Hey, I'm Jones's Moderator, This is a great video! As to why he didn't say the polyglots names, I'm sure he was just trying to be respectful and not ruin peoples income (and maybe avoid a future lawsuit). Keep it up! I subbed to you.
Hey there thank you very much, I appreciate that! Please say hi to Dr. Jones from me and much respect for his channel and professionalism. I might react or respond to another video of his soon. Thank you for subscribing.
If someone speaks the language well they will: use idioms, slang, informal speech patterns naturally. They will understand comedy and be able to explain the jokes, know cultural references in movies, books. And yes, going live is the best way to prove they actually speak the language well.
Exactly. My father was a true polyglot, having lived in the 9 countries whose languages he learned. Fluency is about a lot more than vocabulary and grammar. Body language, culture, customs and the myriad nuances that distinguish a native from a visitor are all important. He loved language, which served him well as a linguist and cryptanalyst for the NSA and chairman of the Cryptologic Professionalization program at the NSA in the 1990s.
Understanding comedy is such a huge part of it, I still remember the first time I managed to laugh at Family Guy. It was in that moment that I realised I could be truly fluent.
Please set your sights on Xiaoma. He is one of the most annoying fake polyglots out there. I've heard him speak in a number of languages that I understand (not fluent, I can just understand them), and it was always abysmal... yet he claims to be a polyglot who speaks "insert insane number here" languages.
Hi how are you. Yes I am speaking X. I studied X for many months. I went to place that speaks X/my friend speaks X. It is a lovely country. I love the food and culture
I really like that you stop Jones’ video (after some positive commentary) and steer us over there: he’s got a great channel. This move makes me want to watch more of your content.
When I was serving in the military, one time I was being briefed about a program which centered around language translation. The guy briefing me crowed about how talented the linguists were and beamed as he told me that one of their members learned "10 languages in a year". I knew from that point on that I was talking to a salesman and not a professional. I would never say that I am a polyglot, but I do speak Spanish, German, and Russian passably well and I know how difficult it is to reach true fluency. People who claim they speak 10, 20 or however many languages are simply arrogant narcissists.
Someone who speaks English, German and Italian fluently could become able to hold basic conversations in Dutch, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese with intensive study in that amount of time. 2 months per language, 3 hours a day. That's 180 hours per language. I think that would be more than enough to be able to read and understand most news (written and spoken), as well as being able to talk in a variety of subjects, albeit with some dsgree of simplication and limitations of vocabulary in all those languages, for instance. Metraton is a hardcore language learner. He talked about aspiration, pitch, tones...Many people barely think about those things. They go like this "I understand you, you understand me, everything's great and therefore I must be fluent". So when talking about fluency or what it means to speak a language, I always like to define those first. In a scale from 1 to 10 of what is necessary to consider yourself fluent, 1 being able to say 10 sentences with broken grammar and a bad accent and 10 being as good as a native speaker, Metraton is among those that think you have to be and 8 or 9. The same for Language Jones. Steve Kaufmann goes for a 6 or 7 (He is very forgiving of his mistakes and doesn't worry about mantaining all the languages he has learned). But most people are a 4 or 5.
@@RogerRamos1993the problem with fake polyglots is that they don’t fall in any of these categories. The fact that they can say “Hello. I’m Bill. I like you. You good!” in 50 different languages doesn’t make them fluent by any definition.
@InvinciblePythonEddy I disagree. He is the perfect polyglot for me. He speaks a few languages very well, and is able to function in many others. The times I saw he speak Portuguese he mixed it a bit with Spanish and would improve after a few minutes. He doesn't need to speak great Portuguese. If he were to live in Brazil for two months, I'm sure he would improve a lot. I don't think you need to keep up all your languages. If you learn a language for two or three years, you could abandon it for 10 years and once you went back to it, it would takes 2 or 3 months to rekindle your dormant language skills. There's a cost-benefit equation, as far as I'm concerned. If I were to live in Australia or the US, I would totally aim for "100%" fluency, but that not being the case 70% or 80% is more than enough. For other languages that I use even less than English, 50 or 60% is enough. What happens is that once you reach a certain stage, you need double the effort to just improve a bit more, and then the triple amount of time to just improve a tiny bit more, and so on.
Great video, as always. It is worth mentioning, the number of requisite hours from the US Dept of State could be misleading without some of the details that the hours imply. These courses, which are full-time in D.C. and a handful of other locations, are taught by multiple natives, require multiple hours of homework every night, have multiple midpoint examinations to ensure the student is on the right track, and after a certain point are taught almost entirely in the target language, which further increases the interaction in the target language. This is not X number of hours of self-study, which would not achieve the same results, frankly.
Also, each language has its own program with varying methods and effectiveness, even making the comparisons questionable. For example, if you look at their current (2024) table, Spanish takes 30 weeks to reach the same level of proficency as the 24 weeks for italian or even romanian, despite the greater differences such as large number of Slavic (and sometimes Dacian) loanwords in Romanian, as well as a case structure that spanish learners dont need to deal with. So this also reflects the strengths of each language program and the strength of the students selected for each, rather than just language difficulty or distance for english learners. Spanish had previously had a horrible pass rate for the proficiency test, so they lengthened the course
Jones is a great content creator; watching his videos is always a joy. I am also a very passionate language learner, and although I speak three languages fluently, I do not consider myself a polyglot. It bothers me to see fake polyglots on RUclips who pretend to speak more than 20 languages and who tell people how easy it is. Snake oil sellers is a really appropriate term for such people, Thank Metatron, for your videos!
Cheat code to being a polyglot is to be a native speaker of any slavic language there's about 15-20 (somewhere around that) and they're pretty much similar. As native Polish speaker I understand Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian. Haven't had much exposure with southern slavic languages but that wouldn't take much effort to understand and be able to speak some of it. For example Russian for me is like Polish mixed with some old Polish (eg words we dont use since like XVI century) mixed together with some new words and we have quite a few of idioms that are same word for word.
My husband is a conference interpreter with a degree in Linguistics (among others) who grew up with two bilingual parents. He was born and grew up in Germany, but his grandparents came from four EU countries (Germany, Hungary, Croatia and Greece). His mother is a German/Hungarian native speaker, and his father a Croatian/Greek native speaker. He spent his entire childhood speaking their native languages at home (the grandparents were always around, while his parents were at work) and spent his summers in these countries with cousins, aunts and uncles. He also watched TV programs in these languages and read books and newspapers on a daily basis. He also took additional school courses (for students with migrant backgrounds) in three of the four languages. He then later studied in these countries, and earned three M.A. and a Ph.D. At the age of 12 he was already fluent in German, Hungarian, Greek, Croatian, but also English and French (mandatory in German schools). Interestingly though, after two glasses of wine, his „High German“ becomes very Southern German (Bavarian/Munich area) and his „High Croatian“ becomes very Dalmatian (Split area). Also, his „Standard British English“ (which he picked up watching British sitcoms) sounds more West Yorkshire. And when I asked how come, he suddenly sounded like a Loiner, he said: „Well, I bloody studied in Leeds for a year.“ But, his Spanish and Dutch sound a bit off. He picked up the languages much later and every time we’re in Spain or the Netherlands, people will always ask where he‘s from (that never happens in Germany, Hungary, Croatia and Greece). But when people praise his „talent“ his immediate answer is „Like Einstein said: It’s only 1 per cent talent and 99 per cent work. It’s basically math. Solving one problem after another. And facing more problems. It’s listening to news and podcasts, reading out texts, writing your own registers, listening to and talking with people, taking notes. It never ends!” He’s dabbling in Korean currently (we’ve been planing to visit South Korea next year) and his comment (“I’ve got no idea where to start with this one”) says a lot about real language acquisition. I don’t understand why some people claim to be able to learn any language in a short time. It takes years and years of serious studies and hard practice, to master five or six languages to a C-level. For ten or twenty languages it would take three lifetimes.
Some people are so sick that honoring the human experience with the simple truth is gone. Instead, it is a ferocious need to be seen as something, anything! If you see me this way, then I am that way. It must be irrational logic.
I think that the "number of hours to learn" thing is a measure that's useful for a vague gauge of more or less how long you need or for a population average, like BMI, but when you try to apply it to specific individuals you'll find a lot of variation. but also, these estimates are based on intensive course study and the people that are selected for such courses generally have a higher aptitude for language learning than the average person (there's an exam they give to try to test that aptitude in candidates for the program). So these numbers are also the average for someone who's probably above average. So it's at least relevant for his point how many minimum hours it generally takes people to learn each language
I am an attempted polyglot..about 7 languages... its an impossible task to really nail all of these. The best you could hope for is to get to level a2 or b1. And going rusty is a very real problem.
I'm an ESL teacher and there is one thing only a few people get right, where to put the natural accents (syllables) in the words for each language. it can completely change the flow of what you are saying and can render your speech difficult to follow especially for those who are not used to speaking to non natives
In French too you can absolutely use the present tense to refer to a future event, but "quand" requires the future tense when it's used to talk about a future event. Eg: you can 100% say "demain je mange de la pizza", but you can't say "quand je suis en France, je mangerai de la pizza" (OK, bad idea to order pizza in France. Switch that for baguette). No idea if you can use the present tense in Italian after quando to talk about a future event, I don't speak Italian.
God, I missed your language videos, cause besides them being interesting, they also always motivate me to go and practice the languages that I'm currently learning.
as a language student, and a "hobby linguist" (i.e. language theory) since i was 2, i cant agree on your depiction that it would take MONTHS to understand spanish grammar as an italian learner. u will understand it in an afternoon while reading about it. but a language is not about understanding abstract structures -- its about applying it actively, and that means a) remembering at every needed moment what the theoretical framework said again, and b) the intuitive "muscle memory" like use of that stuff, which only comes after enough practise -- that might be the "month" u postulated if its much that u have to engrain into ur habits. (but "vocabulary" is a totally different can of worms, its not really going aywhere if u have the perfect structure for every situation ready but u cant fill it with words cuz u dont know how things or actions are called in the targeted language :D this memory game os te part that takes of most time of aggregating poficiency in a language)
Lol as an actual polyglot (my day job is a linguist lol I also have a PhD) I loved this please keep doing vids like this. Anything more than 6 is extremely extremely hard. The only reason I speak as many as I do is because I grew up in a place that speaks many languages. Also I think a lot of these people count "reading an alphabet" as speaking a language. Also lets get rid of the notion that linguists speak a lot of languages. Some of them do but most dont and you dont actually have to in order to do linguistics so if anyone is interested please do study.
For those who aren't aware Metatron has put out a number of videos on how to learn a foreign language. He even menioned several tipd in this video. The most important: Study enough to learn the basics, then join a community of native speakers and immerse yourself in the language and culture.
Language Jones is at least B2 in French, he passed that one years ago and has used it at a high level for a decade or two since. He is working on Hebrew, but I believe his main target at the moment is Spanish. He also seems to be fairly familiar with Yiddish. I don't think he's claimed a CFR level in any of them except French. I suspect he has at least studied many others (dude wrked for Rosseta Stone at one point), but he is a Linguistics PhD. It's hard o know whether he knows a language or he knows about a language when he speaks about it.
He's "good" at Chinese and French by academic standards, "not bad" at Russian, sure some Yiddish and Hebrew too, the entire Jewish sphere of influence why not, he will tell you he knows how to properly immerse but really he lives for his own "clever" 1st hand grammatical observations. He looks down from on high within the group of Duolingo members, of which he is apart of.
Romanian here. About using incorrect grammar: it happens for certain constructs in casual speech. Complex tenses, or conditionals, etc. But you can't do it in more formal speech. And there are things that you can't do, ever. For example messing up the genders / number / case agreements. No native will ever say "Ea ești deștepți" (Ea ("she", feminine singular) ești ("are", second person singular) deștepți ("smart", masculine plural)) :-)
I remember a Romanian teacher I used to have that told me that it was acceptable for me to say “Îl trimit la tine”. I said that means that I can say “eu este”, and he told me that it didn’t exactly work like that 😂 I do however try and make my Romanian learning as economical and lazy as possible. The genitives and datives? Don’t need them. The word “este”? Don’t need it. The tense “venise”? Phrase the sentence in such a way that I don’t have to use the -se, the words “ciorapi” and “cartofi”? “Nişte ciorap” and “nişte cartof”. It’s very easy to be lazy in Romanian and to mumble from time to time while it’s still acceptable 😂
All of what you say here would be "grammatically incorrect, no native would say that, but I can understand" :-) Not in the "a native can say that in a casual setting" category. Correct: "niște ciorapi", "niște cartofi". "Îl trimit la tine" might work if I am sending someone to you. If I send something then it's "ți-l trimit". And "o trimit la tine" / "ți-o trimit" for feminine.
+1 Same shit in Russian. You can say crazy stuff like omitting “I” in a sentence and it would be ok (nobody would ever say “I’m going for a walk” but rather “going for a walk” etc.) yet you mess with just one case or gender and now it’s obvious 😅 It still would be possible to understand of course, but definitely not ‘fluent’ by any standards.
I wonder if you're going to reach Wouter (the Dutch guy that does language challenges with tourists), I think he's the one that started the big YT polyglot trend, even though he's pretty clear and honest about his fluency levels. He does do (or used to do) live streams on Twitch where people come and "challenge" his language skills. He also did a video about this exact topic with Oriental Pearl, did you see it?
Holy crab! And I feel bad for listing Latin as a language I speak on a dating app! (I basically just started to learn it, bought myself two parts of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, but I'm afraid of reading it, because I drown in anxiety whenever I'm in silence, and reading a book while listening to TFL Car Chat podcast isn't the best way to learn)
The whole concept of trying to learn as many languages as numerically possible just seems stupid to me- similar to trying to see how many notes you can shred on a guitar in one second has little to do with music. It's all about showing off and ironically scares many people away from seriously attempting to learn another language because they figure if they can't achieve fluency in six months like this or that youtuber, then they must not have the brains for it. The reason one learns another language, at least for me, is to *understand another culture other than your own* and *maybe impress the person you're talking to enough to want to become your friend so you can learn even more*. It is not to impress people who can't understand a word of the language you claim to speak.
Not exactly like, there are people who really, really, really, really, I mean really love languages and really, I mean, really would like to know as many languages as possible. Watch a few videos by Alexandre Arguelles to understand this from the viewpoint of someone who suffers from that. Just the idea of understanding music, literature and movies in the original had me making a list of over 80 languages I wanted to learn (and that leaving many out). I don't know how long I'll live, but 15 is the bare minimum of languages that I want to learn to a level that I can read the news in that language (My goal is not to read the news, just a good parameter to test my progress). So even reducing the number of languages as much as I can, it's never less than 25. The main romance languages (esp, fre, ita, port, cat, rom) The main germanic languages (eng, ger, dutc, nor, swed) A number of Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian) And then some latin, modern greek, albanian, turkish, Hindi, Bengali, lingala, Swahili, etc... Many people learn languages for the simple fact they love languages, the sounds, the words, the ability to understand humor without translation, the amazing sensation of reading literature in the original and understanding it almost effortlessly. Getting back to my read the news parameter, I can do that in Portuguese (native), English, French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Romanian, so far. Next year, I hope I have added at least German to that list.
The biggest redflag a "polyglot" can have is only speaking about learning the language. That's what that dutch "hyperpolyglot" does. He says "hello, I speak [language]"
I completely agree espcially with both you and jones. Especially as a hindi native speaker. Getting the native accent is very difficult. then getting compound verbs is really difficult like how -uṭhnā means to stand up but when combined with a verb root gives a inchoative sense while denā shoes a movement. then the moods and future form. one method to spot a person who isn't native is when they don't use the ergative structures and dative structures correctly. even future and messing up the tenses like saying tomorrow I am eating pizza while consistently in hindi we use future tense since we don't differ yesterday and tomorrow even in standard. like kal main pizza khaunga and kal main pizza khaya that. plus when speaking they don't drop spaces in verb blocks(very spoken thing)
One of the old RUclips polyglots, always would listen to people's accents to guess which ones spoke one of his languages. But he also relied on having the people just be excited if they spoke a similar language or whatever. But one stuck out where dude kept speaking to a woman with an expecting grin looking for the excitement reaction as she looked rather indifferently repeatedly saying "I barely understand anything you said. You're speaking (x), but I'm from (y)." 😅
The bit about spending time in another country to get better at its language can easily become a positive feedback loop of frustration. To learn the language, I need to relocate first, but, to relocate, I need to learn the language first. (And that even cuts into the motivation a bit, too; if I'll never get to relocate, what am I doing all this work for? A limited number of vacations in my life, of a few weeks apiece?)
The solution is attending language immersion schools in that country. For example Japan has dozens of those schools for foreigners and you can pick the length of the program you want. It might not be a long time but you'll be spending most of it in Japanese.
Je n'ai jamais vecu dans un autre pays que le Brésil et je n'ai jamais sorti de mon pays, mais si j'avais le besoin je serais capable de me debrouiller en 5 ou 6 langues. Li fornisco un esempio, da piu o meno dieci anni non parlo italiano con nessuno, però potrei parlare di molte cose se ci fosse la necessità. Come mi manca la pratica, lo so che mescolare l'italiano con il francese o con lo spagnolo accadrebbe di tanto in tanto, ma non vedo qual sarebbe il problema. Da sempre, ho ritenuto che la comunicazione è lo piu importante, se ci capiamo, allora tutti va bene. Dovrei parlare un italiano impecabile solo se io studiassi in una universittà d'Italia o se lavoressi in un'azienda italiana. En cuanto al español no lo he hablado jamás con nadie, sea presencialmente sea por video llamada o llamada de telefono. Lo he aprendido casi exclusivamente leyendo libros y escuchando a canciones, además de ver unas cuantas peliculas y series. Soy brasileño, por lo tanto, se me hace bastante fácil. No te desanimes, entreno conversacion con guias de conversacion. Imagino que son conversaciones reales, pero no me detengo. Leo frases y más frases. Se puede aprender mucho sin viajar nunca. Seria perfecto que yo pudiera viajar a todos lados y tener profesores que me enserañaran, pero no lo puedo y no los tengo, por eso utilizo las herramientas que tengo.
This is false. I learned Japanese from self-study and Spanish making friends plus a few college classes. There’s enormous amounts of free language materials online but the biggest things is to set a schedule, practice regularly and make friends who are native speakers you practice with and use what you learn while studying and using new words. You’ll be exposed to a ton of content and it will be in context, and if you have a language buddy you are forced to speak not just learn passively. There’s plenty of websites to do this, depending on your topic language. Traveling overseas is great for immersion but it isn’t a prerequisite. Source: I’ve studied languages most of my life and have lived and worked overseas surrounded by people speaking languages unrelated to my mother tongue.
Hey, Metatron. Great video as always mate! Can I give you a video suggestion, if you don't mind? I would love to see a video about Latin, to be more specific, how, for example, different accents of Latin, and their characteristics, eventually became their respective languages.
I find it more than enough to juggle the 3 languages I speak. They are also from the same family. English, Icelandic and Norwegian. Norwegian has opened up the ability to understand two additional languages, Swedish and Danish. And being Icelandic makes me able to read Faeroese. Very narrow field here and since I speak languages that are fairly similar I sometimes get words mixed up between them. 100 languages? Not a chance. There is just no way that can be true.
I'm not a native French speaker but from what I've heard French speakers are similar in that they also use the present tense at times when saying things like "tomorrow, I x"
I'm French, and yes, you're absolutely right, and in the same way Metatron explained for Italian, we would use the more correct futur tense in a more formal context.
I'm Brazilian, bit you can use the present in French to refer to the present, to the near future, to the near past as well to a distant past (historical present) Demain, je vais chez le médecin. Victor Hugo est un des plus celebres ecrivains de langue francaise de tous les temps. Qu'est-ce que tu fais maintenant ? Je bois du café dans un bistrot. Est-elle deja partie ? Bah, oui. Elle sort toute a l'heure, désolé. (This last one sounds a bit weird for me as a non-native speaker, but I've seen in more than one grammar. I would rather say "Elle vient de sortir..."
@@RogerRamos1993 It's where languages become very tricky. In your first example, we could say "Demain, j'irai chez le médecin" but there is a very subtle difference: we would use "Demain, je vais chez le médecin" if everything is already decided, the appointment has already been made; while with the form "Demain, j'irai chez le médecin" it might not be the case... Your last example is indeed very weird: "Elle sort tout à l'heure" means that she's not out yet, but will be in the near future. Your "Elle vient de sortir..." is correct.
@@LudoTechWorld I knew that already about the medecin one. The last one had a better example in the grammar I read these, it sounded like something someone could say. These days, I made a mental exercise and realized that we can say almost anything in Portuguese using only the present tense, as well, but we are not even aware of it. Most people aren't, I mean.
Where you discuss the hours and bring up getting (say) six months for a baseline then living in a country that uses that language for a year - that's actually significantly longer than the estimates Language Jones was using- 75 years for 50 languages! And again, one would need the resources to be able to to that and it still assumes no time is needed to maintain your fluency.
Yes, using the present tense when refering to future happenings is common in many languages and they even teach this as an alternative in language courses. We often speak like this in my mother tounge Swedish as well.
The point of those FSI numbers, is that it’s the average. Of course certain factors will increase/decrease the time but for the majority of people it’s going to be within one SD of that.
One of those tell-tale signs of if a person is fluent is if they can butcher the language appropriately. To achieve fluency you must spend time with native speakers and you need to be able to speak formally and informally. Like, for my job I have to speak formal French constantly as well as being able to write it. I literally never speak like that in person and its informal/slang mostly when speaking french. It boggles the mind how many words you can use in a single conjunction in French lol. So its weird when someone claims to be fluent and speaks like they are reading from a textbook.
I discovered I have a knack for languages, and can hit an intermediate level relatively fast, but getting fluent? That's a years-long journey and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
There are some fake polyglots that bother me. Usually the ones who you can tell that they’re reading off a teleprompter or making cuts to every sentence (while reading off a teleprompter) to make it seem like they know a given language much better than they do. A lot of these offenders are the vlog-style channels where people talk about how they’re learning 6-7 languages at a time. And just as much of the content is about how they schedule their language learning routine as it is about their actual language learning. There’s a very aesthetic element to it. When one starts learning a language in earnest (especially an FSI category 3-4 language) and reaches a certain level of fluency, it is easy to see these fraudsters from a mile away. But I admit that I was fooled for a while by some of these channels. The one “fake” polyglot I can give a pass to is the XiaNYC guy (can’t remember his full RUclips name). I think he was much worse in the past, but he has pivoted to more of a travel/documentary channel with a heavy focus on introducing people to new cultures or endangered languages/cultural groups. I think the work he does in presenting these endangered cultures and languages outweighs his sometimes sketchy claims of having a higher level of fluency.
At 15mins, in French, its more like in Spanish The future tense exists, but we often just use the "we will" form Demain, je mangerai (sounds weird) -> Demain, je vais manger (hell yeah) And in Québécois it can be destroyed into oblivion with Demain, j'vais manger -> Demain, jva manger -> Demain, m'a manger
I really dont agree that you need to undertand advanced grammer to be fluent, ask any native about advanced grammar end they will most likely not know almost anything, my first language is Spanish i'm from Mexico and i can't to save my life accentuate while writing nor i know what the hell is Aguda, Grave, Esdrujula and Sobresdrujula and a lot of stuff, but i'm still fluent in the language, also like i have always said like 90% of the grammar we learn after middle school we never use on a real conversation here in Mexico.
yes, but it took you many, many years with 100% immersion in the language and with an added bonus of a child brain that adapts to languages better than a brain of an adult. learning grammar saves a lot of time compared to if you just jump in blind
@@vsm1456 No. Most of the time it's a terrible waste of time. Formal grammars don't account for the plenty of exceptions in any language, and those tend to coalesce around the most common usage.
I totally agree. Though not a true polyglot myself (I struggle using a language unless in the land... so, for example, my italian is fluent in Italy, both napolitano and 'correct' italian, but conversationally when outside Italy). I don't know if tHis is a normal/known thing? Anyway, my dad was a polyglot and was fluent in 7 languages which he learnt as he travelled across the world as a soldier during WWII. After the war he worked as a court translator, language teacher for the post-war immigrants, and a technical translated for scientific papers. I can't remember all his languages, but they included Polish (mother tongue), Italian, English, Russian (and other languages around there), Urdu and some African ones I don't know. Whenever asked how he managed it, he would joke that he picked up each language from different girls in different countries. Truthfully though, he studied them as he was interested in linguistics and cultures.
2:12. On right is Xiaomanyc. Philippines 🇵🇭. He has not visited that nation. I travel to and from there for 40+ years. I have (male) relatives who, while stationed there, who married Filipinas. I am a San Francisco native 🌁. Many Filipinos live here, especially south in Daly City. His pronunciation of Tagalog is off. He speaks basic words. He does not realize that Filipinos often code switch. Even if you disagree with Xiaomanyc, he has 1 good point: interviews of legitimate polyglots. Oriental Pearl, Luca, polymathy, Gabriel Wyner, others.
Ciao Metatron! Beware of Language Jones, he often times inserts his political agenda in the videos he makes. It would be interesting to see your reaction to his video "the DARK IDEOLOGY secretly lurking in language RUclips" in which he blatantly shows his bias. Un saluto da Roma!
Hi, your channel is to my liking, like +i in the Pa(r)lermo local tongue. Myself (master in electronics) German native and English fluent, C1+ tested (who cares). I wonder who has more effect on interesting people in languages, the PHD's or the less sophisticated. The energy of talking about fake polygots shoulder rather go in building better language learning tools, not everybody has his privat encantadoro, bruja, estrega , witch or whatever ;-)
They say in Turkish when a person uses some non-standard grammar/form they assume they’re speaking informally; when a foreigner uses the same expression they assume they’re making a mistake. :-)
Great video, so happy to see you do linguistics content! Anyone who speaks Mandarin can tell a fraud. Just watch any American TV show where the actor (who doesn’t speak Mandarin) is speaking memorized lines. The pronunciation cannot be faked.
I'm supportive of your crusade against fake RUclips polyglots, but I wonder if you should review a video on how to properly set up an ambush first - step 1 is probably not, "telegraph your plans in detail," that might be from the Bond villain guide instead 😂
Isn't his simple multiplication a bad approach? The more languages you learn, the more parallels you can draw between them. At some point some basics become trivial and you learn languges by their relatively little deviations from the other languages you already understand thoroughly. - Of course a savant-level memory helps a lot here, especially with vocabulary. I mean, a class 4 language might be a class 3 or even class 2 language to a linguistics master. They got optimizations in their brain. Kinda like where musicians cannot enjoy music anymore because they spot all the imperfections, while a layperson gets super-excited about it and everything sounds great. From my personal experience, it makes a significant difference whether someone has a mind that conveniently blends things together or a mind that gets excited about differences, because in the latter case you are less prone to mix up things between languages because you love those minute or tricky differences. (Exemplary key term: false friends.) Ama-teur gold.
It's astonishing how many people will glibly claim fluency in a language when they are probably up to B1 level at the absolute most. Worse yet are those who claim that they can teach you a language in 5 weeks ...... I teach ESOL and find these claims infuriating on two levels. First, it is totally unrealistic. Show me the person who was speaking their own language at 5 weeks of age (with constant input). Some will claim that you can't compare the native language with a second or third one but I think I can - we are learning to make new and unfamiliar sounds and to put meaningful sentences together. The second level is that of the hidden, implied xenophobia. "Our language is the vehicle of our deep and rich culture and therefore difficult to master, but surely the chimp-like gibbering of foreigners can be picked up in a matter of weeks?" These "linguists" and "language teachers" need to be shown up as the frauds they are.
Xiaoma has a video where Norwegian news station interviews him live in their language where he has to learn it and he doesn't know what they'll say. In that video, he explains how long it takes to truly learn a language. That most his videos, he's just learning very basic greeting and restaurant ordering conversations. Which is exactly what Language Jones claims he wants from these people. So why does he constantly use a picture of him in these videos?
I posted another comment somewhat similar, Xiaoma is an entertainment channel and I think he’s toned back his claims of fluency and conversational ability. For all the good his videos bring, I think he deserves a pass. The worst fake polyglots I’ve noticed are usually the college-aged girls who claim to be learning like 5 languages at once, where it is painfully obvious that they’re either reading off a teleprompter or straight from Google translate for every sentence. Usually their channels tend to have heavy aesthetic elements where the content is as much talking about how they schedule their language learning and their pretty color-coded notebooks and planners as it is about focusing on the actual languages themselves.
I can easily believe that there are people out there who *understand* dozens on languages. Metatron has demonstrated how much he can understand of native Spanish speakers without any training in the language so I can easily imagine that a Romance speaker reaching a good level of oral comprehension in the other languages in the family without too much work on each. Same with a German speakers understanding Dutch and Nordic languages or a Russian speaker with Slavic tongues. Producing these other languages is a different ballgame.
In Germany from 1842 to 1912 a writer Karl May lived.When i was a child, his novels had been still popular. In many of his novels he himself is the hero, who has adventures allover the world. This man claimed, to speak a number of languages. The reality was, he only had a large number of dictionaries. Also he never traveled outside of german language countries for a long time. He owned a large number of books about foreign countries and lots of maps. At first many german, austrian, swiss citizens believed, that Mr. May realy was in foreign countries, but only for short time, and as an artist, had then inspiration for his adventure novels. But in 1890s, the readers, especially the adults, noticed more and more mistakes and simply wrong things (also , black spots' in his private life). After 1900 his success as writer rapidly declined, and he became a peace activist.
Although I don't like liars, he still had some merit for researching everything out. Fraudsters usually just make things up and claim with such conviction that people usually side with them instead of the critics.
@Neomalthusiano : In those days, in contrast to now, few german language speakers had been outside of Europe, and much of current knowledge didn' t exist. For example, Mr. May claimed, lions live as couples. But unusual : In those nationalistic days, in Mr. Mays novels people of different nations appear as his friends. So i assume, the peace activities in his last years had been true. Bertha von Suttner ( owner of Peace Nobel Prize) noted: l listened to a speech of him, q good speech.
I think there must be a difference between being able to read a language than being able to speak one. like I can tell déguise in French is disguise in English, but don't know how to pronounce it in French. This is from 2 Corinthians 11:14 of the French Ostervald Bible, then lumière is similar to the English word luminaries so lights, so lumiere must be light. Then of course I second guess everything so I find myself looking it up, but that is for confirmation. I do reverse translations also. "déguise en ange de lumière." Disguises as an angel of light. Though can I say this in French I don't think so.
Hey bro, could you react to Mikel hyperpolyglot who claims literally this «How long does it take to learn a language? 3 months or less. If you think it takes longer, you clearly haven't watched the tutorials and done the free NLL exercises». Hmm. Simply genius or just another grifter?
Usiamo anche spesso il presento per parlare al futuro prossimo in francese, ma dipende anche della frase e del contesto. Anche nel questo caso, generalmente non mescoliamolo con il futuro. Si può dire "demain je vais au cinéma et je mange avec mes amis", o "demain j'irai au cinéma et je mangerai avec mes amis", ma non "demain j'irai au cinéma et je mange avec mes amis". È possibile cambiare nell'altre direzione ("demain je vais au cinéma et je mangerai avec mes amis"), ma è un po inabituale. Nel esempio di Languagejones, è anche un problema che cominci con "when/quand". Noi usiamo mai il presento per parlare al futuro dopo "quand", perché questa congiunzione è usato per indicare un momento specifico ed usarla davanti un "cattivo" tempo sarebbe un po confuso. Se dici "quand je suis en France", noi penseremo che tu vai spesso in Francia e che la prossima frase descriverà un abitudine, non che parli del futuro. Mi sembra ch'è la stessa cosa in italiano, ma sono un po ruggito, posso sbagliarmi...
I could see someone at least being able to slide in and out of fluency with 12 languages if it’s something like Swedish Norwegian danish German, Swiss German, Dutch Belgian English Italian French Spanish Portuguese. But whyyyyyy???😂
The KEY thing to learning languages is memory. If you dont have good memory you are out of luck. Next is being able to hear vvery subtle sounds and tones. If you are tone deaf, you are out of luck.
15:00 I have a feeling that's linguistic prescription taking a clue from logician linguistics. The future tense doesn't have to talk about the future so why would the simple present be stuck talking about right now? Any linguist knows that the values of a tense and the moments it refers to don't have to align at all
Yeah... I`m quite talented with languages and have lived in Beijing for 5 years. Can confirm that the tones aren't super difficult, but they do require practice to get used to. There's only ONE White guy who's perfect in Mandarin, and he's Canadian.
Just being from Europe doesn't guarantee this. Here in the Netherlands (often put forward as 'multilingual') people increasing only speak Dutch (obviously) and some level of English. Anything else is a personal choice to pursue, most don't.
@@tomschreiner3717 Well there's no real practical reason for people in the UK to learn anything more than English. If German currently had the status of English, the majority of Germans would likely be monolingual.
The only polyglot i know that speaks more than a dozen languages is Steve Kaufmann, but i don’t think he fakes it 😅 i’ve seen some live videos with him.
My language learning goals are actually what the fake hyperpolyglots do. All I want is a shallow grasp of a wide variety of languages. I don't want, need, or care about perfect grammar. I don't care about reading or writing. My goal is to speak a variety of languages at that "a month of university" level. Confidently, with decent pronunciation, and able to understand basic answers. Not fooling anyone that I'm fluent, but enough to exchange basic information, be polite, maybe get a smile out of someone. My goal is not to become properly conversational, nor is it to fake and misrepresent my language competency to by any better than it actually is. I just want to be able to talk with the skill of an enthusiastic child in as many languages as interest me. I want to go to [place[. Where is the [place]? I like [thing]. This food is delicious. Maybe learn a joke or two, even if they're rote, and I don't fully understand the grammar behind it. I don't need polish, or anything remotely approaching fluency. I actually think what they do is impressive - it is a cool parlour trick. I wish they didn't inflate it, or pretend they're doing something more than what they do. Having the absolute basics in 20, 50 or 100 languages is impressive, cool, and aspirational. Don't taint it by pretending fluency, or using deceptive editing. Give me a channel with someone who is honest about their dabbling. Honest about their limitations. Excited to get out there and talk to people for the joy of it.
9:52 this math that he does, though, doesn't convince me, because isn't it true that learning your 3rd or 4th language is much more efficient/fast, compared to learning your 2nd language? maybe after learning French, for example, learning Italian would take 1/4 of the time as it took to learn French, and thus that's how polyglots can learn so many languages so quickly?
Like almost anything, it follows the law of diminishing marginal returns. If you only know one language, to learn a second one, requires a lot of time. If you already know two, to learn a third requires much less. If you know three, to learn a fourth requires less time, but not that much less. And on, and on. Every time the advantage decrease. Because you have the mental elasticity, but mental elasticity doesn't give you grammar and vocabulary, or a particularly good memory. Also, French and Italian are both romance languages, so they have much in common. It's like knowing French already gives you a part of italian. But knowing French gives you practically nothing of Czech for example.
it is true that the 3rd and 4th language do take less time, because you are in the habit of learning languages and know how to do it efficiently. You might be fumbling around and wasting time trying to learn your first. BUT it will not speed up the process to a degree where you can just whip out a new language in a few months or even hours. I am a german native speaker and am on pretty very high level with my english (second language) I did learn to speak italian on a passable conversational level in 6 years (mind you I got a day job to do and can only dedicate so many hours a day to that hobby). Ihen i took on the endeavour to learn japanese. I am still on a low A2 level with that after three years. Yes the process is more speedy because I do know what I am doing and how to get the knowledge into my head. Still it takes an insane amount of time to memorize all that vocab and grammar. No you can not speed up the process to be fluent in that insane amount of languages claimed by those fake poliglott. Any brain can only memorize and reproduce a certain amount of knowledge in any given 24h. Unless you are a savant with language learning you will not be able to cram more into your head and keep it there. Being fluent means you know a lot of words and all the grammar points in any language you claim to be fluent in. Which will need review also - use it or loose it is key here. I will go on learning languages and i have high hopes to get 4 languages (oterh than german) to a high level of proficiency, before I die. So am I going to be a polyglott - nah! I will be just that gal that speaks 5 languages, and i will have been working at language learning for hopefully 30 years by then :D
I want to add that the math presented is not as clear cut as it seems. I do think that they are fraud but I think the math argument fails to recognize that you can learn much faster when you have learned other languages. It is still not possible I know but I wanted to throw that in
Ciao Matatron, come ti arzi? 15:21 when I´m speaking Italian freely I not always use the termination -re... "vojo parlà con te" or sometimes I drop the "no" in "sono"... "so felice, e te?" because I also feel lazy ;) :D
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
Link to the original video
ruclips.net/video/JoUXT2uuS38/видео.html
Metatron, what would You say, who is a Polyglot? I'm fluent in 3 Languages. Am I a Polyglot, or must one know 5-6 Languages to be a Polyglot?
Metatron eh?? ... always the frauds hiding behind beauty and truth !! Filthy PoS !!!
Hi this you may want to debunk.
A channel called Exposing fake Polyglots … he criticises you, language Simp , language Jones and well everyone
ruclips.net/video/HdiKzH_iCHY/видео.htmlsi=Y64ws11C3ZMaOinQ
This guy!
Hey, I'm Jones's Moderator, This is a great video! As to why he didn't say the polyglots names, I'm sure he was just trying to be respectful and not ruin peoples income (and maybe avoid a future lawsuit).
Keep it up! I subbed to you.
Hey there thank you very much, I appreciate that! Please say hi to Dr. Jones from me and much respect for his channel and professionalism. I might react or respond to another video of his soon. Thank you for subscribing.
"Wait, what's the evidence that you are his moderator?"
@@SignsWithinScience I mean, it’s not exactly a big deal. You either believe him or you don’t, what evidence would you want him to give?
@@SignsWithinScience ruclips.net/video/w_e1PQ2EccE/видео.html
@@tonydai782 I was just parodying the overly skeptic fools
I think everyone can agree that we want you to react to that video of the language simp reviewing Italian
@@VitorEmanuelOliver We need a real Italian to react to it. You know from New Jersey or New York
@jeffslote9671 nuyohk.
@@jeffslote9671 Fuhgedaboudit, ma guy! Capisce?
you mean heterosexual French? 🤣🤣
If someone speaks the language well they will: use idioms, slang, informal speech patterns naturally. They will understand comedy and be able to explain the jokes, know cultural references in movies, books.
And yes, going live is the best way to prove they actually speak the language well.
Exactly. My father was a true polyglot, having lived in the 9 countries whose languages he learned.
Fluency is about a lot more than vocabulary and grammar.
Body language, culture, customs and the myriad nuances that distinguish a native from a visitor are all important.
He loved language, which served him well as a linguist and cryptanalyst for the NSA and chairman of the Cryptologic Professionalization program at the NSA in the 1990s.
Understanding comedy is such a huge part of it, I still remember the first time I managed to laugh at Family Guy.
It was in that moment that I realised I could be truly fluent.
@@XScythexXx indeed. Humour is probably the ultimate litmus test for fluency.
7:19 "or Spanish, which is the language you hear in america when you go outside"
I spit my mate all over my screen...
Please set your sights on Xiaoma. He is one of the most annoying fake polyglots out there. I've heard him speak in a number of languages that I understand (not fluent, I can just understand them), and it was always abysmal... yet he claims to be a polyglot who speaks "insert insane number here" languages.
Hi how are you. Yes I am speaking X. I studied X for many months. I went to place that speaks X/my friend speaks X. It is a lovely country. I love the food and culture
It was not just an insane number, but he had fraudulent clickbait titles, like he learned fluency, perfect, flawless X language in record time.
I really like that you stop Jones’ video (after some positive commentary) and steer us over there: he’s got a great channel. This move makes me want to watch more of your content.
When I was serving in the military, one time I was being briefed about a program which centered around language translation. The guy briefing me crowed about how talented the linguists were and beamed as he told me that one of their members learned "10 languages in a year". I knew from that point on that I was talking to a salesman and not a professional. I would never say that I am a polyglot, but I do speak Spanish, German, and Russian passably well and I know how difficult it is to reach true fluency. People who claim they speak 10, 20 or however many languages are simply arrogant narcissists.
Someone who speaks English, German and Italian fluently could become able to hold basic conversations in Dutch, Norwegian, French, Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese with intensive study in that amount of time. 2 months per language, 3 hours a day. That's 180 hours per language. I think that would be more than enough to be able to read and understand most news (written and spoken), as well as being able to talk in a variety of subjects, albeit with some dsgree of simplication and limitations of vocabulary in all those languages, for instance.
Metraton is a hardcore language learner. He talked about aspiration, pitch, tones...Many people barely think about those things. They go like this "I understand you, you understand me, everything's great and therefore I must be fluent".
So when talking about fluency or what it means to speak a language, I always like to define those first. In a scale from 1 to 10 of what is necessary to consider yourself fluent, 1 being able to say 10 sentences with broken grammar and a bad accent and 10 being as good as a native speaker, Metraton is among those that think you have to be and 8 or 9. The same for Language Jones. Steve Kaufmann goes for a 6 or 7 (He is very forgiving of his mistakes and doesn't worry about mantaining all the languages he has learned). But most people are a 4 or 5.
@@RogerRamos1993the problem with fake polyglots is that they don’t fall in any of these categories. The fact that they can say “Hello. I’m Bill. I like you. You good!” in 50 different languages doesn’t make them fluent by any definition.
@InvinciblePythonEddy I disagree. He is the perfect polyglot for me. He speaks a few languages very well, and is able to function in many others. The times I saw he speak Portuguese he mixed it a bit with Spanish and would improve after a few minutes. He doesn't need to speak great Portuguese. If he were to live in Brazil for two months, I'm sure he would improve a lot. I don't think you need to keep up all your languages. If you learn a language for two or three years, you could abandon it for 10 years and once you went back to it, it would takes 2 or 3 months to rekindle your dormant language skills.
There's a cost-benefit equation, as far as I'm concerned. If I were to live in Australia or the US, I would totally aim for "100%" fluency, but that not being the case 70% or 80% is more than enough. For other languages that I use even less than English, 50 or 60% is enough. What happens is that once you reach a certain stage, you need double the effort to just improve a bit more, and then the triple amount of time to just improve a tiny bit more, and so on.
True I basically speaks 4 languages both reading and writing but maintaing fluency is hard asf
Spokespeople always wildly exaggerate the capabilities of a product or program I find, whether it's language learning, technology, or anything else
Great video, as always. It is worth mentioning, the number of requisite hours from the US Dept of State could be misleading without some of the details that the hours imply. These courses, which are full-time in D.C. and a handful of other locations, are taught by multiple natives, require multiple hours of homework every night, have multiple midpoint examinations to ensure the student is on the right track, and after a certain point are taught almost entirely in the target language, which further increases the interaction in the target language. This is not X number of hours of self-study, which would not achieve the same results, frankly.
Also, each language has its own program with varying methods and effectiveness, even making the comparisons questionable. For example, if you look at their current (2024) table, Spanish takes 30 weeks to reach the same level of proficency as the 24 weeks for italian or even romanian, despite the greater differences such as large number of Slavic (and sometimes Dacian) loanwords in Romanian, as well as a case structure that spanish learners dont need to deal with. So this also reflects the strengths of each language program and the strength of the students selected for each, rather than just language difficulty or distance for english learners. Spanish had previously had a horrible pass rate for the proficiency test, so they lengthened the course
Living Ironically In Europe has an excellent video about fake RUclips language experts.
Yeah, that's a great channel! :)
He also has an excellent video about why you shouldn't learn Romanian.
Jones is a great content creator; watching his videos is always a joy. I am also a very passionate language learner, and although I speak three languages fluently, I do not consider myself a polyglot. It bothers me to see fake polyglots on RUclips who pretend to speak more than 20 languages and who tell people how easy it is. Snake oil sellers is a really appropriate term for such people, Thank Metatron, for your videos!
Cheat code to being a polyglot is to be a native speaker of any slavic language there's about 15-20 (somewhere around that) and they're pretty much similar.
As native Polish speaker I understand Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Russian. Haven't had much exposure with southern slavic languages but that wouldn't take much effort to understand and be able to speak some of it.
For example Russian for me is like Polish mixed with some old Polish (eg words we dont use since like XVI century) mixed together with some new words and we have quite a few of idioms that are same word for word.
LanguageJones is a solid channel.
My husband is a conference interpreter with a degree in Linguistics (among others) who grew up with two bilingual parents.
He was born and grew up in Germany, but his grandparents came from four EU countries (Germany, Hungary, Croatia and Greece). His mother is a German/Hungarian native speaker, and his father a Croatian/Greek native speaker.
He spent his entire childhood speaking their native languages at home (the grandparents were always around, while his parents were at work) and spent his summers in these countries with cousins, aunts and uncles. He also watched TV programs in these languages and read books and newspapers on a daily basis.
He also took additional school courses (for students with migrant backgrounds) in three of the four languages. He then later studied in these countries, and earned three M.A. and a Ph.D.
At the age of 12 he was already fluent in German, Hungarian, Greek, Croatian, but also English and French (mandatory in German schools).
Interestingly though, after two glasses of wine, his „High German“ becomes very Southern German (Bavarian/Munich area) and his „High Croatian“ becomes very Dalmatian (Split area). Also, his „Standard British English“ (which he picked up watching British sitcoms) sounds more West Yorkshire. And when I asked how come, he suddenly sounded like a Loiner, he said: „Well, I bloody studied in Leeds for a year.“
But, his Spanish and Dutch sound a bit off. He picked up the languages much later and every time we’re in Spain or the Netherlands, people will always ask where he‘s from (that never happens in Germany, Hungary, Croatia and Greece).
But when people praise his „talent“ his immediate answer is „Like Einstein said: It’s only 1 per cent talent and 99 per cent work. It’s basically math. Solving one problem after another. And facing more problems. It’s listening to news and podcasts, reading out texts, writing your own registers, listening to and talking with people, taking notes. It never ends!” He’s dabbling in Korean currently (we’ve been planing to visit South Korea next year) and his comment (“I’ve got no idea where to start with this one”) says a lot about real language acquisition.
I don’t understand why some people claim to be able to learn any language in a short time. It takes years and years of serious studies and hard practice, to master five or six languages to a C-level. For ten or twenty languages it would take three lifetimes.
Unfortunately, some people make these claims because they want to sell you something.
Some people are so sick that honoring the human experience with the simple truth is gone. Instead, it is a ferocious need to be seen as something, anything! If you see me this way, then I am that way. It must be irrational logic.
I think that the "number of hours to learn" thing is a measure that's useful for a vague gauge of more or less how long you need or for a population average, like BMI, but when you try to apply it to specific individuals you'll find a lot of variation.
but also, these estimates are based on intensive course study and the people that are selected for such courses generally have a higher aptitude for language learning than the average person (there's an exam they give to try to test that aptitude in candidates for the program). So these numbers are also the average for someone who's probably above average.
So it's at least relevant for his point how many minimum hours it generally takes people to learn each language
Great that you discovered his channel. I always enjoy your reviews and his is my favourite channel
I am an attempted polyglot..about 7 languages... its an impossible task to really nail all of these. The best you could hope for is to get to level a2 or b1. And going rusty is a very real problem.
Better than me! I only speak four languages. It took me 30 years to speak Spanish well. But, I do speak it now!
Gladly supporting your righteous indignation. Danke aus Österreich! 👍
I'm an ESL teacher and there is one thing only a few people get right, where to put the natural accents (syllables) in the words for each language. it can completely change the flow of what you are saying and can render your speech difficult to follow especially for those who are not used to speaking to non natives
In French too you can absolutely use the present tense to refer to a future event, but "quand" requires the future tense when it's used to talk about a future event. Eg: you can 100% say "demain je mange de la pizza", but you can't say "quand je suis en France, je mangerai de la pizza" (OK, bad idea to order pizza in France. Switch that for baguette). No idea if you can use the present tense in Italian after quando to talk about a future event, I don't speak Italian.
God, I missed your language videos, cause besides them being interesting, they also always motivate me to go and practice the languages that I'm currently learning.
as a language student, and a "hobby linguist" (i.e. language theory) since i was 2, i cant agree on your depiction that it would take MONTHS to understand spanish grammar as an italian learner.
u will understand it in an afternoon while reading about it. but a language is not about understanding abstract structures -- its about applying it actively, and that means a) remembering at every needed moment what the theoretical framework said again, and b) the intuitive "muscle memory" like use of that stuff, which only comes after enough practise -- that might be the "month" u postulated if its much that u have to engrain into ur habits.
(but "vocabulary" is a totally different can of worms, its not really going aywhere if u have the perfect structure for every situation ready but u cant fill it with words cuz u dont know how things or actions are called in the targeted language :D this memory game os te part that takes of most time of aggregating poficiency in a language)
I concur. It's like 2 weeks rather than months. Basically it's just "what me go" after internalizing major differences.
Lol as an actual polyglot (my day job is a linguist lol I also have a PhD) I loved this please keep doing vids like this. Anything more than 6 is extremely extremely hard. The only reason I speak as many as I do is because I grew up in a place that speaks many languages. Also I think a lot of these people count "reading an alphabet" as speaking a language. Also lets get rid of the notion that linguists speak a lot of languages. Some of them do but most dont and you dont actually have to in order to do linguistics so if anyone is interested please do study.
For those who aren't aware Metatron has put out a number of videos on how to learn a foreign language. He even menioned several tipd in this video. The most important: Study enough to learn the basics, then join a community of native speakers and immerse yourself in the language and culture.
Language Jones is at least B2 in French, he passed that one years ago and has used it at a high level for a decade or two since. He is working on Hebrew, but I believe his main target at the moment is Spanish. He also seems to be fairly familiar with Yiddish. I don't think he's claimed a CFR level in any of them except French. I suspect he has at least studied many others (dude wrked for Rosseta Stone at one point), but he is a Linguistics PhD. It's hard o know whether he knows a language or he knows about a language when he speaks about it.
LJ’s French is decent. But B2 doesn’t say much. I’m supposed to have a C1 in English and I doubt it personally
@@SodaDrinker94 Most Americans with English as first language are marginally C1 in British English(s) and vice versa. C2 requires work.
@@HweolRidda i’m not an Ameircan, though. From Europe…
@@SodaDrinker94 I am just saying C1 is a high standard. C2 is so high that many people aren't at it in their first language.
He's "good" at Chinese and French by academic standards, "not bad" at Russian, sure some Yiddish and Hebrew too, the entire Jewish sphere of influence why not, he will tell you he knows how to properly immerse but really he lives for his own "clever" 1st hand grammatical observations. He looks down from on high within the group of Duolingo members, of which he is apart of.
Romanian here.
About using incorrect grammar: it happens for certain constructs in casual speech. Complex tenses, or conditionals, etc.
But you can't do it in more formal speech.
And there are things that you can't do, ever. For example messing up the genders / number / case agreements.
No native will ever say "Ea ești deștepți" (Ea ("she", feminine singular) ești ("are", second person singular) deștepți ("smart", masculine plural))
:-)
I remember a Romanian teacher I used to have that told me that it was acceptable for me to say “Îl trimit la tine”. I said that means that I can say “eu este”, and he told me that it didn’t exactly work like that 😂 I do however try and make my Romanian learning as economical and lazy as possible.
The genitives and datives? Don’t need them. The word “este”? Don’t need it. The tense “venise”? Phrase the sentence in such a way that I don’t have to use the -se, the words “ciorapi” and “cartofi”? “Nişte ciorap” and “nişte cartof”. It’s very easy to be lazy in Romanian and to mumble from time to time while it’s still acceptable 😂
All of what you say here would be "grammatically incorrect, no native would say that, but I can understand" :-)
Not in the "a native can say that in a casual setting" category.
Correct: "niște ciorapi", "niște cartofi".
"Îl trimit la tine" might work if I am sending someone to you. If I send something then it's "ți-l trimit". And "o trimit la tine" / "ți-o trimit" for feminine.
+1
Same shit in Russian. You can say crazy stuff like omitting “I” in a sentence and it would be ok (nobody would ever say “I’m going for a walk” but rather “going for a walk” etc.) yet you mess with just one case or gender and now it’s obvious 😅 It still would be possible to understand of course, but definitely not ‘fluent’ by any standards.
I'm loving your energy with these videos.
Jones is awesome! Very informative but also fun!
I wonder if you're going to reach Wouter (the Dutch guy that does language challenges with tourists), I think he's the one that started the big YT polyglot trend, even though he's pretty clear and honest about his fluency levels. He does do (or used to do) live streams on Twitch where people come and "challenge" his language skills. He also did a video about this exact topic with Oriental Pearl, did you see it?
Holy crab! And I feel bad for listing Latin as a language I speak on a dating app! (I basically just started to learn it, bought myself two parts of Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, but I'm afraid of reading it, because I drown in anxiety whenever I'm in silence, and reading a book while listening to TFL Car Chat podcast isn't the best way to learn)
The whole concept of trying to learn as many languages as numerically possible just seems stupid to me- similar to trying to see how many notes you can shred on a guitar in one second has little to do with music. It's all about showing off and ironically scares many people away from seriously attempting to learn another language because they figure if they can't achieve fluency in six months like this or that youtuber, then they must not have the brains for it. The reason one learns another language, at least for me, is to *understand another culture other than your own* and *maybe impress the person you're talking to enough to want to become your friend so you can learn even more*. It is not to impress people who can't understand a word of the language you claim to speak.
Not exactly like, there are people who really, really, really, really, I mean really love languages and really, I mean, really would like to know as many languages as possible. Watch a few videos by Alexandre Arguelles to understand this from the viewpoint of someone who suffers from that. Just the idea of understanding music, literature and movies in the original had me making a list of over 80 languages I wanted to learn (and that leaving many out). I don't know how long I'll live, but 15 is the bare minimum of languages that I want to learn to a level that I can read the news in that language (My goal is not to read the news, just a good parameter to test my progress).
So even reducing the number of languages as much as I can, it's never less than 25.
The main romance languages (esp, fre, ita, port, cat, rom)
The main germanic languages (eng, ger, dutc, nor, swed)
A number of Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Croatian)
And then some latin, modern greek, albanian, turkish, Hindi, Bengali, lingala, Swahili, etc...
Many people learn languages for the simple fact they love languages, the sounds, the words, the ability to understand humor without translation, the amazing sensation of reading literature in the original and understanding it almost effortlessly.
Getting back to my read the news parameter, I can do that in Portuguese (native), English, French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Romanian, so far. Next year, I hope I have added at least German to that list.
its because you never know what languages you are going to need in the future
Keep on doing these react videos, really easy to consume & it goes hand in hand with educational value, just priceless content
I will thanks! Daily content from now on
The biggest redflag a "polyglot" can have is only speaking about learning the language. That's what that dutch "hyperpolyglot" does. He says "hello, I speak [language]"
Yeah Wouter he is from here i was super impressed at first but the amount of languages he speaks are insane not even possible.
I completely agree espcially with both you and jones. Especially as a hindi native speaker. Getting the native accent is very difficult. then getting compound verbs is really difficult like how -uṭhnā means to stand up but when combined with a verb root gives a inchoative sense while denā shoes a movement.
then the moods and future form.
one method to spot a person who isn't native is when they don't use the ergative structures and dative structures correctly. even future and messing up the tenses like saying
tomorrow I am eating pizza while consistently in hindi we use future tense since we don't differ yesterday and tomorrow even in standard. like kal main pizza khaunga and kal main pizza khaya that. plus when speaking they don't drop spaces in verb blocks(very spoken thing)
Hah, I was going to mention this video from Dr Jones on your last video...but got distracted watching his videos.
One of the old RUclips polyglots, always would listen to people's accents to guess which ones spoke one of his languages.
But he also relied on having the people just be excited if they spoke a similar language or whatever.
But one stuck out where dude kept speaking to a woman with an expecting grin looking for the excitement reaction as she looked rather indifferently repeatedly saying "I barely understand anything you said. You're speaking (x), but I'm from (y)." 😅
Who?
The bit about spending time in another country to get better at its language can easily become a positive feedback loop of frustration. To learn the language, I need to relocate first, but, to relocate, I need to learn the language first. (And that even cuts into the motivation a bit, too; if I'll never get to relocate, what am I doing all this work for? A limited number of vacations in my life, of a few weeks apiece?)
The solution is attending language immersion schools in that country. For example Japan has dozens of those schools for foreigners and you can pick the length of the program you want. It might not be a long time but you'll be spending most of it in Japanese.
Je n'ai jamais vecu dans un autre pays que le Brésil et je n'ai jamais sorti de mon pays, mais si j'avais le besoin je serais capable de me debrouiller en 5 ou 6 langues.
Li fornisco un esempio, da piu o meno dieci anni non parlo italiano con nessuno, però potrei parlare di molte cose se ci fosse la necessità. Come mi manca la pratica, lo so che mescolare l'italiano con il francese o con lo spagnolo accadrebbe di tanto in tanto, ma non vedo qual sarebbe il problema. Da sempre, ho ritenuto che la comunicazione è lo piu importante, se ci capiamo, allora tutti va bene. Dovrei parlare un italiano impecabile solo se io studiassi in una universittà d'Italia o se lavoressi in un'azienda italiana.
En cuanto al español no lo he hablado jamás con nadie, sea presencialmente sea por video llamada o llamada de telefono. Lo he aprendido casi exclusivamente leyendo libros y escuchando a canciones, además de ver unas cuantas peliculas y series. Soy brasileño, por lo tanto, se me hace bastante fácil.
No te desanimes, entreno conversacion con guias de conversacion. Imagino que son conversaciones reales, pero no me detengo. Leo frases y más frases. Se puede aprender mucho sin viajar nunca. Seria perfecto que yo pudiera viajar a todos lados y tener profesores que me enserañaran, pero no lo puedo y no los tengo, por eso utilizo las herramientas que tengo.
This is false. I learned Japanese from self-study and Spanish making friends plus a few college classes. There’s enormous amounts of free language materials online but the biggest things is to set a schedule, practice regularly and make friends who are native speakers you practice with and use what you learn while studying and using new words.
You’ll be exposed to a ton of content and it will be in context, and if you have a language buddy you are forced to speak not just learn passively. There’s plenty of websites to do this, depending on your topic language. Traveling overseas is great for immersion but it isn’t a prerequisite.
Source: I’ve studied languages most of my life and have lived and worked overseas surrounded by people speaking languages unrelated to my mother tongue.
A listening test in that language has to prove whether a person hears all the sounds of that language or part of the sounds.
Hey, Metatron. Great video as always mate!
Can I give you a video suggestion, if you don't mind? I would love to see a video about Latin, to be more specific, how, for example, different accents of Latin, and their characteristics, eventually became their respective languages.
That's nonsense!
I know 7500 languages and it didn't take much time to learn them all
When I started to notice that one guy would only go to restaurants, I started to become a skeptical.
I find it more than enough to juggle the 3 languages I speak. They are also from the same family. English, Icelandic and Norwegian. Norwegian has opened up the ability to understand two additional languages, Swedish and Danish. And being Icelandic makes me able to read Faeroese. Very narrow field here and since I speak languages that are fairly similar I sometimes get words mixed up between them. 100 languages? Not a chance. There is just no way that can be true.
I'm not a native French speaker but from what I've heard French speakers are similar in that they also use the present tense at times when saying things like "tomorrow, I x"
I'm French, and yes, you're absolutely right, and in the same way Metatron explained for Italian, we would use the more correct futur tense in a more formal context.
As a French native myself too, I fully concur.
I'm Brazilian, bit you can use the present in French to refer to the present, to the near future, to the near past as well to a distant past (historical present)
Demain, je vais chez le médecin.
Victor Hugo est un des plus celebres ecrivains de langue francaise de tous les temps.
Qu'est-ce que tu fais maintenant ? Je bois du café dans un bistrot.
Est-elle deja partie ? Bah, oui. Elle sort toute a l'heure, désolé. (This last one sounds a bit weird for me as a non-native speaker, but I've seen in more than one grammar. I would rather say "Elle vient de sortir..."
@@RogerRamos1993 It's where languages become very tricky. In your first example, we could say "Demain, j'irai chez le médecin" but there is a very subtle difference: we would use "Demain, je vais chez le médecin" if everything is already decided, the appointment has already been made; while with the form "Demain, j'irai chez le médecin" it might not be the case...
Your last example is indeed very weird: "Elle sort tout à l'heure" means that she's not out yet, but will be in the near future. Your "Elle vient de sortir..." is correct.
@@LudoTechWorld I knew that already about the medecin one. The last one had a better example in the grammar I read these, it sounded like something someone could say. These days, I made a mental exercise and realized that we can say almost anything in Portuguese using only the present tense, as well, but we are not even aware of it. Most people aren't, I mean.
Heyyyyy... Nice... Representing Pennsylvania well here... Nice. Im liking it
I've got a secret sauce called alcohol, once I drink enough I am completely fluent in any language
Where you discuss the hours and bring up getting (say) six months for a baseline then living in a country that uses that language for a year - that's actually significantly longer than the estimates Language Jones was using- 75 years for 50 languages! And again, one would need the resources to be able to to that and it still assumes no time is needed to maintain your fluency.
I have your first victim. The channel 'language lords' he learned Italian in 6 weeks. I would love to see a live stream.
Yes, using the present tense when refering to future happenings is common in many languages and they even teach this as an alternative in language courses. We often speak like this in my mother tounge Swedish as well.
The point of those FSI numbers, is that it’s the average. Of course certain factors will increase/decrease the time but for the majority of people it’s going to be within one SD of that.
One of those tell-tale signs of if a person is fluent is if they can butcher the language appropriately. To achieve fluency you must spend time with native speakers and you need to be able to speak formally and informally. Like, for my job I have to speak formal French constantly as well as being able to write it. I literally never speak like that in person and its informal/slang mostly when speaking french. It boggles the mind how many words you can use in a single conjunction in French lol. So its weird when someone claims to be fluent and speaks like they are reading from a textbook.
05:55
This is a great humourous kick towards a platform which sponsors various videos but also has a reputation of being a scam.
I discovered I have a knack for languages, and can hit an intermediate level relatively fast, but getting fluent? That's a years-long journey and anyone who says otherwise is lying.
There are some fake polyglots that bother me. Usually the ones who you can tell that they’re reading off a teleprompter or making cuts to every sentence (while reading off a teleprompter) to make it seem like they know a given language much better than they do. A lot of these offenders are the vlog-style channels where people talk about how they’re learning 6-7 languages at a time. And just as much of the content is about how they schedule their language learning routine as it is about their actual language learning. There’s a very aesthetic element to it.
When one starts learning a language in earnest (especially an FSI category 3-4 language) and reaches a certain level of fluency, it is easy to see these fraudsters from a mile away. But I admit that I was fooled for a while by some of these channels.
The one “fake” polyglot I can give a pass to is the XiaNYC guy (can’t remember his full RUclips name). I think he was much worse in the past, but he has pivoted to more of a travel/documentary channel with a heavy focus on introducing people to new cultures or endangered languages/cultural groups. I think the work he does in presenting these endangered cultures and languages outweighs his sometimes sketchy claims of having a higher level of fluency.
I speak 100 languages if you count different accents as different languages.
I'm finding the subject of fake polyglot identification fascinating.
At 15mins, in French, its more like in Spanish
The future tense exists, but we often just use the "we will" form
Demain, je mangerai (sounds weird) -> Demain, je vais manger (hell yeah)
And in Québécois it can be destroyed into oblivion with
Demain, j'vais manger -> Demain, jva manger -> Demain, m'a manger
I really dont agree that you need to undertand advanced grammer to be fluent, ask any native about advanced grammar end they will most likely not know almost anything, my first language is Spanish i'm from Mexico and i can't to save my life accentuate while writing nor i know what the hell is Aguda, Grave, Esdrujula and Sobresdrujula and a lot of stuff, but i'm still fluent in the language, also like i have always said like 90% of the grammar we learn after middle school we never use on a real conversation here in Mexico.
yes, but it took you many, many years with 100% immersion in the language and with an added bonus of a child brain that adapts to languages better than a brain of an adult. learning grammar saves a lot of time compared to if you just jump in blind
@@vsm1456 No. Most of the time it's a terrible waste of time. Formal grammars don't account for the plenty of exceptions in any language, and those tend to coalesce around the most common usage.
are you gong to return to those videos where you try to see how much you understand of a different but similar language?
The screen recording has delayed audio. You can easily fix it while editing the video
OMG a Commodore 64 .
I totally agree. Though not a true polyglot myself (I struggle using a language unless in the land... so, for example, my italian is fluent in Italy, both napolitano and 'correct' italian, but conversationally when outside Italy). I don't know if tHis is a normal/known thing? Anyway, my dad was a polyglot and was fluent in 7 languages which he learnt as he travelled across the world as a soldier during WWII. After the war he worked as a court translator, language teacher for the post-war immigrants, and a technical translated for scientific papers. I can't remember all his languages, but they included Polish (mother tongue), Italian, English, Russian (and other languages around there), Urdu and some African ones I don't know. Whenever asked how he managed it, he would joke that he picked up each language from different girls in different countries. Truthfully though, he studied them as he was interested in linguistics and cultures.
2:12. On right is Xiaomanyc.
Philippines 🇵🇭. He has not visited that nation. I travel to and from there for 40+ years. I have (male) relatives who, while stationed there, who married Filipinas. I am a San Francisco native 🌁. Many Filipinos live here, especially south in Daly City.
His pronunciation of Tagalog is off. He speaks basic words. He does not realize that Filipinos often code switch.
Even if you disagree with Xiaomanyc, he has 1 good point: interviews of legitimate polyglots. Oriental Pearl, Luca, polymathy, Gabriel Wyner, others.
Ciao Metatron! Beware of Language Jones, he often times inserts his political agenda in the videos he makes. It would be interesting to see your reaction to his video "the DARK IDEOLOGY secretly lurking in language RUclips" in which he blatantly shows his bias.
Un saluto da Roma!
Hi, your channel is to my liking, like +i in the Pa(r)lermo local tongue. Myself (master in electronics) German native and English fluent, C1+ tested (who cares). I wonder who has more effect on interesting people in languages, the PHD's or the less sophisticated. The energy of talking about fake polygots shoulder rather go in building better language learning tools, not everybody has his privat encantadoro, bruja, estrega , witch or whatever ;-)
They say in Turkish when a person uses some non-standard grammar/form they assume they’re speaking informally; when a foreigner uses the same expression they assume they’re making a mistake. :-)
Do you think you use "domani mangio una pizza" more because Sicilian doesn't have a future tense? Would you expect northerners to speak like that too?
Great video, so happy to see you do linguistics content!
Anyone who speaks Mandarin can tell a fraud. Just watch any American TV show where the actor (who doesn’t speak Mandarin) is speaking memorized lines. The pronunciation cannot be faked.
I am totally confident to talk live to you about the benefits of snake oil. 😁
I honestly think your English is perfect. I had no idea that you weren't from England, your accent is incredibly accurate
I'm supportive of your crusade against fake RUclips polyglots, but I wonder if you should review a video on how to properly set up an ambush first - step 1 is probably not, "telegraph your plans in detail," that might be from the Bond villain guide instead 😂
Give the names! Give the Keeleys, Courdeweners, and more!
Isn't his simple multiplication a bad approach? The more languages you learn, the more parallels you can draw between them. At some point some basics become trivial and you learn languges by their relatively little deviations from the other languages you already understand thoroughly. - Of course a savant-level memory helps a lot here, especially with vocabulary.
I mean, a class 4 language might be a class 3 or even class 2 language to a linguistics master. They got optimizations in their brain. Kinda like where musicians cannot enjoy music anymore because they spot all the imperfections, while a layperson gets super-excited about it and everything sounds great.
From my personal experience, it makes a significant difference whether someone has a mind that conveniently blends things together or a mind that gets excited about differences, because in the latter case you are less prone to mix up things between languages because you love those minute or tricky differences. (Exemplary key term: false friends.) Ama-teur gold.
It's astonishing how many people will glibly claim fluency in a language when they are probably up to B1 level at the absolute most. Worse yet are those who claim that they can teach you a language in 5 weeks ...... I teach ESOL and find these claims infuriating on two levels. First, it is totally unrealistic. Show me the person who was speaking their own language at 5 weeks of age (with constant input). Some will claim that you can't compare the native language with a second or third one but I think I can - we are learning to make new and unfamiliar sounds and to put meaningful sentences together. The second level is that of the hidden, implied xenophobia. "Our language is the vehicle of our deep and rich culture and therefore difficult to master, but surely the chimp-like gibbering of foreigners can be picked up in a matter of weeks?" These "linguists" and "language teachers" need to be shown up as the frauds they are.
@@oldishandwoke-ish1181 Totally agree!
If someone is a B1, even a weak B1, he isn't a fraud by any means.
Xiaoma has a video where Norwegian news station interviews him live in their language where he has to learn it and he doesn't know what they'll say. In that video, he explains how long it takes to truly learn a language. That most his videos, he's just learning very basic greeting and restaurant ordering conversations.
Which is exactly what Language Jones claims he wants from these people. So why does he constantly use a picture of him in these videos?
I posted another comment somewhat similar, Xiaoma is an entertainment channel and I think he’s toned back his claims of fluency and conversational ability. For all the good his videos bring, I think he deserves a pass.
The worst fake polyglots I’ve noticed are usually the college-aged girls who claim to be learning like 5 languages at once, where it is painfully obvious that they’re either reading off a teleprompter or straight from Google translate for every sentence. Usually their channels tend to have heavy aesthetic elements where the content is as much talking about how they schedule their language learning and their pretty color-coded notebooks and planners as it is about focusing on the actual languages themselves.
Xiaomanyc gives me the impression that he is in for clicks than anything else. More of a tour guide.
See my main post 📫 about his Tagalog. 🇵🇭
Is that a C 64 at your right elbow?
True I basically speaks 4 languages both reading and writing but maintaing fluency is hard asf
I can easily believe that there are people out there who *understand* dozens on languages. Metatron has demonstrated how much he can understand of native Spanish speakers without any training in the language so I can easily imagine that a Romance speaker reaching a good level of oral comprehension in the other languages in the family without too much work on each. Same with a German speakers understanding Dutch and Nordic languages or a Russian speaker with Slavic tongues. Producing these other languages is a different ballgame.
In Germany from 1842 to 1912 a writer Karl May lived.When i was a child, his novels had been still popular. In many of his novels he himself is the hero, who has adventures allover the world. This man claimed, to speak a number of languages. The reality was, he only had a large number of dictionaries. Also he never traveled outside of german language countries for a long time. He owned a large number of books about foreign countries and lots of maps. At first many german, austrian, swiss citizens believed, that Mr. May realy was in foreign countries, but only for short time, and as an artist, had then inspiration for his adventure novels. But in 1890s, the readers, especially the adults, noticed more and more mistakes and simply wrong things (also , black spots' in his private life). After 1900 his success as writer rapidly declined, and he became a peace activist.
Although I don't like liars, he still had some merit for researching everything out. Fraudsters usually just make things up and claim with such conviction that people usually side with them instead of the critics.
@Neomalthusiano : In those days, in contrast to now, few german language speakers had been outside of Europe, and much of current knowledge didn' t exist. For example, Mr. May claimed, lions live as couples. But unusual : In those nationalistic days, in Mr. Mays novels people of different nations appear as his friends. So i assume, the peace activities in his last years had been true. Bertha von Suttner ( owner of Peace Nobel Prize) noted: l listened to a speech of him, q good speech.
You should react to those videos that claim that they will teach you Japanese in 1 or 2 hours, those have millions of views.
I really appreciate these critical episodes.
I'm interested to know more about your mandarin skills and learning journey
You dont even need to learn spanish to understand it. I remember the test you did. You understand 85% maybe 90% without any training
I think there must be a difference between being able to read a language than being able to speak one. like I can tell déguise in French is disguise in English, but don't know how to pronounce it in French. This is from 2 Corinthians 11:14 of the French Ostervald Bible, then lumière is similar to the English word luminaries so lights, so lumiere must be light. Then of course I second guess everything so I find myself looking it up, but that is for confirmation. I do reverse translations also. "déguise en ange de lumière." Disguises as an angel of light. Though can I say this in French I don't think so.
Hey! This channel getting some love!
:O The Crusade continues!
Hey bro, could you react to Mikel hyperpolyglot who claims literally this «How long does it take to learn a language? 3 months or less. If you think it takes longer, you clearly haven't watched the tutorials and done the free NLL exercises».
Hmm. Simply genius or just another grifter?
In Portuguese is also say " amanha eu como o peixe" "tomorrow I eat the fish" no need in a informal dialogo to put the verb in the future.
Usiamo anche spesso il presento per parlare al futuro prossimo in francese, ma dipende anche della frase e del contesto. Anche nel questo caso, generalmente non mescoliamolo con il futuro. Si può dire "demain je vais au cinéma et je mange avec mes amis", o "demain j'irai au cinéma et je mangerai avec mes amis", ma non "demain j'irai au cinéma et je mange avec mes amis". È possibile cambiare nell'altre direzione ("demain je vais au cinéma et je mangerai avec mes amis"), ma è un po inabituale.
Nel esempio di Languagejones, è anche un problema che cominci con "when/quand". Noi usiamo mai il presento per parlare al futuro dopo "quand", perché questa congiunzione è usato per indicare un momento specifico ed usarla davanti un "cattivo" tempo sarebbe un po confuso. Se dici "quand je suis en France", noi penseremo che tu vai spesso in Francia e che la prossima frase descriverà un abitudine, non che parli del futuro.
Mi sembra ch'è la stessa cosa in italiano, ma sono un po ruggito, posso sbagliarmi...
I could see someone at least being able to slide in and out of fluency with 12 languages if it’s something like Swedish Norwegian danish German, Swiss German, Dutch Belgian English Italian French Spanish Portuguese. But whyyyyyy???😂
The KEY thing to learning languages is memory. If you dont have good memory you are out of luck. Next is being able to hear vvery subtle sounds and tones. If you are tone deaf, you are out of luck.
15:00 I have a feeling that's linguistic prescription taking a clue from logician linguistics. The future tense doesn't have to talk about the future so why would the simple present be stuck talking about right now? Any linguist knows that the values of a tense and the moments it refers to don't have to align at all
Yeah... I`m quite talented with languages and have lived in Beijing for 5 years. Can confirm that the tones aren't super difficult, but they do require practice to get used to.
There's only ONE White guy who's perfect in Mandarin, and he's Canadian.
Hi Metatron what would you recommend for language immersion if you can’t move to the country?
5:55 THANK GOD finally someone who declares they wont support the fraud "better help"
obviously I matrix downlowded every language that ever has and will exist in every accent in 3 seconds
I am not polyglot but i can speak, read and write in 3 languages, so does my sister, just because im from Europe
Just being from Europe doesn't guarantee this. Here in the Netherlands (often put forward as 'multilingual') people increasing only speak Dutch (obviously) and some level of English. Anything else is a personal choice to pursue, most don't.
@@baronmeduse Exactly. Same thing with Germany. Furthermore the UK is in Europe too and we all know they mostly only understand English.
@@tomschreiner3717 Well there's no real practical reason for people in the UK to learn anything more than English. If German currently had the status of English, the majority of Germans would likely be monolingual.
@@baronmeduse The vast majority of Germans is actually monolingual. Schools are dreadful at teaching languages.
The only polyglot i know that speaks more than a dozen languages is Steve Kaufmann, but i don’t think he fakes it 😅 i’ve seen some live videos with him.
My language learning goals are actually what the fake hyperpolyglots do.
All I want is a shallow grasp of a wide variety of languages. I don't want, need, or care about perfect grammar. I don't care about reading or writing. My goal is to speak a variety of languages at that "a month of university" level. Confidently, with decent pronunciation, and able to understand basic answers. Not fooling anyone that I'm fluent, but enough to exchange basic information, be polite, maybe get a smile out of someone.
My goal is not to become properly conversational, nor is it to fake and misrepresent my language competency to by any better than it actually is. I just want to be able to talk with the skill of an enthusiastic child in as many languages as interest me. I want to go to [place[. Where is the [place]? I like [thing]. This food is delicious. Maybe learn a joke or two, even if they're rote, and I don't fully understand the grammar behind it.
I don't need polish, or anything remotely approaching fluency.
I actually think what they do is impressive - it is a cool parlour trick. I wish they didn't inflate it, or pretend they're doing something more than what they do. Having the absolute basics in 20, 50 or 100 languages is impressive, cool, and aspirational. Don't taint it by pretending fluency, or using deceptive editing.
Give me a channel with someone who is honest about their dabbling. Honest about their limitations. Excited to get out there and talk to people for the joy of it.
9:52 this math that he does, though, doesn't convince me, because isn't it true that learning your 3rd or 4th language is much more efficient/fast, compared to learning your 2nd language? maybe after learning French, for example, learning Italian would take 1/4 of the time as it took to learn French, and thus that's how polyglots can learn so many languages so quickly?
Like almost anything, it follows the law of diminishing marginal returns.
If you only know one language, to learn a second one, requires a lot of time.
If you already know two, to learn a third requires much less.
If you know three, to learn a fourth requires less time, but not that much less.
And on, and on. Every time the advantage decrease.
Because you have the mental elasticity, but mental elasticity doesn't give you grammar and vocabulary, or a particularly good memory.
Also, French and Italian are both romance languages, so they have much in common. It's like knowing French already gives you a part of italian.
But knowing French gives you practically nothing of Czech for example.
it is true that the 3rd and 4th language do take less time, because you are in the habit of learning languages and know how to do it efficiently. You might be fumbling around and wasting time trying to learn your first. BUT it will not speed up the process to a degree where you can just whip out a new language in a few months or even hours. I am a german native speaker and am on pretty very high level with my english (second language) I did learn to speak italian on a passable conversational level in 6 years (mind you I got a day job to do and can only dedicate so many hours a day to that hobby). Ihen i took on the endeavour to learn japanese. I am still on a low A2 level with that after three years. Yes the process is more speedy because I do know what I am doing and how to get the knowledge into my head. Still it takes an insane amount of time to memorize all that vocab and grammar. No you can not speed up the process to be fluent in that insane amount of languages claimed by those fake poliglott. Any brain can only memorize and reproduce a certain amount of knowledge in any given 24h. Unless you are a savant with language learning you will not be able to cram more into your head and keep it there. Being fluent means you know a lot of words and all the grammar points in any language you claim to be fluent in. Which will need review also - use it or loose it is key here.
I will go on learning languages and i have high hopes to get 4 languages (oterh than german) to a high level of proficiency, before I die. So am I going to be a polyglott - nah! I will be just that gal that speaks 5 languages, and i will have been working at language learning for hopefully 30 years by then :D
I want to add that the math presented is not as clear cut as it seems.
I do think that they are fraud but I think the math argument fails to recognize that you can learn much faster when you have learned other languages.
It is still not possible I know but I wanted to throw that in
Ciao Matatron, come ti arzi?
15:21 when I´m speaking Italian freely I not always use the termination -re... "vojo parlà con te" or sometimes I drop the "no" in "sono"... "so felice, e te?" because I also feel lazy ;) :D