a real one for taking this one in the middle of the night. I was wondering why it seemed your side wasn't matching with the flow of the conversation. thanks for highlighting such a cool guy and experience!
This was fascinating. I'm glad you found this story and were able to interview him for your channel. It's cool that he took what he was given and ran with it. Seems like a nice and interesting dude as well!
Apparently this can happen without an accident. I was teaching myself Spanish because I had a lot of employees that spoke only Spanish, but I was struggling with it. I became friends with a couple of brothers that worked with me, and when I quit my job, I took some time off before getting another job to visit them in Mexico. Although I was forced to speak and listen to Spanish every day, I was struggling, and went to bed with a headache every night from struggling at translating spoken Spanish into the English in my head, and from the English in my head to spoken Spanish. After about 2 weeks of that, one night I dreamed entirely in Spanish, and when I woke up, I was thinking and speaking fluently entirely in Spanish. I didn't come back to the US until several months later, and had to spend time readjusting to thinking in English, but only when talking about my adventures in Mexico. Talking about my past or present life in the US was no problem, but at first I struggled when I tried to translate my Spanish-language memories to English.
It's far less impressive, but I re-learned how to ride a bike in a similar fashion. I've never liked the phrase "it's like riding a bike (you never forget how to do it)," because I was that motherfucker who did. I had a bike that I rode for like a year or two only a handful or two times when I was somewhere in the 7-9 area. We moved to another city and lived on a street that wasn't nearly as busy as the one we lived on in NY (and was one way), and the kids I was working to befriend had bikes too. So I get a bike (old one was lost or left behind), and I'm fucking useless on it. I'm utterly embarrassed, embarrassing and barely even able to balance on it at all let alone try to ride it. I struggle with it over two attempts in one afternoon totaling like 45 minutes and give up, miserable. It was such a prominent thing in my mind that I had a dream about it, but in it, I was actually riding around. Basically a dream of what I wanted to be able to do. The next morning, motivated by my dream, I get out there and get on the bike. And nearly instantly my ability to ride was restored. My brain had just lost the files somewhere in the basement and needed time to find them and bring them out, and once it did, I was good to go. I was never particularly good at riding mind you so I wasn't the type to ride with no hands or anything, but I was very quickly confidently riding up and down the block gleeful as can be.
Similar thing happened to me. I always struggled with Chemistry in school. Never liked it and never understood it properly, so I wouldn’t study more than what was needed to pass the tests/exams. Obviously that lead me to believe I forgot everything I learned since it wasn’t interesting. Then around 15 years later, I had a dream, and in this dream I was flying in space (superman like), and I’d see the stars, planets and galaxies and say “ah those stars are electrons”, “these ones are protons and neutrons”, “this galaxy has an Atomic Number of 22, so it’s the Titanium Galaxy” and so on. Though I didn’t remember I had this dream until later afternoon when RUclips suggested a video about the “Structure of an Atom” and I suddenly felt this “brain zap”. From that moment I felt like I just knew everything about Atoms, even Electromagnetism (thing I never understood properly before) became scarily clear to me. I’m sure I could teach anyone about Atoms nowadays and they’d believe I’m a Chemistry/Physics teacher, no joke. What’s interesting is that this event didn’t “upload” any new knowledge, instead it almost compacted every single memory about Atoms (even stuff I read online out of curiosity and I’d consciously say I had forgotten) into one single package, connected all the dots and produced a type of understanding that I never had before. After that day, my view about the human brain also changed quite a bit. I went from no memory/understanding (at least conscious) at all to a full understanding, so imagine how many times this might’ve happened without me being conscious of it? That made me question my memory as well. Are my memories real or created from my perspective of certain situation? If it’s a perspective and considering that they are constantly changing, does that mean the same memory five years ago were metaphysically seen completely differently I don’t even know about it? It’s kinda crazy. I know some people will think it’s a joke, but that’s exactly how it happened to me. So I definitely believe you.
@@lucassacramento9039 I think this also highlights the importance of dreaming and our subconscious mind when it comes to memories, encoding, learning, and creativity. Another way this might be related is that many inventors have said to have had a problem that they have been pondering for a long time, but suddenly in a dream the answer to their big problem comes to them. The brain is mysterious and there's so many things we don't know about it yet.
@@TheLimitlessExperience While you can't learn a language while sleeping it's actually pretty helpful to study before bed. Basically, when you're tired. I've been studying German hard core for the past month and sometimes I have "hallucinations" as I like to call them where I'll hear or see German. At first it liked freaked me out and I sorta thought I was going crazy and POSSIBLY studying a bit too hard but now I'm okay with it. I'm currently taking a week break from studying it hard core though.
A little while after I started learning Polish, Spanish words suddenly started popping into my brain. (I first learned Spanish in high school, then refreshed it about 15 years ago, but was never better than A2 level either time and haven't used it in between times.) When speaking, I would go to use a Polish word, but the only one I could come up with was a Spanish word I hadn't heard in decades--not the Polish word I knew just yesterday. Then one night, the lady at the Mexican restaurant who doesn't speak English well answered the phone and I ordered in Spanish. But when she asked me questions, I started to reply in Polish. And then, for about 3 seconds, I could not remember how to say "yes" in either Spanish OR ENGLISH. Brains are strange things.
Brains are very efficient with what they have available. Especially since it is an evolved organ. No one designed it like a computer where everything falls into place. Sure computers are unbeatable in math, becoming great at a lot of things, but they have a long way to go with becoming as powerful as brains.
This sounds very similar to my experiences with language. I started studying Spanish after having studied German, and didn't use German for 2 years then. My German was at a decent level, I could have easy conversations at least. Then I met some Germans and they asked if I spoke German and I said "yes" in Spanish. I was completely shocked cause I noticed I couldn't access my German! I just gave up on German after that and continued studying Latin languages. When I tried recently to pick up my German I notice that only Spanish words pop up the second my brain needs to start searching for the word. I still understand quite a lot of German so it's still there, it's just that I cannot access it. Hopefully trying to learn German again will teach the brain to keep Spanish and German separate, the there's Hopefully a way to work up those connections. Now it's like there's one center of the brain "third language center", and it just uses the most recently used word there. Hopefully I can work up a German center and a Spanish center separately!
Similar to me, I’ve been learning Welsh for the last 2 years and for the whole first year or so my brain insisted (and still does) on putting French words into the gaps I’m not certain of
my mother was born in Western Ireland and as a child she learned Gaelic Irish. fast forward to her 60's, she has a major stroke. after a few weeks of touch and go she wakes up... speaking Gaelic. took her months to relearn english which is what she spoke her entire life...
Common for folks from the Gaeltacht, especially those who went to a Gaelscoil to think in Irish. A friend of mine still does the shapes in Irish, ie he doesn’t see a square he sees a cearnóg. Fascinating stuff
This happened to my Pop. He had a stroke and could only speak French. And no one else in the family spoke French. It was scary. He ended up speaking English soon after. But what was odd was he had forgotten his French language and it came so fluently after the stroke
this really speaks to me! (pun intended, sorry). i clearly remember after 6 months living alone in France that language switch in my internal monologue. it was amazing! and exhausting. at one point i had to tell my mum in Australia that i couldn't handle speaking on the phone in English cos it was too confusing. my French is pretty rusty now but i love knowing that it's all filed away & available to me whenever i'm immersed. it feels like such a privilege!
Thanks Xiaoma. After I've watched the video I've spend like 2 hours scrolling through the comments reading the most fascinating stuff. This topic is so damn interesting and I can't get enough of it!
Your RUclips interview show is very really well made! I like the way that you facilitate and guide the flow of conversation with your questions without creating an awkward or stilted lack of flow. Your guest was very well-spoken and interesting. Thank you for just letting him speak.
aslo I want to say this is interesting for me because I intensely studied Italian when i was younger and was quite fluent but then nearly a decade went by and I hardly used Italian and I “forgot” most of the language. So when I would try to speak to relative and friends in Italy I would have a very difficult time. However occasionally I will have dreams where i’m speaking Italian fluently again. You never actually forget anything you learn it just becomes stored in a place that is difficult to retrieve
I mean... They talk about it in the video and it's also written in the description: yes, before the coma he already spoke Mandarin but was not fluent. What caused his coma was not to learn Mandarin from nowhere but to be able to speak it naturally when he woke up (probably because the staff spoke this language and he got used to it since the brain processes outside informations even in a comatose state).
I'm a nurse, also the daughter of an amazing nurse, and my father was a doctor of psychology. My Mom was the Unit Manager of a large Stroke and Head Injury Rehab Unit in a large 11,000 bed teaching hospital until her retirement.. Amazing things happened on that Unit. Our brain records everything. Everything. Even our peripheral vision, sounds we are not focused on, smells, sensory information, while simultaneously internally speaking to it's self. We have just scratched the surface of what our brains are capable of. Damage to a part of the brain is traumatic, and the brain will "re-wire" itself, to a point, depending on how bad the damage is in an effort to respond to external stimuli. It's a fascinating field of study. Great video! Really enjoyed it! Oddly enough, I'm a white Canadian lady married to a Cantonese man! Lol
Reminds me of another amazing story of Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny) Mel was in a coma for two weeks and his Dr. addressed him as Bugs and he woke up.
Raised as a speaker of Taiwanese Mandarin, and learning English after I moved away from Taiwan, I think my English really started to improve when I stopped thinking of it as learning a language in a classroom, writing down new vocabs I encountered in a notebook, and getting bogged down with the grammar, but just pretended that I spoke English, and held my inner dialogues in English. When I didn't actually know a word or how to say something in my inner dialogue, I just hummed what I think the intonation of that word or phrase would sound like in my head. Together with watching lots of TV shows in English with closed caption, without relying on Chinese subtitles to understand what's going on, my fluency really improved. Oh, that and all those required readings I had to do for school assignments. I mean, reading the Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Steinbacks, even the Canterbury Tales weren't easy when you've only been learning the language for a couple of years. Though, letters and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. really got to me. I completely forgot I was reading them as assignments, I was just engrossed with the ideas and aspirations of MLK.
That's a really great approach! I found similar success in utilizing a more relaxed and playful approach, like you mention. The perspective and attitude with which you learn a 2nd language affects how easily the process goes. Best of luck with your continued progress!
I'm impressed. Canterbury Tales aren't easy for English speakers, let alone doing it as a second language. They were written in 1350s or thereabouts and the language has changed considerably since that time; many of the words are no longer in use, the meanings have changed, the spelling has changed and the construction of writing and speech have changed. Not the easiest way to learn the modern language!
@@susieg4624 It wasn't easy, but my English teacher at the time did a good job making it relatable in class. It also got me interested in historical linguistics down the road.
Hello sir, I hope you and the family are doing great. I just wanted to thank you for your time and video's. I have giving a go at mandarin and I really appreciate it. It is still a work in progress. Please keep ding the good work and we will watch. With much love and respect from Chicago USA planet Earth
I’m happy for Ben! What an incredible gift. It’s tragic to suffer a serious accident and come out of a coma but he was given a gift. The brain is so complex and will shift to work independently to “survive”. Thank you for sharing this experience Xioama and Ben. I wish to wake for a dream and speak Mandarin. (minus the coma)
My husband had an uncle that was said to speak over 100 languages including different dialects. He was in Army intelligence during the Korean War. I only met him once and he wrote my daughter’s name in several different languages.
Wow, I've heard of people waking up from a coma and having a "foreign" accent. This is incredible. When I was 20 I was learning Cantonese (poorly I might add) because I had a job offer in Hong Kong. My friend arranged it for me through her family. When she told me I had to buckle down because I'd need to learn to speak Mandarin, I gave up. My biggest regret is not taking a leap of faith. I'm now about to be 63 and am trying to learn rudimentary Japanese because I'm going to be going there for a month; December through to New Years. I just can't pick it up, despite speaking it a bit 40 years ago. Same with French. I grew up in a bilingual city and spoke English and French. When I moved away and stopped using it, I never thought I'd forget it completely, but I'm living in a French building where only about a dozen of us speak only English. I forgot almost everything, but I can understand conversations when people are talking about me, thinking I don't understand and thank heavens they've never said anything really bad about me, just comments about the way I'm dressed 😂 I wonder why this happened to me...
A similar thing actually happened to me too. That's really interesting! Of course not as extreme, but after I woke up from amnesia after a surgery, I kept speaking in English (not my native language). It took a few hours and a bit of sleep to go back to my native language. I wasn't actually fluent yet.
I have had dreams where I am having conversations in German naturally (without having to translate internally). I am a native English speaker who took four years of German classes in school, but that was 30 years ago. I have never spoken it as well IRL as I have in my dreams. It's really cool, but also disappointing to wake up and be bad at it again, lol.
@@Johnny_Socko lmao I had a dream like that but in fluent Spanish, have no clue what I said or what the other ppl said when I woke up, it was so weird 😭 I don’t speak Spanish very much though so
well dang i had a dream i was speaking fluent chinese and it was flawless and i asked my dad since we are chinese american and btw i didnt understand much chinese still at the time and he said that my chinese was perfect and i was so confused
@@Johnny_Socko wait this happened to me too but with Spanish, not my mother tounge but I've learnt it for a 2 years on and off, and I woke up being so confused as to how I had a dream in Spanish even though I'm not yet in a conversational point
I've studied several languages and I forget some of them because I don't maintain practice, but recently I had a day where I understood every language that I studied and had been exposed to. It all came back at once for some reason.
Seems to me that while he was in a coma, his brain was practicing the mandarin he already knew. If he was in a coma for a week, that’s roughly 168 hours of extra practice uninterrupted minus the time his brain rested. That may not seem that much but if you’ve already had a head start and your natural ability to retain information was already exceptional, it’s quite a bit. I myself learned French when I was very young but then hardly spoke it for a couple of decades. Still hardly speak it, but when I encounter someone French, it comes back fairly quickly.
Not even sure it works like that, seems more like his current language center might have been damaged, and so defaulted to what was available. Dude's speaking like he has WAY more than even 200 hours, more like been speaking his whole life. And apparently this is a "common" occurrence with head trauma.
I’ve been dabbling in Spanish, Hungarian, and Thai for a little and it’s so amazing to me how well the mind is able to remember and think in those different languages with such little practice.
I'm trilingual. I speak Tagalog because I was born in the Philippines. I speak English because, well, I live in the U.S. and also there were a lot of Taglish speakers back in my first country.. Now I speak Spanish just because of all the Mexicans that came to the U S. who live and where near me lol.
It's difficult to rationalize this. For him to learn a language while in coma, he would need something to learn from. He had very limited vocabulary and speaking fluently is one of the most difficult part in languages.
@@randomaccessfemale He wouldn't have gained new vocabulary in the coma, but he was still forming thoughts in Chinese from what he'd already studied. And when he woke up, he couldn't speak English due to that part of his brain being damaged, started speaking what he did know of Chinese, and the only person he could communicate with was the Chinese nurse. So out of necessity, he gained a lot of conversational Chinese experience during his recovery in the hospital, if not necessarily during the coma itself.
Oliver Sacks , a famous neurologist wrote the books , ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat ‘ and ‘Awakenings’ which was adapted into a film. The former book is a brilliant read where he discusses head trauma cases and what happens to the brain and some of the weirdest symptoms that happen to his patients . I can’t recommend the book enough .
I can relate with Ben. When I was learning Filipino, I would internalize all my thoughts in Filipino. In less than a few months I could fluently speak and understand the language!
This actually happened to my mother as well, she is japanese and lives in Denmark. One day she had an accident or something similar (i wasn't born yet so this is all things ive heard from others) and she woke up in the hospital speaking perfect danish. It's a super interesting phenomena that probably has to do with the subconcious mind supressing ones ability to fully use a language (maybe due to built up norms and such?). Either way it seems to be a reoccuring effect of headtrauma :P
What fantastic tips on how to learn any language! I was doing what he said not to-trying to learn too many words and sentences at the same time. I'm so glad to hear how best to learn Mandarin-or any language. I'm an upper beginner and was losing hope of transitioning into Intermediate or HSK3. Thank you for interviewing Ben! Also, I was raised in Japan as a five and six year old. I recently pretested at a level two in Japanese! As a child, I apparently learned more than I realized from my Japanese friends. I think that Ben is an example that we actually know more than we realize sometimes, but just need to know "how" to access it more effectively! Thank you again for the encouraging message. 👍👍
i've heard of this guy's story a few times over the years and knew that he'd done media stuff, but never ended up watching any of it - super cool to see this crossover! what an incredible person and an unbelievable scenario, the human mind is so mysterious
About 35 years ago I had started taking guitar lessons. I wasn't talented, and was struggling. I only knew a few chords. One afternoon I was practicing, and suddenly I could PLAY. I was changing chords, quickly and very easily. I understood what string to pluck to get a particular note, I could play the melody, I could change chords flawlessly. I could play as if I'd been playing for 10 years. It lasted about 5 minutes, and slowly went back to where I was, over about another 10 minutes. It showed me what it would be like, a few years down the road. I was amazed, and grateful. It gave me the incentive to continue practicing, and playing.
These are very interesting stories. I love learning languages but I'm not exactly fluent in any except English at this moment. I studied some German and Italian when I was 13 but only know two words in Italian and my numbers basically in German. On and off in my 20's I studied Japanese and a bit of Korean in my late 20's. Yet when people (customers) would speak in German around me, I'd understand them completely but reply back in English, I can also read German books. When I took a break last year from my Korean studies to go back to Japanese, quite a lot came back to me. The strangest moment in my life though was when I was 23. (10 years ago.) I worked at an airport at a popular named Cafe, the shop is next to the boarding area. They're boarding at 3am and my shop just opened. So I have a line of maybe 30 people and my coworker is running late. I'm awake but overwhelmed. I have a sweet older gentleman with his young teen son and daughter ready to order drinks. He's French and speaking broken English, I do my best to help. But he's getting overwhelmed and apologetic to me and the people in line cause he's having a hard time with English. He speaks in French to his kids and says maybe they should wait to get something in their next destination. I apparently replied back in perfect French and continued to work through their order in French. Only towards the end did I realize what happened cause they we're still speaking French and thanking me for my help. The customers after him asked if I knew French and I looked puzzled at them and said No. They looked even more confused, thinking I'm lying lol. But it only happened that one time. I'm trying my hand at French and I suck at it lol. But I'm working through it too. I think I just got overly stressed and my brain kicked in apparently knowledge of the French language that I didn't know I had. ^^
This interview was so interesting! I would have loved it if you had spoken more Chinese to one another. It is just so amazing to hear you speak in your second language so beautifully.
This story is very interesting , the side of the story I see is this is an example of what our brain is capable of. To use that power to the maximum would make the world a very different place ! Good vid my friend …
This whole story is pretty interesting. Gotta say, I’ve met lots of folks who can speak Chinese fluently but their tones are terrible. The guy speaks well and he gets his tones right too.
This is interesting. I had a dream once where I spoke fluent Cantonese. I understood everything that was being said in my dream and was talking fluently and thinking in Cantonese. After I woke up, it was gone. I had visited Hong Kong some years back, but never got beyond a “beginner” level of Cantonese. Very interesting.
My guess is that he overheard the nurse speaking Chinese while he was in coma, or otherwise perceived that he was being cared for by a Chinese speaker, and his healing consciousness switched into the Chinese language in response (which he had studied previously) and this persisted once he regained consciousness. Remarkable.
I would say, brain damage. Mother-tongue and foreign languages are not stored in the same place in the brain, although there is some overlap. A part where his dominant language was stored got "injured" so the brain used what was available which was the foreign language
Really cool to hear this story. I got into a bad motorcycle accident a few months back and while I’m still not fluent in Spanish it’s strangely unlocked so much that was stuffed in there.
There's a true story about another man who while recovering from a head trauma realized he can play piano by ear. Now he's a renowned pianist. There are parts of our brain that remain dornant for this kind of learning. I believe this 100%.
You mentioned Foreign Accent Syndrome, and it reminded me of one of my English professors at the community college I attended years ago. He had a very very thick but authentic British accent as a result of FAS. He was in some sort of vehicle accident (I can't recall the details) and afterwards he went from speaking in a standard American Southern Accent to a brutally thick almost Cockney accent.
Great video. It is a really interesting phenomenon that happens to people and shows just how incredibly complex the brain is. Very nice for me that Ben is from my home city of Melbourne too.
So it's like his studied and learned subconscious understanding of Chinese overrode his conscious understanding of English. It's like his day to day Australian Brain wasn't awake yet so as his brain was healing itself and coming back to life, the subconscious understandings he picked up on through his learning and trips to China filled in the gaps for him. I imagine it's not that he got better at Chinese, it's that he had so much subliminal understanding already known to him, but without the overabundance of English language knowledge, he was able to confidently use all the information he previously gathered without any hesitations. Leading not to fluency but to a version of himself where he only confidently knew the Chinese he knew without any English being in the way to stunt his Chinese knowledge Edit: sorry for the word soup lmao
I met a prominent gentleman who had a similar experience. He fell through the ice and drowned. He was dead but resuscitated. He said he remember dying and then something told him it was his time and he woke up speaking three additional languages fluently.
Wow. I had the same experience. After a clinical death I spoke fluent French. Before it I learned a bit and spoke very badly. But in emergency room I spoke fluent to nurses and told them French jokes. You should see eyes of my wife when she entered the room... I was thinking in French and spoke without accent. Unfortunately it lasted for about 20 hours, then I fell asleep and when woke up my French was even worse than before... Too bad it did not stay with me...
You can't speak without an accent. Did you mean to say your accent sounded purely native? Or that you spoke perfect syntax, grammar, but the accent wasn't perfect?
It would be awesome to see you try learning some of the Khoisan languages that are often referred to as the click languages I think it would make for an awesome video
I still remember the day after I moved to Canada from the Netherlands where I stopped thinking in Dutch and English became my fluent language. Now I have to think about speaking Dutch
Omg!! I moved to canada from the philippines thinking in tagalog but a couple of days after i started my first day of school i only thought in english. i'm not fluent in tagalog anymore sadly :')
There’s been too many cases of people suffering a serious accident and waking from comas speaking a different language. This is well documented throughout the world.
This story is really interesting to me. 🤔 Reminds me of the dispersion at the Tower of Babel. I was always skeptical of these stories, so this was really interesting to watch.
I am am fluent in three languages but according to my former teachers I am failure . Never let a teacher define your career . Some teachers are not good enough at educating , they are just haters who can’t understand that we all learn differently .
Easiest hypothesis I can come up with is that his more accessible parts of his brain for language were originally damaged and that as a coping mechanism, parts of the brain where LTM is stored had to compensate. As he recovered sufficiently to wake up, his brain had already "wired" in Mandarin. EDIT: As he basically says in minute 8
I also think maybe his subconscious mind, during what would have been similar to dreaming, his brain was reorganizing data he had previously taken in but not internalized, similar to how people don't necessarily get better at something during practice, but during the rest after a practice. Then give someone two weeks with their brain on overdrive doing nothing but trying to recognize patterns, and he basically acquired stuff he only new factually before.
So interesting 😊. I'm a Sagittarius and learning new languages is one of my innate loves. Being that my family is international. My maternal grandfather was born in Malta, my grandmother in London and my mother was born in South Africa, I came into a very international family 😉. I was born in Philadelphia, but we went over to Malta when I was 4 for what turned out to be an extended stay to visit while I turned 5 and I had to be enrolled in school, so I started there, then came back to the States and I finished school here. But when I was in high school, there was a fellow student who spoke not a word of Spanish, that Summer, she had gone to a country where that was ALL they spoke and by the fall semester when she returned, she spoke fluent Spanish. I loved it! I took French and Spanish in high school, but lost a lot of it by my 51st birthday, I can only remember a slight bit. And my grandfather was forever trying to teach me Maltese, but I didn't stick with it and he passed away. A very difficult language to learn, as Malta was taken over by SO many cultures, they have a language that mixes a bit of ALL of those previous invaders into one. In fact, Xiaoma, I challenge YOU to learn Maltese! 😄 You will be in a very small community, learning the language of a VERY small island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, but fair warning, it may test all of your skills 😜💜👍.
This confirmed my theory that we internalize a LOT things (events, emotions, languages, etc.) but we don't necessarily process them. In a coma, which we still don't understand fully, brains must be working overtime - just like in dreams and sleep. Comas must allow the brain to be on overdrive to where the eyes might be closed and the breathing might be slowed down, but the ears must be open 24/7. It must be almost like a government shutdown when the external branches shut down, but the most critical aspects to running the nation continue working. For some odd reason, I would like to see more medical control over comas to where people can be induced into a coma in order to learn a new skill faster, recover in their bodies faster, etc. The problem with that of course would be how we'd use that technology. The brain is quite amazing!
Wow, this reminded me of a near fatal injury I had being hit by a transport vehicle over a decade ago. I was under a medically induced coma for 2 weeks and after would slip in and out of consciousness for week 3 till I came around. I had studied Japanese for about a year before that. I was definitely far from fluent but on one occasion during week 3 (I was told later) I was speaking only in a foreign language that non of the doctors and nurses in the ward could understand (in London Royal hospital). They could not get a response from me in English. Later my sister visited and identified it as Japanese. I doubt I was fluent, but it's really interesting that this is a thing. I barely have any memory of it though.
I have experienced assimilating a foreign language twice whilst staying in foreign countries. I found listening was the first step and then after months it all fell into place.
Fascinating video for language enthusiasts I think. I've studied several languages and it's absolutely true that when your internal monologue switches over to another language your overall language ability follows too. I can only imagine how impactful it would be if my brain switched to a foreign language 100% of the time. I think it only does for 2% or 3% or something but even that much means I'm getting better.
My step mom had this happen with French. Your secondary language is stored in a different part of your brain, so if the part with primary language is damaged, the secondary comes out naturally
If you understand the way our brain works, you know how things like this can happen. The language we grow up with and languages we learn later in life are processed in different areas of the brain. So if one of these two areas gets injured, the brain will try to use the other area to compensate the injured area. This can work both ways. If the area that processes the languages you learned later in life is injured, you loose parts of the ability to use these languages. My family is frinds with a family from Austria. Over 20 years ago one of the members of this Austrian family had an accident with a traumatic brain injury that damaged the part of the brain for second languages. The problem was that this man grew up speaking a rare regional dialect from an area called Oberpinzgau and learned standard German later in school. When he woke up from his coma, he was unable to communicate with most of the doctors and nurses since they came from different parts of Austria and Germany and the dialect he spoke has quite big differences to standard German. It is a bit like the differences between Chinese dialects. For the remaining time in hospital his wife had to translate almost everything he wanted to say to the doctors and it took many years for him to get back at least parts of his ability to speak and understand standard German. That was even more of a problem for him, because most people even in this area don´t learn the regional dialect anymore since all national media is in standard German nowadays.
When I worked as a nurse in German speaking Switzerland, an elderly lady was admitted with Meningitis. She was very agitated and started to speak English with a strong Swiss German accent with me. The next day I told her son about it and he told me that she'd never ever learned English. It was kind of freaked both of us out. Unfortunately I quit that job shortly after, so I don't know what happened to her language ability after that.
Thanks for posting. I need to tighten up my answer to ‘why are you learning (currently) German?’ The end of the interview really spoke to me. The challenge, the passion, etc. When people think it’s a “hobby,” I get upset and feel my efforts are being demeaned. Thanks!
Great video, currently learning Thai at the moment. Whilst I've been learning I've always been trying to compare to English but when I'm speaking to Thai people I'm altering my sentences like Ben says. Going to have to start thinking more like this and changing the way I speak to myself in my head when people are speaking Thai to me. Incredible video thank you! :)
Love your videos and and I've been following for years. I understand the need for ads. The issue is that the banner ads pop up covering the translations way too often.
I believe this. I lived and studied Mandarin in China for 4 years. Even though I have been back in the States since 2011, I still have have complete Mandarin dialogue in my dreams. It’s not as frequent though
I woke up from surgery after having a life threatening infection and for 3 hrs I could only speak Spanish. I had spoken Spanish dialecs for several years prior. I can only imagine but a week would be much more confusing and interesting and I've heard it happens alot.
As an RN who has worked in neuro, I'd surmise there is trauma / damage to normal language centers from their head trauma; and that 2nd languages are stored differently. Post head-trauma, of the language centers the brain defaults to the non-injured language center
Same thing happened to a friend of mine. He had done a Mormon mission in Italy and spoke fluent Italian, although he hadn't used it/spoke it in years. After his major head injury, he woke up speaking only Italian. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to retain it and after a few weeks, his brain switched back to English but he completely lost ALL of his Italian. He's tried intermittently to relearn Italian, but the head injury has actually made it even harder to learn other languages, or in the case of Italian for him, relearn it. Our brains are amazing!
A similar thing happened to my middle school councilor. He spoke near fluent italian already and he got in a really bad accident that put him in a several month coma, and when he awoke he could only speak Italian. They had to get one of his Italian speaking friends to translate initially. It sounds like he had to somewhat relearn English
"Once you lose muscle you kinda got to build it back". That is the best analogy for muscle memory I've ever heard. The brain is a muscle. If you don't use it you lose it. Language can be lost if we don't use it. Great video.
after 30 years of studying languages and traveling the world, I'm convinced the two most common pathways to achieving native fluency in multiple languages are multiple language immersion in the first two years of life and brain damage...
Hmmm. Interesting Video! And Ben gave me an Idea that I am kinda embarrassed to Not have thought If before. There is so many languages I wanna learn, yet I have never thought of immersing myself into those languages' youtube
So the real story is, an Australian man who was learning Chinese for years, went into a coma after an accident, when he woke up, he couldn't speak English for a couple of days.
Is that all you're interested in taking away from the interview? Because the interview went on for longer than 6 minutes - there's a lot of good nuggets in there
It’s deeper than that. He became completely fluent WITH an accent. He was completely submersed by even thinking in Chinese. Much more than just “couldn’t speak English for a few days”
This sounds fairly easy to explain: the accident somehow shut down access to the part of the brain that controls his mother tongue. Languages studied roughly after puberty are stored in a completely different part of the brain, which was apparently unaffected. Left without access to his mother tongue, his brain switched over to the second language. This resulted in the extreme immersion of having the only language that he has any access to at all being the second language. Ability then increased at speeds closer to childhood acquisition of English until he was able to regain English ability.
Thanks to Raycon for sponsoring this vid & go to buyraycon.com/xiaomanyc for 15% off your order! Ben is such a nice guy, and to see him speak more Chinese and give you a tour of Australia, go give his channel some love! www.youtube.com/@redrooben520
W Raycons
Raycon are as expensive as iPods even with your discount code
@@TheDogGoesWoof69 do you feel scared without a gun or does it compensate for something else
From time to time I’ve heard you speak out against what the United States is doing in other countries and here at home, but for some reason I never ever hear you throw a dig in at the Chinese government for what they do to their people and around the world, is there a reason for that?
It would've been great to have Ben get some Raycons in advance of the interview.
His headphones sorry of acted like an advert for wireless.
CLARIFICATION: He spoke mandarins BEFORE the accident. He was pretty immersed in the language. His brain just went primarily to Mandarian after he woke up.
They really need to lead with that and make it very clear. Lol. This is not a mystery or a miracle. It’s weird, but that’s it.
thank you. i was literally so confused for the last 10 minutes googling trying to figure out the context. it didnt make any sense at all how someone could automatically "know" all of it without exposure somewhere in the past. thanks. still amazing and bizarre but less unexplainable.
@@cripplermaximus he’s also a partial savant so there’s also that…
But that disclosure would get less youtube clicks and likes and subs.
@@cripplermaximus this can happend without stufying the language before. A friend of mine has seen it first at the hospital he works at.
The accident and language change isn't nearly as interesting as what he did with that gift. Woke up speaking fluent Chinese and made a substantial career for it. What an amazing human.
Hate to tell you this but the guy is faking it. That level of memory isn't hiding somewhere in your DNA. Just look at him, he's Very much the type to study a second language (no offense) and who doesn't like attention lul
@Kansas City Slim Not sure what you mean by faking it. He clearly states in the video he studied Chinese in school and university. The accident just jarred his brain into his primary language being Chinese. Took him awhile before he could even speak English again.
@@mattyfuture someone didnt watch the video
He already knew Chinese let's not forget that. He didn't just suddenly wake up and spoken Chinese without ever knowing it
Not really, he was living and studying Chinese before hand. He just carried on doing what he was doing before the accident. Lucky he survived that's all.
I remember when my grandfather had a mini stroke. He was in the navy when he was 20 ish years old, stationed in Japan. So he learned Japanese while he was there. But throughout the years he forgot it. Fast forward 60 years when he had the mini stroke, he could speak fluently. He even helped the nursing home by talking to the Japanese ladies there.
Thats wild!
Truly amazing! It just shows that our brains really dont forget things! We just forget how to access those memories.
W stroke
@@Aerochalklate lol free Top g
@@Aerochalklate rare.
This happened to my dad. He has since passed but he had a catastrophic brain event that caused him to go into a coma and when he woke up he no longer spoke japanese and spoke English with a deep southern drawl. It was really weird and he even started liking Nascar and my dad was a native Osakan with really bad English. REALLY BAD.
That's actually scary. But hilarious. Maybe he was watching western movies in his head during the entire coma
That’s wild. Maybe we are all in the matrix and some of these folks got rebooted with new files.
@@username_undefined shared consciousness. We are all one conscious identity trying to separate ourselves into individuals using the meta physical world.
If you don’t believe in the afterlife, here’s your proof!
Sounds like these are walk-in soul happenings
I was skeptical until I found out he had studied the language before. That makes a lot of sense! The brain and neural connections formed after TBI’s are crazy
Thank you i was looking for a comment explaining it. I thought it would be another bullshit story about someone with head trauma with zero knowledge about a certain language and then waking up from a coma speaking it fluently.
@@craftylemon2460 Those stories aren't BS lmao
@@aj897 You can't wake up one day and speak a language you have never spoken before. We don't have a language database of every language in the world in our brain. You can't be hit in the head and then randomly wake up and speak a language that was spoken 5000 years ago. It has never happened because it's impossible.
@@aj897 bruh
@@aj897 yes they are because they are impossible
I've heard of this a few times before but they were in a different country. My friend was in a coma for 7 or so months and after coming out he said he could hear everything we said to him and was sick of hearing us speak.
xD
Fr prolly wanted to go while yall said weird shi but couldn't X_x
Omg imagine. How is he doing?
@@livsnjutaresverige3802 fine now, this was 20 years ago
😂
Pro tip: If you go in a coma, have a family member play language learning lessons until you (hopefully) wake up.
Get me science audio books in all kinds of languages so I'm both smart and multilingual when I wake up 🤓
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Foreign ACCENT syndrome not foreign LANGUAGE syndrome 🤷♂️
Play a few different languages and become a polyglot.
Thanks for the advice ill proceed to go into a coma
The same thing happened to my cousin. If I hadn’t witnessed it personally, I would have never believed it. He was in a terrible car accident and was in a coma for 5 1/2 months. He woke up speaking fluent Spanish. He had taken Spanish for 2 years in high school, but never spoke it outside of class.
His story is fascinating, but honestly makes a lot of sense. I moved to Taiwan and started learning Chinese when I was 23, and the biggest obstacle to me speaking fluently was my previous mastery of English and the worrying that went on inside my brain. What if I mispronounce that word? What if the grammar is incorrect and I sound like an idiot? Actively thinking of all of those questions slowed me down a lot, even after learning enough vocabulary. The times that my true fluency came out were when I had a few beers or was discussing a question that I absolutely had to know the answer to, so that side of my brain “the doubts” was turned off and the language could just flow. A coma is a very extreme example of that side of the brain being turned off, but I can see how that would impact fluency in a previously learned language. I am sure Xiaoma would agree, we are oftentimes our own greatest barrier to success in languages, so this story makes a lot of sense to me! Keep going Ben!
So interesting to read your experience! I had a similar experience back in 1983. I visited Germany and Austria, taking a year of conversational German before going. After a couple of weeks, I was picking up the language well and able to understand my surroundings well. I visited the Munich Oktoberfest and managed to get myself a couple of sheets to the wind. I was walking between two tents and stumbled across a man taking a piss in the dark against a tree. We started talking. He was a local from a nearby village. We chatted for awhile, then he asked where I was from. He was astonished to discover I was from the USA and he wondered how I was able to speak his thick Bavarian dialect so clearly, and understand it. As soon as he said that, and I realized it, I could no longer speak or understand it well at all. We were both amazed at how my brain had temporarily worked "under the influence". I guess I had been hearing it around me and picking it up subconsciously. Who knows?!
@@WhiteTiger333 Wow. I can relate! As soon as someone compliments me on my language abilities, I become self-conscious and my speech goes down south!!! It's amazing how connected languages and emotions are in our brains.
@@quinncreel6091 Right?! When I got to the country the first time, my ability to communicate the first week or so depended so much on the feedback from who I was talking to. If they became impatient, my language ability just went right out of my head and I became a babbling idiot - LOL.
too add to this i feel that because of being in a coma his brain could’ve gone into temporary long term memory amnesia and since his brain had recently learned chinese it resorted to last language learned
I think the default language just changed at that moment
Sounds like the accident pushed his second language into the first position in his audio cortex. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Pfizer makes u learn Mandarin
Definitely interesting
Yup. The brain can rewire itself after injury. Pretty amazing!
@@Jess-737 well its just like how some people are better at maths than others
@@Jess-737 sounds like a bunch of excuses
That's insane to see someone speak fluent Chinese after recovering from a coma. He sure has a vast mind. The level of knowledge and skills he has is certainly admirable in many ways.
The interesting thing is the man ever since he was a little boy his family member said he’s been fascinated with the language and ever since high school he’s immersed himself in speaking Mandarin full time and if you go not just a couple years like in high school and a few trips here and there to China, but he literally has been speaking primarily Mandren for over a decade, so the fact that he woke up speaking Mandarin after a head injury isn’t a stretch by any means because that’s the language that he primarily spoke up until the accident. Yes he did speak English with his parents, but he didn’t live with his parents he was overseas a majority of the time and his family member said that he literally spoke Mandren full-time for years and after a head injury one would think you would wake up speaking the language that you primarily spoke.
@@metallica2500nice comment
@@dfredankey thank you and happy Valentine’s Day.❤️
both ben and xiaoma
@Taylor yea,he already knew mandarin I think it's just that he spoke it after the coma without having to think about it,it's almost like the coma made him think in Chinese without the mental translation
My mother suffered dementia and for a time, if she'd get upset or agitated, she'd forget English and could only speak Greek. She hadn't used it since she was about 7. I had learned Greek myself during my teens, so the nurses would call me up to translate.
What was really interesting was, when I had heard her use Greek in her better days, it was very limited. But when it was all she had, I heard her using words that I never dreamed she would've known. It was still seven-year-old Greek, but it was a lot closer to fluent in anything I had heard during her life.
Eventually they changed her medication's and that stopped.
wow, thank you for sharing!
That's very common for people with dementia, that they can forget the second language even if that's a language they've been speaking it fluently for 30 years.
My brother was in a coma for a month and woke up speaking Spanish and Mandarin Chinese as well. Love this guys disposition, living with a TBI can be so humbling and mentally exhausting to the point of depression. So happy for you and rooting for you!
I think your native language gets in the way of learning a second, third (whatever) language as an adult. As a child when you acquire your first language, you've no choice but to use the tools (i.e. the words and phrases you know) at your disposal, because that's *all* you know.
What I've found learning Polish is that there's a massive gap between how I can express myself in English, vs the 5,000 odd words I know in Polish. And that's a problem. My native inner dialog knows this rich vocabulary for expressing itself, not so any of my second languages.
What if you could flip a switch, and your second language was all you knew? I think that's part of what's happened here. You're forced to work with what you've got, because temporarily that's all you've got.
You reminded me of the Sofia Vergara quote. "Do you have any idea how smart I am in spanish?!"
Agree. It’s like immersion but even more because you aren’t translating from English to target language but going directly to that language. Just 24 hours of your interior monologue being exclusively in that language will greatly advance your ability. And if you have some sort of outside exposure too ( nurse, tv,etc)
Well, that doesn't go like that when you grow up being bilingual.
Why did you learn polish? I learned polish as my third as I live here
@@Tameemterminator - lots of Polish people at work and my local gym.
It started off as 'just learning a few phrases' and spiralled out of control from there!
My grandfather had a stroke and when he woke up and only spoke Norwegian but he had spoken it when he was a child (born 1918). When he was a child, his 1 room school house required all children to learn English so he had to stop speaking Norwegian at school. Thankfully, my grandmother had kept up her Norwegian through lessons and was able to understand him-thankfully. It took him a few weeks to get back to speaking English but he was also recovering from a stroke too.
As a Norwegian I find this interesting. I have read much about Scandinavian migration to North America at the end of the 19th century. Boating and farming Norwegians settled in communities, and kept their cultural heritage frozen in time for a century or more. The language, like Dutch, is very similar to English. A good chunk of the vocabulary translates 1:1 into Anglish and modern English too.
@@___xyz___ my grandmother was full Norwegian. Her parents migrated to the US and she was born in Minnesota. She never taught me Norwegian, but I know she spoke it fluently.
@@___xyz___ it makes sense for immigrants to live near others with the same language and familiar culture. Many immigrants from non-English speaking countries did and still do this.
I can especially see this happening when there was not really too much of a chance of ever being able to afford to travel back to where you were from. I can see why so many immigrant families from all over the planet would want to hold on to that in that era.
Xiaoma you a real one for taking this one in the middle of the night. I was wondering why it seemed your side wasn't matching with the flow of the conversation. thanks for highlighting such a cool guy and experience!
This was fascinating. I'm glad you found this story and were able to interview him for your channel. It's cool that he took what he was given and ran with it. Seems like a nice and interesting dude as well!
Apparently this can happen without an accident. I was teaching myself Spanish because I had a lot of employees that spoke only Spanish, but I was struggling with it. I became friends with a couple of brothers that worked with me, and when I quit my job, I took some time off before getting another job to visit them in Mexico. Although I was forced to speak and listen to Spanish every day, I was struggling, and went to bed with a headache every night from struggling at translating spoken Spanish into the English in my head, and from the English in my head to spoken Spanish. After about 2 weeks of that, one night I dreamed entirely in Spanish, and when I woke up, I was thinking and speaking fluently entirely in Spanish. I didn't come back to the US until several months later, and had to spend time readjusting to thinking in English, but only when talking about my adventures in Mexico. Talking about my past or present life in the US was no problem, but at first I struggled when I tried to translate my Spanish-language memories to English.
It's far less impressive, but I re-learned how to ride a bike in a similar fashion. I've never liked the phrase "it's like riding a bike (you never forget how to do it)," because I was that motherfucker who did. I had a bike that I rode for like a year or two only a handful or two times when I was somewhere in the 7-9 area. We moved to another city and lived on a street that wasn't nearly as busy as the one we lived on in NY (and was one way), and the kids I was working to befriend had bikes too.
So I get a bike (old one was lost or left behind), and I'm fucking useless on it. I'm utterly embarrassed, embarrassing and barely even able to balance on it at all let alone try to ride it. I struggle with it over two attempts in one afternoon totaling like 45 minutes and give up, miserable. It was such a prominent thing in my mind that I had a dream about it, but in it, I was actually riding around. Basically a dream of what I wanted to be able to do.
The next morning, motivated by my dream, I get out there and get on the bike. And nearly instantly my ability to ride was restored. My brain had just lost the files somewhere in the basement and needed time to find them and bring them out, and once it did, I was good to go. I was never particularly good at riding mind you so I wasn't the type to ride with no hands or anything, but I was very quickly confidently riding up and down the block gleeful as can be.
Similar thing happened to me. I always struggled with Chemistry in school. Never liked it and never understood it properly, so I wouldn’t study more than what was needed to pass the tests/exams. Obviously that lead me to believe I forgot everything I learned since it wasn’t interesting.
Then around 15 years later, I had a dream, and in this dream I was flying in space (superman like), and I’d see the stars, planets and galaxies and say “ah those stars are electrons”, “these ones are protons and neutrons”, “this galaxy has an Atomic Number of 22, so it’s the Titanium Galaxy” and so on. Though I didn’t remember I had this dream until later afternoon when RUclips suggested a video about the “Structure of an Atom” and I suddenly felt this “brain zap”. From that moment I felt like I just knew everything about Atoms, even Electromagnetism (thing I never understood properly before) became scarily clear to me. I’m sure I could teach anyone about Atoms nowadays and they’d believe I’m a Chemistry/Physics teacher, no joke.
What’s interesting is that this event didn’t “upload” any new knowledge, instead it almost compacted every single memory about Atoms (even stuff I read online out of curiosity and I’d consciously say I had forgotten) into one single package, connected all the dots and produced a type of understanding that I never had before. After that day, my view about the human brain also changed quite a bit. I went from no memory/understanding (at least conscious) at all to a full understanding, so imagine how many times this might’ve happened without me being conscious of it? That made me question my memory as well. Are my memories real or created from my perspective of certain situation? If it’s a perspective and considering that they are constantly changing, does that mean the same memory five years ago were metaphysically seen completely differently I don’t even know about it? It’s kinda crazy.
I know some people will think it’s a joke, but that’s exactly how it happened to me. So I definitely believe you.
@@lucassacramento9039 I think this also highlights the importance of dreaming and our subconscious mind when it comes to memories, encoding, learning, and creativity. Another way this might be related is that many inventors have said to have had a problem that they have been pondering for a long time, but suddenly in a dream the answer to their big problem comes to them. The brain is mysterious and there's so many things we don't know about it yet.
@@TheLimitlessExperience While you can't learn a language while sleeping it's actually pretty helpful to study before bed. Basically, when you're tired. I've been studying German hard core for the past month and sometimes I have "hallucinations" as I like to call them where I'll hear or see German. At first it liked freaked me out and I sorta thought I was going crazy and POSSIBLY studying a bit too hard but now I'm okay with it. I'm currently taking a week break from studying it hard core though.
Very interesting!
A little while after I started learning Polish, Spanish words suddenly started popping into my brain. (I first learned Spanish in high school, then refreshed it about 15 years ago, but was never better than A2 level either time and haven't used it in between times.) When speaking, I would go to use a Polish word, but the only one I could come up with was a Spanish word I hadn't heard in decades--not the Polish word I knew just yesterday.
Then one night, the lady at the Mexican restaurant who doesn't speak English well answered the phone and I ordered in Spanish. But when she asked me questions, I started to reply in Polish. And then, for about 3 seconds, I could not remember how to say "yes" in either Spanish OR ENGLISH.
Brains are strange things.
Brains are very efficient with what they have available. Especially since it is an evolved organ. No one designed it like a computer where everything falls into place.
Sure computers are unbeatable in math, becoming great at a lot of things, but they have a long way to go with becoming as powerful as brains.
This sounds very similar to my experiences with language.
I started studying Spanish after having studied German, and didn't use German for 2 years then. My German was at a decent level, I could have easy conversations at least. Then I met some Germans and they asked if I spoke German and I said "yes" in Spanish. I was completely shocked cause I noticed I couldn't access my German!
I just gave up on German after that and continued studying Latin languages.
When I tried recently to pick up my German I notice that only Spanish words pop up the second my brain needs to start searching for the word.
I still understand quite a lot of German so it's still there, it's just that I cannot access it.
Hopefully trying to learn German again will teach the brain to keep Spanish and German separate, the there's Hopefully a way to work up those connections.
Now it's like there's one center of the brain "third language center", and it just uses the most recently used word there. Hopefully I can work up a German center and a Spanish center separately!
Similar to me, I’ve been learning Welsh for the last 2 years and for the whole first year or so my brain insisted (and still does) on putting French words into the gaps I’m not certain of
my mother was born in Western Ireland and as a child she learned Gaelic Irish. fast forward to her 60's, she has a major stroke. after a few weeks of touch and go she wakes up... speaking Gaelic. took her months to relearn english which is what she spoke her entire life...
Common for folks from the Gaeltacht, especially those who went to a Gaelscoil to think in Irish. A friend of mine still does the shapes in Irish, ie he doesn’t see a square he sees a cearnóg. Fascinating stuff
This happened to my Pop. He had a stroke and could only speak French. And no one else in the family spoke French. It was scary. He ended up speaking English soon after. But what was odd was he had forgotten his French language and it came so fluently after the stroke
It seems like everyone's father Had a stroke And Started to speak a Second language... 😅😅😅
So how can I self induce a stroke
@@abagz3919 you need to wait 50 years
this really speaks to me! (pun intended, sorry). i clearly remember after 6 months living alone in France that language switch in my internal monologue. it was amazing! and exhausting. at one point i had to tell my mum in Australia that i couldn't handle speaking on the phone in English cos it was too confusing. my French is pretty rusty now but i love knowing that it's all filed away & available to me whenever i'm immersed. it feels like such a privilege!
It’s nice to hear your story. It gives me hope that there’s still plenty of time to learn all the other languages I want to learn.
Thanks Xiaoma. After I've watched the video I've spend like 2 hours scrolling through the comments reading the most fascinating stuff. This topic is so damn interesting and I can't get enough of it!
Your RUclips interview show is very really well made! I like the way that you facilitate and guide the flow of conversation with your questions without creating an awkward or stilted lack of flow. Your guest was very well-spoken and interesting. Thank you for just letting him speak.
It's really cool to see the expansion of your content!!!! Thank you for sharing so many different cultures and languages with the world!!!
aslo I want to say this is interesting for me because I intensely studied Italian when i was younger and was quite fluent but then nearly a decade went by and I hardly used Italian and I “forgot” most of the language. So when I would try to speak to relative and friends in Italy I would have a very difficult time. However occasionally I will have dreams where i’m speaking Italian fluently again. You never actually forget anything you learn it just becomes stored in a place that is difficult to retrieve
Sweet. Obviously he spoke Mandarin before he was in the coma.
I thought the same
Yes, except in the coma his brain was obviously practicing and it has become a lot more fluent whilst in a coma.
I mean... They talk about it in the video and it's also written in the description: yes, before the coma he already spoke Mandarin but was not fluent.
What caused his coma was not to learn Mandarin from nowhere but to be able to speak it naturally when he woke up (probably because the staff spoke this language and he got used to it since the brain processes outside informations even in a comatose state).
RUclipsrs greedy titles these days. Not surprised.
@@guitarsolos89 PEOPLE WILL MAKE EYE CATCHING TITLES IN ORDER TO GET MONEY AND HAVE A STABLE LIVING😱😱😱
I'm a nurse, also the daughter of an amazing nurse, and my father was a doctor of psychology. My Mom was the Unit Manager of a large Stroke and Head Injury Rehab Unit in a large 11,000 bed teaching hospital until her retirement.. Amazing things happened on that Unit. Our brain records everything. Everything. Even our peripheral vision, sounds we are not focused on, smells, sensory information, while simultaneously internally speaking to it's self. We have just scratched the surface of what our brains are capable of. Damage to a part of the brain is traumatic, and the brain will "re-wire" itself, to a point, depending on how bad the damage is in an effort to respond to external stimuli. It's a fascinating field of study. Great video! Really enjoyed it! Oddly enough, I'm a white Canadian lady married to a Cantonese man! Lol
Reminds me of another amazing story of Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny) Mel was in a coma for two weeks and his Dr. addressed him as Bugs and he woke up.
Raised as a speaker of Taiwanese Mandarin, and learning English after I moved away from Taiwan, I think my English really started to improve when I stopped thinking of it as learning a language in a classroom, writing down new vocabs I encountered in a notebook, and getting bogged down with the grammar, but just pretended that I spoke English, and held my inner dialogues in English. When I didn't actually know a word or how to say something in my inner dialogue, I just hummed what I think the intonation of that word or phrase would sound like in my head. Together with watching lots of TV shows in English with closed caption, without relying on Chinese subtitles to understand what's going on, my fluency really improved. Oh, that and all those required readings I had to do for school assignments. I mean, reading the Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Steinbacks, even the Canterbury Tales weren't easy when you've only been learning the language for a couple of years. Though, letters and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. really got to me. I completely forgot I was reading them as assignments, I was just engrossed with the ideas and aspirations of MLK.
That's a really great approach! I found similar success in utilizing a more relaxed and playful approach, like you mention. The perspective and attitude with which you learn a 2nd language affects how easily the process goes. Best of luck with your continued progress!
在臺灣自己學能達成跟你一樣的程度嗎😭
@@HaoTse 可以找一下youtube上史嘉琳回音法的TED talk。我看完後覺得非常有道理，也和自己學習的過程很類似。用她的方法，只要找到自己有興趣的英文影片(最好是長的知識類影片，如AtlasPro)，就可以達到很好的效果。
I'm impressed. Canterbury Tales aren't easy for English speakers, let alone doing it as a second language. They were written in 1350s or thereabouts and the language has changed considerably since that time; many of the words are no longer in use, the meanings have changed, the spelling has changed and the construction of writing and speech have changed. Not the easiest way to learn the modern language!
@@susieg4624 It wasn't easy, but my English teacher at the time did a good job making it relatable in class. It also got me interested in historical linguistics down the road.
Hello sir, I hope you and the family are doing great. I just wanted to thank you for your time and video's. I have giving a go at mandarin and I really appreciate it. It is still a work in progress. Please keep ding the good work and we will watch. With much love and respect from Chicago USA planet Earth
I’m happy for Ben! What an incredible gift. It’s tragic to suffer a serious accident and come out of a coma but he was given a gift.
The brain is so complex and will shift to work independently to “survive”.
Thank you for sharing this experience Xioama and Ben.
I wish to wake for a dream and speak Mandarin. (minus the coma)
My husband had an uncle that was said to speak over 100 languages including different dialects. He was in Army intelligence during the Korean War. I only met him once and he wrote my daughter’s name in several different languages.
This is so freaking cool that there's people out in the world with that kind of gift!
Awesome human
Our brains are fascinating
That's very cool! I also think that the more languages you learn the easier it gets because a lot of languages are connected.
Wow, I've heard of people waking up from a coma and having a "foreign" accent. This is incredible. When I was 20 I was learning Cantonese (poorly I might add) because I had a job offer in Hong Kong. My friend arranged it for me through her family. When she told me I had to buckle down because I'd need to learn to speak Mandarin, I gave up. My biggest regret is not taking a leap of faith. I'm now about to be 63 and am trying to learn rudimentary Japanese because I'm going to be going there for a month; December through to New Years. I just can't pick it up, despite speaking it a bit 40 years ago. Same with French. I grew up in a bilingual city and spoke English and French. When I moved away and stopped using it, I never thought I'd forget it completely, but I'm living in a French building where only about a dozen of us speak only English. I forgot almost everything, but I can understand conversations when people are talking about me, thinking I don't understand and thank heavens they've never said anything really bad about me, just comments about the way I'm dressed 😂
I wonder why this happened to me...
A similar thing actually happened to me too. That's really interesting! Of course not as extreme, but after I woke up from amnesia after a surgery, I kept speaking in English (not my native language). It took a few hours and a bit of sleep to go back to my native language. I wasn't actually fluent yet.
I have had dreams where I am having conversations in German naturally (without having to translate internally). I am a native English speaker who took four years of German classes in school, but that was 30 years ago. I have never spoken it as well IRL as I have in my dreams. It's really cool, but also disappointing to wake up and be bad at it again, lol.
@@Johnny_Socko lmao I had a dream like that but in fluent Spanish, have no clue what I said or what the other ppl said when I woke up, it was so weird 😭 I don’t speak Spanish very much though so
well dang
i had a dream i was speaking fluent chinese and it was flawless and i asked my dad since we are chinese american and btw i didnt understand much chinese still at the time and he said that my chinese was perfect and i was so confused
@@Johnny_Socko wait this happened to me too but with Spanish, not my mother tounge but I've learnt it for a 2 years on and off, and I woke up being so confused as to how I had a dream in Spanish even though I'm not yet in a conversational point
You are very good and enjoy your content. But it was amazing to hear Ben and how fluent he is speaking. Thank you, really enjoyed this interview
I've studied several languages and I forget some of them because I don't maintain practice, but recently I had a day where I understood every language that I studied and had been exposed to. It all came back at once for some reason.
Seems to me that while he was in a coma, his brain was practicing the mandarin he already knew. If he was in a coma for a week, that’s roughly 168 hours of extra practice uninterrupted minus the time his brain rested. That may not seem that much but if you’ve already had a head start and your natural ability to retain information was already exceptional, it’s quite a bit. I myself learned French when I was very young but then hardly spoke it for a couple of decades. Still hardly speak it, but when I encounter someone French, it comes back fairly quickly.
Not even sure it works like that, seems more like his current language center might have been damaged, and so defaulted to what was available. Dude's speaking like he has WAY more than even 200 hours, more like been speaking his whole life. And apparently this is a "common" occurrence with head trauma.
I’ve been dabbling in Spanish, Hungarian, and Thai for a little and it’s so amazing to me how well the mind is able to remember and think in those different languages with such little practice.
I'm trilingual. I speak Tagalog because I was born in the Philippines. I speak English because, well, I live in the U.S. and also there were a lot of Taglish speakers back in my first country.. Now I speak Spanish just because of all the Mexicans that came to the U S. who live and where near me lol.
It's difficult to rationalize this. For him to learn a language while in coma, he would need something to learn from. He had very limited vocabulary and speaking fluently is one of the most difficult part in languages.
@@randomaccessfemale He wouldn't have gained new vocabulary in the coma, but he was still forming thoughts in Chinese from what he'd already studied. And when he woke up, he couldn't speak English due to that part of his brain being damaged, started speaking what he did know of Chinese, and the only person he could communicate with was the Chinese nurse. So out of necessity, he gained a lot of conversational Chinese experience during his recovery in the hospital, if not necessarily during the coma itself.
I was always really curious about this specific case. I'm so happy you got the REAL story, and shared it with us!!! THANK YOU! GO RAIBH MAITH AGAT!
Oliver Sacks , a famous neurologist wrote the books , ‘The man who mistook his wife for a hat ‘ and ‘Awakenings’ which was adapted into a film. The former book is a brilliant read where he discusses head trauma cases and what happens to the brain and some of the weirdest symptoms that happen to his patients . I can’t recommend the book enough .
Thank you for these recommendations, this sounds fascinating.
@@estrellasyfrases You’re welcome . X
I can relate with Ben. When I was learning Filipino, I would internalize all my thoughts in Filipino. In less than a few months I could fluently speak and understand the language!
This actually happened to my mother as well, she is japanese and lives in Denmark. One day she had an accident or something similar (i wasn't born yet so this is all things ive heard from others) and she woke up in the hospital speaking perfect danish. It's a super interesting phenomena that probably has to do with the subconcious mind supressing ones ability to fully use a language (maybe due to built up norms and such?). Either way it seems to be a reoccuring effect of headtrauma :P
What fantastic tips on how to learn any language! I was doing what he said not to-trying to learn too many words and sentences at the same time. I'm so glad to hear how best to learn Mandarin-or any language. I'm an upper beginner and was losing hope of transitioning into Intermediate or HSK3. Thank you for interviewing Ben! Also, I was raised in Japan as a five and six year old. I recently pretested at a level two in Japanese! As a child, I apparently learned more than I realized from my Japanese friends. I think that Ben is an example that we actually know more than we realize sometimes, but just need to know "how" to access it more effectively! Thank you again for the encouraging message. 👍👍
i've heard of this guy's story a few times over the years and knew that he'd done media stuff, but never ended up watching any of it - super cool to see this crossover! what an incredible person and an unbelievable scenario, the human mind is so mysterious
About 35 years ago I had started taking guitar lessons. I wasn't talented, and was struggling. I only knew a few chords. One afternoon I was practicing, and suddenly I could PLAY. I was changing chords, quickly and very easily. I understood what string to pluck to get a particular note, I could play the melody, I could change chords flawlessly. I could play as if I'd been playing for 10 years. It lasted about 5 minutes, and slowly went back to where I was, over about another 10 minutes. It showed me what it would be like, a few years down the road. I was amazed, and grateful. It gave me the incentive to continue practicing, and playing.
These are very interesting stories. I love learning languages but I'm not exactly fluent in any except English at this moment. I studied some German and Italian when I was 13 but only know two words in Italian and my numbers basically in German. On and off in my 20's I studied Japanese and a bit of Korean in my late 20's. Yet when people (customers) would speak in German around me, I'd understand them completely but reply back in English, I can also read German books. When I took a break last year from my Korean studies to go back to Japanese, quite a lot came back to me. The strangest moment in my life though was when I was 23. (10 years ago.) I worked at an airport at a popular named Cafe, the shop is next to the boarding area. They're boarding at 3am and my shop just opened. So I have a line of maybe 30 people and my coworker is running late. I'm awake but overwhelmed. I have a sweet older gentleman with his young teen son and daughter ready to order drinks. He's French and speaking broken English, I do my best to help. But he's getting overwhelmed and apologetic to me and the people in line cause he's having a hard time with English. He speaks in French to his kids and says maybe they should wait to get something in their next destination. I apparently replied back in perfect French and continued to work through their order in French. Only towards the end did I realize what happened cause they we're still speaking French and thanking me for my help. The customers after him asked if I knew French and I looked puzzled at them and said No. They looked even more confused, thinking I'm lying lol. But it only happened that one time. I'm trying my hand at French and I suck at it lol. But I'm working through it too. I think I just got overly stressed and my brain kicked in apparently knowledge of the French language that I didn't know I had. ^^
This interview was so interesting! I would have loved it if you had spoken more Chinese to one another. It is just so amazing to hear you speak in your second language so beautifully.
This story is very interesting , the side of the story I see is this is an example of what our brain is capable of. To use that power to the maximum would make the world a very different place ! Good vid my friend …
This whole story is pretty interesting. Gotta say, I’ve met lots of folks who can speak Chinese fluently but their tones are terrible. The guy speaks well and he gets his tones right too.
This is interesting. I had a dream once where I spoke fluent Cantonese. I understood everything that was being said in my dream and was talking fluently and thinking in Cantonese. After I woke up, it was gone. I had visited Hong Kong some years back, but never got beyond a “beginner” level of Cantonese. Very interesting.
i've actually heard this before
My guess is that he overheard the nurse speaking Chinese while he was in coma, or otherwise perceived that he was being cared for by a Chinese speaker, and his healing consciousness switched into the Chinese language in response (which he had studied previously) and this persisted once he regained consciousness. Remarkable.
I would say, brain damage. Mother-tongue and foreign languages are not stored in the same place in the brain, although there is some overlap. A part where his dominant language was stored got "injured" so the brain used what was available which was the foreign language
Interesting perspective
@@moonhunter9993interesting
I woke up speaking perfect English today. Its weird because I've only been speaking English for about 45 years.
I went to bed speaking English. I woke up speaking English with a hangover.
Wow
@@rbrtgrdn 🤣🤣
Really cool to hear this story. I got into a bad motorcycle accident a few months back and while I’m still not fluent in Spanish it’s strangely unlocked so much that was stuffed in there.
There's a true story about another man who while recovering from a head trauma realized he can play piano by ear. Now he's a renowned pianist. There are parts of our brain that remain dornant for this kind of learning. I believe this 100%.
You mentioned Foreign Accent Syndrome, and it reminded me of one of my English professors at the community college I attended years ago. He had a very very thick but authentic British accent as a result of FAS. He was in some sort of vehicle accident (I can't recall the details) and afterwards he went from speaking in a standard American Southern Accent to a brutally thick almost Cockney accent.
Great video. It is a really interesting phenomenon that happens to people and shows just how incredibly complex the brain is. Very nice for me that Ben is from my home city of Melbourne too.
Great advice at the end! Thanks for making this video and interview, very eye-opening! 🎉
So it's like his studied and learned subconscious understanding of Chinese overrode his conscious understanding of English. It's like his day to day Australian Brain wasn't awake yet so as his brain was healing itself and coming back to life, the subconscious understandings he picked up on through his learning and trips to China filled in the gaps for him. I imagine it's not that he got better at Chinese, it's that he had so much subliminal understanding already known to him, but without the overabundance of English language knowledge, he was able to confidently use all the information he previously gathered without any hesitations. Leading not to fluency but to a version of himself where he only confidently knew the Chinese he knew without any English being in the way to stunt his Chinese knowledge
Edit: sorry for the word soup lmao
spot on
I met a prominent gentleman who had a similar experience. He fell through the ice and drowned. He was dead but resuscitated. He said he remember dying and then something told him it was his time and he woke up speaking three additional languages fluently.
Wow. I had the same experience. After a clinical death I spoke fluent French. Before it I learned a bit and spoke very badly. But in emergency room I spoke fluent to nurses and told them French jokes. You should see eyes of my wife when she entered the room... I was thinking in French and spoke without accent. Unfortunately it lasted for about 20 hours, then I fell asleep and when woke up my French was even worse than before... Too bad it did not stay with me...
The brain is amazing!😮
You can't speak without an accent. Did you mean to say your accent sounded purely native? Or that you spoke perfect syntax, grammar, but the accent wasn't perfect?
It would be awesome to see you try learning some of the Khoisan languages that are often referred to as the click languages I think it would make for an awesome video
I still remember the day after I moved to Canada from the Netherlands where I stopped thinking in Dutch and English became my fluent language. Now I have to think about speaking Dutch
How old were you?
Omg!! I moved to canada from the philippines thinking in tagalog but a couple of days after i started my first day of school i only thought in english. i'm not fluent in tagalog anymore sadly :')
Waarom bn j verhuisd naar canada
This was a great way to demystify a sensitive topic! I appreciate your perspective brotha.
There’s been too many cases of people suffering a serious accident and waking from comas speaking a different language.
This is well documented throughout the world.
This story is really interesting to me. 🤔
Reminds me of the dispersion at the Tower of Babel.
I was always skeptical of these stories, so this was really interesting to watch.
I wonder if his personality changed any, well besides all the things he has done and is doing...amazing and on so many levels...Thanks for doing this!
I am am fluent in three languages but according to my former teachers I am failure . Never let a teacher define your career . Some teachers are not good enough at educating , they are just haters who can’t understand that we all learn differently .
Easiest hypothesis I can come up with is that his more accessible parts of his brain for language were originally damaged and that as a coping mechanism, parts of the brain where LTM is stored had to compensate. As he recovered sufficiently to wake up, his brain had already "wired" in Mandarin. EDIT: As he basically says in minute 8
I also think maybe his subconscious mind, during what would have been similar to dreaming, his brain was reorganizing data he had previously taken in but not internalized, similar to how people don't necessarily get better at something during practice, but during the rest after a practice. Then give someone two weeks with their brain on overdrive doing nothing but trying to recognize patterns, and he basically acquired stuff he only new factually before.
So interesting 😊. I'm a Sagittarius and learning new languages is one of my innate loves. Being that my family is international. My maternal grandfather was born in Malta, my grandmother in London and my mother was born in South Africa, I came into a very international family 😉.
I was born in Philadelphia, but we went over to Malta when I was 4 for what turned out to be an extended stay to visit while I turned 5 and I had to be enrolled in school, so I started there, then came back to the States and I finished school here.
But when I was in high school, there was a fellow student who spoke not a word of Spanish, that Summer, she had gone to a country where that was ALL they spoke and by the fall semester when she returned, she spoke fluent Spanish. I loved it!
I took French and Spanish in high school, but lost a lot of it by my 51st birthday, I can only remember a slight bit. And my grandfather was forever trying to teach me Maltese, but I didn't stick with it and he passed away.
A very difficult language to learn, as Malta was taken over by SO many cultures, they have a language that mixes a bit of ALL of those previous invaders into one.
In fact, Xiaoma, I challenge YOU to learn Maltese! 😄 You will be in a very small community, learning the language of a VERY small island in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, but fair warning, it may test all of your skills 😜💜👍.
This confirmed my theory that we internalize a LOT things (events, emotions, languages, etc.) but we don't necessarily process them. In a coma, which we still don't understand fully, brains must be working overtime - just like in dreams and sleep. Comas must allow the brain to be on overdrive to where the eyes might be closed and the breathing might be slowed down, but the ears must be open 24/7. It must be almost like a government shutdown when the external branches shut down, but the most critical aspects to running the nation continue working. For some odd reason, I would like to see more medical control over comas to where people can be induced into a coma in order to learn a new skill faster, recover in their bodies faster, etc. The problem with that of course would be how we'd use that technology. The brain is quite amazing!
Wow, this reminded me of a near fatal injury I had being hit by a transport vehicle over a decade ago. I was under a medically induced coma for 2 weeks and after would slip in and out of consciousness for week 3 till I came around. I had studied Japanese for about a year before that. I was definitely far from fluent but on one occasion during week 3 (I was told later) I was speaking only in a foreign language that non of the doctors and nurses in the ward could understand (in London Royal hospital). They could not get a response from me in English. Later my sister visited and identified it as Japanese. I doubt I was fluent, but it's really interesting that this is a thing. I barely have any memory of it though.
I love how his listening expression is naturally, a slightly sad one
very cool interview btw
Was looking for this comment
Reincarnation is real
I have experienced assimilating a foreign language twice whilst staying in foreign countries. I found listening was the first step and then after months it all fell into place.
Fascinating video for language enthusiasts I think. I've studied several languages and it's absolutely true that when your internal monologue switches over to another language your overall language ability follows too. I can only imagine how impactful it would be if my brain switched to a foreign language 100% of the time. I think it only does for 2% or 3% or something but even that much means I'm getting better.
My step mom had this happen with French. Your secondary language is stored in a different part of your brain, so if the part with primary language is damaged, the secondary comes out naturally
Wow, really well done interview! If I didn't know better I would think this was a journalism channel rather than a language one.
If you understand the way our brain works, you know how things like this can happen. The language we grow up with and languages we learn later in life are processed in different areas of the brain. So if one of these two areas gets injured, the brain will try to use the other area to compensate the injured area. This can work both ways. If the area that processes the languages you learned later in life is injured, you loose parts of the ability to use these languages.
My family is frinds with a family from Austria. Over 20 years ago one of the members of this Austrian family had an accident with a traumatic brain injury that damaged the part of the brain for second languages. The problem was that this man grew up speaking a rare regional dialect from an area called Oberpinzgau and learned standard German later in school. When he woke up from his coma, he was unable to communicate with most of the doctors and nurses since they came from different parts of Austria and Germany and the dialect he spoke has quite big differences to standard German. It is a bit like the differences between Chinese dialects. For the remaining time in hospital his wife had to translate almost everything he wanted to say to the doctors and it took many years for him to get back at least parts of his ability to speak and understand standard German. That was even more of a problem for him, because most people even in this area don´t learn the regional dialect anymore since all national media is in standard German nowadays.
Thank you for confirming what I thought I had learnt at uni, ages ago. 🤣
When I worked as a nurse in German speaking Switzerland, an elderly lady was admitted with Meningitis. She was very agitated and started to speak English with a strong Swiss German accent with me. The next day I told her son about it and he told me that she'd never ever learned English. It was kind of freaked both of us out. Unfortunately I quit that job shortly after, so I don't know what happened to her language ability after that.
That’s amazing and shocking it will gives u extra purposes & motivation to learn a language you love
Thanks for posting. I need to tighten up my answer to ‘why are you learning (currently) German?’ The end of the interview really spoke to me. The challenge, the passion, etc. When people think it’s a “hobby,” I get upset and feel my efforts are being demeaned. Thanks!
Great video, currently learning Thai at the moment. Whilst I've been learning I've always been trying to compare to English but when I'm speaking to Thai people I'm altering my sentences like Ben says. Going to have to start thinking more like this and changing the way I speak to myself in my head when people are speaking Thai to me.
Incredible video thank you! :)
Love your videos and and I've been following for years.
I understand the need for ads. The issue is that the banner ads pop up covering the translations way too often.
I believe this. I lived and studied Mandarin in China for 4 years. Even though I have been back in the States since 2011, I still have have complete Mandarin dialogue in my dreams. It’s not as frequent though
I woke up from surgery after having a life threatening infection and for 3 hrs I could only speak Spanish. I had spoken Spanish dialecs for several years prior. I can only imagine but a week would be much more confusing and interesting and I've heard it happens alot.
My guy woke up and had an upgrade in communication stat
As an RN who has worked in neuro, I'd surmise there is trauma / damage to normal language centers from their head trauma; and that 2nd languages are stored differently. Post head-trauma, of the language centers the brain defaults to the non-injured language center
I guess based on what you showed, if this happened to me I'd be speaking fluent Japanese. I've studied it for years and understand a lot of it.
Same thing happened to a friend of mine. He had done a Mormon mission in Italy and spoke fluent Italian, although he hadn't used it/spoke it in years. After his major head injury, he woke up speaking only Italian. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to retain it and after a few weeks, his brain switched back to English but he completely lost ALL of his Italian. He's tried intermittently to relearn Italian, but the head injury has actually made it even harder to learn other languages, or in the case of Italian for him, relearn it. Our brains are amazing!
A similar thing happened to my middle school councilor. He spoke near fluent italian already and he got in a really bad accident that put him in a several month coma, and when he awoke he could only speak Italian. They had to get one of his Italian speaking friends to translate initially. It sounds like he had to somewhat relearn English
Very interesting Xiama. Hope your well matey!
But this guy really spoke perfect Chinese at the beginning of the video, he didn’t sound like a foreigner at all 😮
"Once you lose muscle you kinda got to build it back".
That is the best analogy for muscle memory I've ever heard. The brain is a muscle. If you don't use it you lose it. Language can be lost if we don't use it. Great video.
after 30 years of studying languages and traveling the world, I'm convinced the two most common pathways to achieving native fluency in multiple languages are multiple language immersion in the first two years of life and brain damage...
Hmmm. Interesting Video! And Ben gave me an Idea that I am kinda embarrassed to Not have thought If before. There is so many languages I wanna learn, yet I have never thought of immersing myself into those languages' youtube
So the real story is, an Australian man who was learning Chinese for years, went into a coma after an accident, when he woke up, he couldn't speak English for a couple of days.
Mhm, with a perfect accent too!
Is that all you're interested in taking away from the interview?
Because the interview went on for longer than 6 minutes - there's a lot of good nuggets in there
@@agenericyoutubehandleAgreed. I wasn't referring to the interview, I'm talking about the original headlines.
It’s deeper than that. He became completely fluent WITH an accent. He was completely submersed by even thinking in Chinese. Much more than just “couldn’t speak English for a few days”
Awesome to see someone else's journey who's had great success with it.
This sounds fairly easy to explain: the accident somehow shut down access to the part of the brain that controls his mother tongue. Languages studied roughly after puberty are stored in a completely different part of the brain, which was apparently unaffected. Left without access to his mother tongue, his brain switched over to the second language. This resulted in the extreme immersion of having the only language that he has any access to at all being the second language. Ability then increased at speeds closer to childhood acquisition of English until he was able to regain English ability.
i love you Xiaoman, how come you never do chinese television? with 50 million views in a single episode, your youtube would also grow