Let's Expose Those Frauds Man! Hyper Ultra Mega Polyglots Hunt

[@metatronacademy]

Link to the original video kzbin.info/www/bejne/nX_bfoqfmLp9r7s

[@AAA-fh5kd]

'prowess'< you put an n in there.

[@Glassandcandy]

It’s called the Columbus method: 1. Pick your language 2. Learn the basic pronunciation and the most basic vocabulary that is absolutely essential (I.e. I am X, I like x, thank you, how are you, this is hard, you are so kind, etc.) 3. Create an algorithm based on the most common responses you will get from a new speaker: Example: if A says something like “why do you learn” say B “I think C language is so beautiful though it is difficult” etc. 3. Find native speaker whom you will only speak to ONCE and who absolutely does not know you at all personally 4.record conversation with or without consent (depends on country) 5. Receive validation and free V-bucks on KZbin 6. Repeat until Xiaomanyc or Laoushu style audience of monolinguals start worshiping you

[@DomoniqueMusiclover]

why Laoshu?

[@Glassandcandy]

@ because he literally started this entire trend The guy claimed to speak 50+ languages and sold courses on languages he could literally barely get through a pre scripted conversation in (he sold three courses in French- his French was absolutely atrocious. The courses were literally just phrases he copied out of Assimil and other courses- he sold each level for $40 and thousands of people bought that shit because they saw videos of him haranguing Asian people at shopping malls in forced and super awkward conversations. To put it short he could speak Chinese fluently , Japanese decently and a few other East Asian languages at a beginner level, but he posed as a self described “language master” who could not only speak but even TEACH 50+ languages because his “method” considers memorizing 20 basic sentences to be “conversationally fluent”. Literally everything shitty about KZbin polyglots started with his channel: -awkward public harassment of native speakers -using a few key phrases to have pre planned conversations -using scripts and selective editing to hide incompetence -a genuine lack of any legitimate credentials or teaching experience -hyper sexual titles to trick gooners into giving him money (look at the titles of his videos, it’s insane) People get upset about it but he’s pretty much the ur-language-guru- the actual archetype of polyglot snake oil salesmen. It got unpopular to point this out because of his sudden and legitimately tragic death of an underlying heart condition, but if we want to call out this kind of obvious grifting behavior we have to be honest with ourselves. Back in 2012-16 I didn’t think too much about this as a problem, but now that the language learning community online has gotten considerably larger the problem has increased exponentially. Every other language influencer is selling some bullshit course/method where they trick gullible and naive monolinguals into spending considerable money on shit that range from incredibly incompetent to blatant scam. It has to be called out but 90% of KZbinrs who see it are too afraid to mention people by name to avoid drama and flash mobs of angry fans.

[@ahall9839]

@@Glassandcandy huhuhhuhuh literally huhuhuhuhuhu literally huhuhuhuhuhu

[@Glassandcandy]

@@ahall9839 I’m sorry you fell for videos titled like “black man dominates small Asian with magic tongue skills” but you know it’s true. Laoshu had been doing this exact grift since 2012 and if you’re only realizing this now you’re either new or actually dumb lol

[@yuriythebest]

@@Glassandcandy thank you for this 'expose,' it's funny how memory tends to gloss things over

[@MarkHorton-n3t]

I am a retired circus performer. I once had a Hungarian agent who spoke something like 20 languages, which he used in his work. I know for sure that his English and Spanish were terrible. Circus performers in the US come from all over the world, and I was told that Tibor spoke every language badly, even his native Hungarian. I guess he overloaded the language processing part of his brain. On the other hand I was once on a flight from Tokyo to Los Angeles and one one my colleges casually spoke at least 8 languages with native speakers of those languages. Including Japaneese with the flight attendent. We had been there about 3 months. I am sure that his English and Spanish were fluent. I do include "Swiss" which Pio used with his brother Tony. "Swiss" is a more or less private language used by the Nock family and relatives to discuss rigging. It appears to be mostly German and Italian words with some French and Italian words. Grammer, II have no idea.

[@KarmasAB123]

What you do in the circus?

[@chabis]

As a Swiss I always took the many circus families we have here for granted. But it's actually quite special for such a small and also highly regulated country where you have lots of red tape if you want to to employ foreigners, set up a tent, have animals, play music or do construction work at night, work at weekends etc. Swiss German is using a subset of the German grammar with lots of local varieties. The country is has 4 official languages and a comparably high percentage of foreigners living here, so we get exposure to quite many languages.

[@HerbertMaloney]

To me, a language opens up a new culture, so what's the point of being able to ask where the library is in 30 languages, but nothing beyond? Like half-repping a high weight.

[@DELottProductions]

Exactly, learning a language is the key to the DLC.

[@Matt-jc2ml]

Kyrakios grizzly polyglot

[@rizzwan-42069]

Language is the type of thing you want to learn one of until you're good at. I think the level a language should be learned to is when you can read a whole blog post or a book and not know like 2 or 3 words.

[@chabis]

I could brag about speaking 5 languages, But Swiss German and High German are normal here (we speak the first and write the latter), English can't be avoided in my job, French is mandatory in school and pretty rusty now, Italian and Spanish are mixed in my head and extremely rusty. I don't think I am a hyper-polyglot or something and don't write books. As a non-professional singer I am used to learn sentences in other languages. I did sing in more languages than I can remember. Doesn't make me a polyglot. But I could absolutely fake one, no problem.

[@jhoughjr1]

Its easy to fake anything to ppl who dont know.

[@nicedog1]

That’s pretty impressive.

[@luke211286]

If you can converse in French with those from Romandy and Italian with people from Ticino (despite you saying you are rusty with both), maybe you speak more than some young Swiss people nowadays. I have a friend (Schweizerdeutsch native speaker) who laments the current situation in Switzerland that many new generation Swiss prefer to speak in English with countrymen across the linguistic divide.

[@chabis]

@@luke211286 It was the plan to learn the languages spoken in my country. But it's also true that English is easier to learn for everybody here since French and German are both pretty hard to learn. And all sides are a bit outside of their comfort zones so all are actually on the same level when using English. It's not really a bad thing, IMHO. French and Italian come in handy when reading street signs etc. I can read and write both languages on an acceptable level while I am not very good in understanding them when spoken.

[@jenm1]

I didn't fully grasp just how many of these videos were fake until they spoke languages I knew/started learning like German, since that's a popular one. Germans are too nice to call you out and will say you have good pronunciation and literally just say ich correctly

[@lawofseven1465]

First guy is definitely not fluent in Portuguese. If it were just the accent being a little off it could still pass as legit, but "tenho sido em Portugal" is definitely a 1-1 translation of "I have been in Portugal" and, as a brazilian native speaker, I am not aware for any lusophone region that uses this construction. Anyone would say "(eu) estive em Portugal".

[@michelefrau6072]

He clearly said that his Portuguese is bad and poor

[@gabrieldias3479]

​@@michelefrau6072 but the guy making the questions have a heavy foreigner accent as well. He isn't native either.

[@HerbertMaloney]

@@michelefrau6072 Okay but why include it then? Like saying you can play a little basketball, but you can't even dribble the ball.

[@michelefrau6072]

The original link was not provided, so we are judging a snippet of a snippet of a video without knowing anything about it, without knowing when the original video was shot, where and why, as well as not knowing who the people in the video are Surely the other Romanian speaker is not a native speaker, he is Italian and used to live in Romania, he's currently running a channel on learning Italian they are probably just language enthusiasts who got together, and in this case they are just practicing with each other you can then play a game with your friends even if you don't pwn all the fundamentals, you can play just for fun and learn how to play better

[@corbul32stefan58]

Hey metatron I am a Romanian and I can tell you that the guy that spoke my native language had a very strange pronunciation. He does not speak like a native or even fluently.. I had to correct his pronunciation in my head several times.

[@ЮрийКастро-м5в]

I don't know Romanian but I have Moldovan and Romanian friends and his pronunciation is hurting my brain

[@fecalphantom]

Fluency is not based on accent. Fluency is marked by your understanding of native speakers, and whether you can be understood yourself. As a native Romanian speaker myself - in that section of speech, he at the very least understood what was asked and it seems the native speakers understood him in return. Unless you learn a language before early teen years, you will almost always have an accent

[@narsplace]

​@@fecalphantomnot true, there is a difference between your accent not being native, to having a strong accent. By strong I mean by being non understandable. The fact this Romanian had trouble understanding him, means that he was faking it.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

@@fecalphantom "Fluency is not based on accent. " - yeah, except if you butcher pronunciation you will simply not be understood. When people realise pronunciation is a part of the language? 😐

[@stlouisramsfan03]

Da, exact! I'm learning Romanian. I love it! My favorite Romance language!

[@Xiroi87]

I'm trilingual, Spanish, Swedish and English, which I learnt as a child because of family from different countries and living/spending time there. I also speak a bit of German and very very basic Chinese (almost forgotten now, to be honest) and have a good ear so I'm good at mimicking sounds, intonation and accents. Thanks to speaking Spanish, I can easily PRETEND I speak Portuguese and Italian, even French with a couple of days preparation. Because of Swedish I can PRETEND I speak Norwegian and Danish and, again with a bit of preparation, Dutch and Flemish. Yes, I could reply a few questions with a very good accent. Does it mean I speak 11 languages? Absolutely not, then again I'm not an arrogant idiot trying to impress a bunch of ignorant gullible strangers on the internet

[@osvaldobenavides5086]

His Portuguese was not clear and the phasing was not native.

[@michelefrau6072]

He clearly said his Portuguese is poor and bad

[@rhianor]

I can tell you one thing the guy talking Portuguese, isn't from Portugal or Brazil. It's easy for us Portuguese to know because our accent is very specific.

[@lawofseven1465]

Also "tenho sido em Portugal" is clearly a 1-1 translation of "I have been in Portugal" which is so wrong

[@Pauliepoika]

Same with all languages, no?

[@nicedog1]

I recorded a conversation with a waiter in Seville, Spain. When I played it to my friends and family, they were all awe struck. What they didn’t realise was that at one point, I had totally misunderstood what he said and replied with a ridiculous answer.

[@LaneBee]

Just do what the little horse does and alter the subtitles and you can make everyone say whatever you want after the fact.

[@flameguy3416]

Hyper Ultra Gigachad Mega Based Supersonicglot actually

[@briangunn21]

Language simp

[@AbeIJnst]

In my book, i"m a bilingual at most. Dutch (native) and English aren't a problem, I can speak my mind in both languages. I do speak German at intermediate level and French at basic level, but that doesn't make me a polyglot. I'd say you're a polyglot if you speak at least four, if not five languages comfortably.

[@jeffkardosjr.3825]

With German I can probably understand around 2/3s to 3/4 of it spoken. Maybe a little optimistic there. But my ability to speak it is rather limited. My reading of it isn't great either. I picked up a lot from stuff such as movies and documentaries about Germany's history in the 20th century.

[@hermessyndicate7938]

The Romanian was rough but correct and on point with what he was asked. He gave a complex answer to a simple question with a bit of history. He cannot replicate all the sounds we do but the language was mostly correct.

[@Kezmark]

I don't know. To me it sounded like he google translated the phrase from some other language and just read it. Maybe he knows some Romanian, but I don't think he speaks a lot.

[@hermessyndicate7938]

@@Kezmark oh yeah if the video was set up anything is possible. But he said "carte de citit" which is correct but no one would use that sentence. This leads me to believe that he is translating into romanian in his mind which what a lot of people learning languages do. Also the way he says "deasta" which is spelled "de asta", He shortened the pronunciation like a native, which tells me he learned phonetically as well.

[@hermessyndicate7938]

@@Kezmark Definitely doesn't peak a lot no, missing a lot of sounds and also the person asking the question isn't native either.

[@h3kk552]

When I see content related to polyglots and languages, it always raises a red flag, not only because most of the time the person who makes the video turns out to be a fake polyglot, but because the term "Polyglot" itself is so subjective nowadays because of these fake polyglots, and its saddening that in the world of language learning, there are a lot of things which are just left hanging in the air especially when there are so called "experts" involved who can speak a gazillion languages. Which, in turn, make people demotivated that they didn't become fluent in Russian or Spanish in 2 weeks, but, Metatron always highlights the facts, and sometimes throws in his personal opinion to make it more entertaining. This is why I adore this channel. Keep up the amazing work!

[@JustinMay74]

Before I even knew about this polyglot thing on KZbin, I was super into learning as many languages as I could. I was really good in a couple of languages other than English and so so in others. I had a guy tell me that very thing that I should focus on just one and get fluent in it first. To this day, I’m still only really proficient in two languages and I think that’s more than enough. I can preach and teach in Mandarin and Thai. Prepping my lessons and translating them keeps me more than busy.

[@maiorciprian]

Romanian here. Neither one of these two gentlemen are native romanian speakers and most likely phonetically learned these phrases for the video.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

Challenged accepted. I can speak English fluently, Italian with quite a lot of mistakes but I can understand everything and talk about everything, from sex to existentialist philosophy, Japanese pretty well, only behind my English, and my Vietnamese is shitty yet. Live. I'm Brazilian. And I'm doing that not to show off but because I agree 100% with what you've said and we should start making a trend out of that to shut out the frauds. Let's go live and challenge those fake polyglots.

[@CarolinaMSZF]

Me too. Fluent english, portuguese is my native language (also Brazilian), German (work and live in Germany, so I am used to talk it daily) and spanish (it's been a while since I last spoke, but give me 5 minutes and it will return. Writing and reading is top notch, since I am pretty used reading texts in spanish). Also want to learn italian and japanese, which I can speak a couple of sentences (enough to not starve)

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@CarolinaMSZF Let's do that. Let's gather and talk, live, among us, and with natives, be honest at what we can really do, so people can see how far we can really go, when we hit a wall, have to maybe ask for the meaning of some words, and how long it really takes (hors a day, every and each day, for years) to be barely competent. And let's invite those guys around and see if they are legit or not. That's a WONDERFUL idea.

[@tamasmarcuis4455]

My daughter speaks French, Dutch(Flemish), and English, fluently. She also conversationally speaks German and can get by in Lithuanian. She tells me once she got to fluency in three it was just too much time and lack of opportunity, to speak and read enough to be fluent in more. Keeping fluency in three languages is manageable not more. There may be people who work with languages and are talented who can manage more. I'm native Lithuanian, after which I keep up two others fluently. I can speak multiple Slavic languages but only generally because of their similarity. I'm no longer fluent in Russian as I was when younger but it was the basis of my studies in Slavic languages. I can get by in French on the street but not very good at reading. In some languages I speak well in others I read and write well. I work with different languages every day speaking, reading and writing and my native language is ingrained. Other than that the others kind of fade away the longer the intervals are it being used. I just don't see any of these claims as being reasonable. You might find the very odd talented person and they would be exceptional. But speak 20 or even 10? Nope.

[@jeffkardosjr.3825]

In French I initially had more fluency in reading than listening or speaking. German on the other hand, I have more fluency in listening than I do reading or speaking. I got much better with French speaking and listening when I first visited Quebec in 2018.

[@lunarlake1]

I remember in university there was this girl with a chinese background (never lived in china) and she made a really big deal out of it. Like her personality was formed around "iam chinese and ultra smart because of that". She said she can speak 7 languagues fluently. Then we had a chinese class coming from abroad and she couldt speak chinese at all. She is now a CEO of a fairly big company.

[@redelfshotthefood8213]

...and, she came from a wealthy family... ?

[@willyb7353]

She's so full of nonsense

[@manubishe]

What in the blyat?

[@jhoughjr1]

Chinese is soo different from english one would have to really study hard to learn it

[@jeffkardosjr.3825]

Yeah. I don't know more than a couple handfuls of words of Cantonese and Mandarin. I understand how Chinese script works, but I don't know more than a few symbols. ​@@jhoughjr1

[@Saylem1000]

He's a language browser, it's common in the language learning community. IIRC Richard and Luca put him through the ringer in order to see if he was legit and they were satisfied with his performance if I'm remembering right. If there are any two people I'd trust to be able to spot a fake, it'd be Richard and Luca. I went back and watched the original video again, while the title says 16 languages, that's just how many languages they tested his abilities in, he was actually claiming 30. I really wish they had the time and inclination to go through them all to see if some of the languages they didn't test him on are better than the ones they showed...

[@attilalaszlopentek970]

As a native hungarian speaker I think that his hungarian is basic but understandable. His first sentence ("Köszönöm, jól vagyok.") was the best.

[@lugo_9969]

A Langage-fluency is like fitness....use it or lose it. I used to have amazing fluent French ( having lived & worked there ), and now its dropped to only about 20% of its previous grandeur.

[@jeffkardosjr.3825]

Yeah, I don't get to exercise French as much as I'd like to. Not many people actively speaking French or Haitian in my presence where I live. I did though get to use it on vacation in Canada and France.

[@EvropaVetvs]

As a native speaker pf Bulgarian, I have been seeing a lot of these polyglots speaking "Bulgarian" to strangers recently. I watched a KZbin short of some guy stopping some Bulgarian girls on the street and asking them what their native language is. Then he proceeded to have a "conversation" with them in Bulgarian and I can totally see why a non-Bulgarian speaker could be fooled into thinking the guy spoke Bulgarian. Firstly, he hadn't even memorized basic phrases like "My name is X." or "What is your name?" correctly, and his grammar and pronunciation were completely off. However, he had memorized some words in Bulgarian or some of the other Slavic languages to where there would be enough intelligibility for the Bulgarian speaker to understand what he was trying to say. It was basically the equivalent of "I name John. What name you? I luv Bulgarian language very. Nice meat you!" Can you understand what he's saying? Sure. If someone spoke English to you like this, would you say they speak English though? It's also natural for the Bulgarian speaker to ask something like "How did you learn Bulgarian?" and it is polite in pretty much every culture to compliment the person for learning the language, further adding into the illusion. From the perspective of the non-Bulgarian viewer, a guy stops random Bulgarian strangers, talks to them in their native language. They can understand him and have a conversation with him, while the whole thing is translated in perfect English in the captions of the video.

[@mike200017]

Yeah, it's basically a kind of "instant stooge" magic act. In the moment, the native speakers are going to play along, be polite, and basically understand what the polyglot attempts to say, and they will be genuinely impressed that someone could instantly blurb out some phrases in their relatively rare language, however basic and broken those might be. Also, these polyglots usually have a pretty good level in the major languages (say, English, French, German, Spanish, etc.), so most people who speak one, two, or three of the most common languages (which, by definition, is a bigger audience) can easily be fooled into thinking the polyglot is just as good in the less common languages. But if you happen to know a less common language (Swedish for me), then when the polyglot hits that language, the trick becomes so obvious.

[@excancerpoik]

my parents are the opposite they know many languages but don't admit it and say they don't speak them good enough to be fluent, even tho no one would notice that they aren't raised in the other countries

[@RicardoCebola]

Weirdly enough at 7:50 the Brazilian Portuguese sounded very weird to me. Maybe it's from an area of Brazil I haven't talked with someone from yet. Maybe it's the mix between saying "Portugau" instead of Portugal but then saying Brasil and not "Brasiu". The inconsistency sounded weird in my ears. Can someone from Brasil with in on this? I believe his European Portuguese is legit because of the mistakes. He said "Eu escolheu", not conjugating is a sign he is making it up himself.

[@lawofseven1465]

As a brazilian native speaker I can say that he's definitely fake. The accent is not accurate or consistent at all, but what gives it away to me is the way he said "tenho sido em Portugal" as a one-to-one direct translation of "I have been in Portugal", which is a construction no one would ever use, but rather "(eu) estive em Portugal".

[@CarolinaMSZF]

Is weird. I am from Minas, had contact with people from all over the country (Yes, even Acre)and never heard this pronunciation. Also the reply has nothing to do with the question. He asked why brazilian portuguese and the guy started with "português de Lisboa, mas falo mal. Tenho sido duas vezes em Portugal " that means, to me, that he learned some standard questions and key words and, because of that, he just heard:"why....portuguese". The sido em Lisboa also shows that he used, maybe, a translation from english, as pointed by the colleagues.

[@focusaddiction3460]

@@lawofseven1465 Doesn't mean he's fake though, it might mean he's just not as fluent as we expected, as he himself said it. It was understandable in my opinion, i got everything that he said - even though there were these mistakes that sound like literal translation, that might be the way he learned it. When i was first learning english, long time ago, i also spoke some wrong stuff that were just literal translation from portuguese.

[@michelefrau6072]

he clearly anticipated in the conversation that he speaks Portuguese poorly and badly

[@RicardoCebola]

@@michelefrau6072 the guy is definitely not fluent. Like @CarolinaMSZF said the question did bot quite match the answer. But it matched enough to be understandable as an answer to the question. My curiosity was more to see about the Brazilian Portuguese speaker that sounded very unnatural to me and it turns out to Brazilians as well - making this seem more rehearsed. I’m going to be honest and say that the way that he said Lisboa was pretty much on point for Lisboa accent - they say “Lsboa” - unlike other European Portuguese speakers that open the “I” on that word. It is likely that he is repeating the was an “Alfacinha” sounds.

[@astrol4b]

I Remember seeing this video a decade ago, this was in a polyglot conference and this guy is Italian, Luca lampariello interviewed him and he basically learned all these languages using grammar books like they teach latin in Italy. So yeah, not exactly the most market friendly method. Also a lot of the languages he learned are very similar, like the whole of central-eastern Europe (Czech and Slovak still count as 2, for example) BUT he knew an insane number of them, like 30 something.

[@BackWithANewMission]

They always ask the same questions.

[@NebulaNXN]

I was interested in refreshing my Russian language knowledge and came across American who claimed to speak native Russian. His pronunciation was completely off and he had strong American accent. Yet he claims speaking natively. I'm not fluent but my pronunciation is much better.

[@3rdand105]

The impression I got from the initial polyglot was that it was all scripted. Pretty much, everyone asked him the same basic question, and they only asked one question. Why not an actual conversation? I think we know why.

[@livedandletdie]

It is often that someone claims to speak a language but can't. I speak several languages, but I'd never claim proficiency in any one of them, except for English and Swedish(as a native speaker). That's despite speaking Danish, Norwegian and German as well. I would never say I'm a polyglot. Bare for at eg kan tale Norsk så er det ikke noget speciellt. I'm not good at it, but as a Swedish speaker, 90% of the vocab is the same, just slightly different pronunciation and intonation. People try to oversell their capabilities, and as far as I know, there's only a handful actual polyglots on KZbin, like Sonnywils, an Indonesian guy who speaks Italian, Spanish, French, and Português de Brasil.. And his Spanish is excellent because he can shift between Latam accents with ease.

[@Xiroi87]

You speak Danish and Norwegian as well? Most Scandinavians brag about speaking all the three main Scandinavian languages, those 2 and Swedish, when in fact they simply rely on mutual intelligibility and some passive vocabulary. That is NOT speaking a language.

[@module79l28]

Besides his native language, the japanese youtuber Kazuma (Kazu Languages) speaks several languages fluently (at least English, Spanish, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, Indonesian, Russian and Hindi) but he never says he's a polyglot, he always says he's learning 13 languages. He can also communicate fairly well in Italian, French, German and Polish, enough to approach people and start speaking in their native languages. Another legit youtuber polyglot is Wes Lyot: he's half brazilian, half swiss, he has lived in many countries and all the languages he claims to speak, he speaks them fluently: Portuguese (both brazilian and portuguese variants), English, Japanese, German (both Swiss German and standard German), French and Italian.

[@Fadogar911]

i'm really about to start a polyglot channel... it's trendy.. and i'm legit 😂

[@willyb7353]

Shoot for the stars, my friend. Maybe you'll have a channel like Metatron Academy one day.

[@Fadogar911]

@@willyb7353 i'll let you know when i'm at 50K my greek friend

[@hglundahl]

4:52 I wish my Italian or Spanish were like this ... I wish. With Italian, I was pretty happy that other day when I stepped off the bus, heard someone ask "quanto sono" and just blurted out "sono le dieci" ... (10PM). Unusual reactivity for my Italian.

[@laranjashtear]

Native Brazilian here. The fake polyglot can't conjugate verbs properly and worse than that, he clearly used Google Translate when he said "I have been in Portugal" - "Tenho sido em Portugal" which is absolutely wrong. He should've said "Eu estive em Portugal". If he can't say something this simple properly, he probably can't 'write well' as he says. Edit: Love your channels. If you ever wanna talk/learn about Brazilian history, look up Thiago Braga's channel, Brasão de Armas.

[@rhianor]

I like his excuse about only talking European Portuguese, like if the other guy was a Brazilian.... Gringos when speak Portuguese always sound metallic or robotic...

[@RicardoCebola]

I actually think it made it more believable. Almost every non native speaker does this mistake as well as misgendering words - saying weird stuff like "o mesa" or "eu estar aqui" is pretty much par for the course for eastern Europeans at first in Portugal. Did the other guy sound natural to you? It made my brain explode when he said Brasil in a Portuguese way (not "Brasiu") and Portugal as "Portugau". Nice shout out to Thiago Braga, he also has a lot of Portuguese history there and is a great host!

[@rhianor]

@@RicardoCebola In Portugal nobody says "Eu estar aqui", we may have different accents but our grammatical rules are almost the same.

[@RicardoCebola]

@@rhianor Eu sou Português pá! I know that here we don't speak like that. However most foreigners do if they are not from a CPLP country. Well Brazilians don't conjugate the "tu" very well either but they make due with the overly polite " você" that they find somehow less formal. The guy has a Portuguese that is worse than my French but I think he is actually Italian like Metatron and my Italian no doubt sucks as I'd just talk in Portuguese and add "ati" to everything hahaha Eu non falati nadi di Italiani! (Sorry Metatron for murdering your language)

[@willyb7353]

@@RicardoCebola 😆 a funny and informative comment. Bravo..

[@tombusza6401]

Reminds me of the late Alistair Cooke, when brodcasting on BBC in his series "Letter from America", who recounted that he once met someone who spoke 15 languages but couldn't say anything in one of them.

[@TheRedleg69]

I don't know about this. That video looks 30 years old lol. And the two people in the very beginning are most definitely polyglots. He could have actually found a better video of an actual fraud if they're so prevalent.

[@tudormarginean4776]

his Romanian was decent, but I guess it's not hard to get a decent pronunciation if you only have three sentences. Also, I don't speak Hungarian but I live in Transylvania, I have Hungarian friends and know how the language sounds. His Hungarian sounded awful.

[@tovarishchfeixiao]

But he said that he only spent 5 years on learning Hungarian, and he would need 15 or more years to actually be good. So his showcased level actually accurately represents the amount of time he spent on it. (I say this as a native Hungarian.)

[@AaAa-uq5tp]

As a portuguese native myself I can also say that they put him up against someone who also wasn't fluent in portuguese. It's like testing if you can code against someone who only knows "print('hello world')"

[@LovePikaMusic]

And you know what. i CAN speak 4 languages at the same time! Like... Croatian Serbian Bosnian and Montenegrin.. ba dum tss

[@ctam79]

Large language models will make it harder to call out fake polyglots online.

[@Skywalker96214]

It's not that hard, just call out the fake polyglots the old fashion way: have a native speaker challenge them to a livestream.

[@jhoughjr1]

Not at all. They dont speak naturally. Just like the AIs that call my mom multiple times a day. I can tell its a bot in 300 ms.

[@ba8898]

2:06 that man on the left is Richard Simcott, a legitimate hyperpolyglot from Britain. Luca, on the right, is also an impressive polyglot.

[@jerry2357]

The Monty Python team made a couple of TV specials in German ("Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus"), despite most of them not speaking German...

[@designbyatlantis007]

My father spoke 9 languages, he was Hungarian, I don't remember all of them, but it included Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, English, German, French and Polish. When I was a child I did speak Hungarian, but I have lost it over the years. I live in Messina, and I'm desperately trying to learn Italian... but I have many friends in my area who speak their native language, (Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Austrian) English and Italian, and a few also speak Sicilian... One friend speaks Sicilian, Italian, English, Spanish and Portuguese. I can honestly say after 2 years here... I still can't speak Italian... I feel like a failure! 🤣

[@StatesofnewIsrael]

The guy's fluency in Romanian is decent, but his pronunciation is off for many words. Still admirable since he can clearly get by, and understands natives.

[@CrimsonSun-n3i]

love the video man keep it up. I know he has passed away but a person that comes to mind is Laoshu50500. bro claimed he was fluent in like 50 langauges when he really only new very very basic intro phrases. to make matters worst he was selling books all the while being an absolute fraud. I remember being in highschool and buying one of these books by a polglot (not laoshu) and realized I wasted my money, that is when i started to look at these people more critically.

[@jeffkardosjr.3825]

I generally liked Laoshu's videos but I could tell when he was struggling with French or Haitian.

[@CrimsonSun-n3i]

@@jeffkardosjr.3825 He seemed like a cool guy. But selling language resources you are not fluent in was neglect at best and scammy at worst.

[@ignore5737]

He talked hungarian exactly like some foreigners i knew who recently started learning. Its impressive to learn that little hungary allready, because its a very complex language but if i could only speak that much in a language i would not say that i speak the language. I needed 1 year of german living in germany for example to be able to say confidently that i speak a little german..

[@DeReAntiqua]

Look, I learned English, then French in school, Latin, Welsh and Breton in university, took some single-semester language courses in Japanese, Russian, Hittite, Classical Greek and Italian. I am fluent in English, can get by in French, can read Latin and can make sense of Welsh and Breton with a dictionary and some time. If I had spent all my time learning these languages instead of studying, I could probably have become fluent in English, French and MAYBE Italian. Potentially Russian if I really gave up my social life and lived in the respective countries at least for some time. More than that as a functioning adult, especially without living in these countries? Absolute nonsense.

[@yiannisroubos8846]

Personally, I think the issue is the word, fluency. What does fluent mean? If fluency means A1, then people could pick up 15 languages. If Fluency is C1, then speaking 3 languages fluently is incredibly difficult. English is my native language, but I've studied and have degrees in Greek and French. I'd say I speak French at a B1 level and Greek maybe B2 because I lived in Greece for a short period. To get to B1 or B2 is incredibly difficult and will take years. But if you want to be able to travel and order coffee and ask directions, why not just get to A1 which won't take too long.

[@PAWfessionalTennis]

I'd like to give some background information about the first video because I remember watching it when it came out. If I remember correctly this was filmed at either the "Polyglot Gathering" or "Polyglot Conference" both of which are held every year and promote language learning. I attended it in Berlin in 2015 and met most of the guys who appear in this video. They're all super nice and HUGE language lovers. I believe they just wanted to film this to show people what is possible to achieve and motivate people to learn languages. The bald guy that you pointed at in the beginning is Richard Simcott who speaks more than 10 languages and I've seen many videos of people interviewing him and as far as I could tell he has a really good level in all the languages that I can judge (pretty much all Romance languages, English, German and Chinese) Then, there is the guy who asked the question in Romanian here. That's Alberto who has a KZbin channel called "Impara l'italiano con Italiano Automatico" and he creates great content in Italian with subtitles for learners. He is one of the major reasons why my Italian improved very quickly back then and I talked to him both in Italian and German in Berlin when I met him. He himself speaks 5-6 languages I believe. Well, and then there is Luca Lampariello who is standing on the right side in the beginning of the video. It would honestly surprise me to find out that you don't know him yet because he is one of THE most famous people in the language learning community on KZbin. He speaks 14 languages and works as a language coach. He has published lots of videos about language learning strategies etc and he is LEGIT. His English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Russian are extremely good. (again, those are the languages I can judge) He also speaks Polish, Greek, Hungarian and a few more. Probably not all at a C2 level, but I can assure you that he is the kind of person who truly loves languages and learns them to become good at them and get to live and experience life in those languages. He doesn't ever produce content with titles like "shocking natives" or "Look how amazing I am" Like I said, I think this particular video here was just a cooperation at the Polyglot gathering or conference and was only supposed to motivate people. But these guys are all proper language lovers and not just in for it for KZbin clicks. [I would agree though, that maybe they could have given the video a different title, but it didn't bother me much] I'd love to see you react to some of Luca Lampariello's videos :) Lui è sempre stato il poliglotta che più ammiravo. E lui stesso ha ammesso di non aver avuto lo stesso successo nell'apprendimento del giapponese come con altre lingue e ammira le persone che lo parlano ad alto livello. Saluti dalla Germania, Metatron!

[@hglundahl]

1:42 I would disagree. I would definitely not claim to be fluent in Italian or in Spanish. When I watched Assisi Underground from RAI on video, it was like trying to get the English of Star Wars after a few months after starting to learn English. This does not in any way diminish the importance of treating these as dialects of what you already know, like French (fluent period) and Latin (fluent in writing ... by the way, my Spanish in writing is not all that far from that). It's a totally different approach from learning a language from scratch with no help from your native language or from a previously learned one.

[@holycow666]

Today it's possible to have an AI answer questions while streaming instead of me, and it's very hard to tell the difference

[@luizalmeida5398]

I watched the hype of polyglots on KZbin go downhill as they were going to exposed for their fraudulent "skills". "Oh, you Chinese?" - proceeds to speak one phrase greeting in Chinese and then cuts the video. Others try to go further, saying things like "I really love your language, I like how it sounds" but they never maintain a longer conversation. I myself hate when people say "I can speak Portuguese" and starts to speak with a thick accent, wrong inflexions, or they just speak Spanish masked with a tchee and djee accent. If you say you speak a language, you better speak it comprehensibly and keep a fluid conversation.

[@Ismael-j8n]

It,'s a real pity, language learning is my best hobby and I wanted to have mastery or at least a nice livel in 10 or 11, this kind of things make me think that I shouldn't share it and I should stay quiet about that, there's always someone ruining everything

[@Aikurisu]

To me, people learning different languages is akin to earning respect. Reminds me of 13th Warrior, when the outsider (Ahmed) learned the native tongue of the Vikings. But yeah, I never ridicule anyone who speak my native tongue (English) as a second language, even badly. Okay, fine, maybe I'll make an exception for call centers in India...

[@alexiamandei]

for romainan neither of the two actually spoke correctly. it sounds like they used google translate and rehearsed the answer and here's why i think this - the "romanian" speaker said " am vazut ca vorbeste romaneste" when directly asking the polyglot person. vorbeste translated to eanglish means speaking but when you ask someone if or why they speak romanian you would say "vorbesti" which in english would be "you speak". then he does the same mistake and says "am vazut ca vorbeste foarte multe limbile straine" again, correctly you would say "am vazut ca VORBESTI foarte multe LIMBI straine" he said "i saw speaking many the foreign languages".to say you speak a language you should know how to conjugate verbs. the polyglot's reply also doesn't make a lot of sense - he actually said he started learning with the reading book, which again leads me to think he just learned those phrases from an incorrect google translation and would not be able to hold a decent conversation. that said, yeah, i would understand what he meant to say there, sure.

[@CrysolasChymera2117]

Right. The only thing that you MUST learn in as many languages as possible is: where is the toilet?

[@eivindkaisen6838]

BTW, Metatron, the ea in reahearse(d) is less like the a in "arsed" than the ø in sir/bird. I mean, if you want to sound (sort of) rude, you want to do it intentionally. :-)

[@--Burn--]

Although the Romanian spoken had a weird accent, which is normal for a non native speaker to have, the grammar, the conjugations, everything was actually top notch. Ofcourse he could have learned them by heart, I'm not qualified enough to speak on that subject, but the words and the sounds, and the grammar was actually native. I could even go as far as to say that it seems like a native speaker wrote it for him, but again, I can't speculate just based on "a hunch"

[@nissevelli]

What I want to see from self proclaimed polyglots (and have yet to see) is an unscripted, uncut video of them speaking the languages they claim to speak. It is always painfully obvious that they’re reading off of a script. There’s a cut after every sentence, and their cadence sounds wrong.

[@alexandermanzanares3879]

Great vid G

[@krupam0]

His conclusion actually was that it's apparently not that easy to sound fluent by just memorizing a script in a language you know barely anything about. As a native speaker, I can say that his faked Polish was just barely intelligible.

[@OVIDIUS.P]

First guy's romanian is not bad, some accents are of but overall ok, compared to the guy asking the questions, his accent is really bad 😂 . Me personally I know five languages, three very good (romanian-english-french) then Italian, I can fully understand it and have decent conversations(but I have to translate in my mind before and then say it, so it can be slow) and then last is hungarian(one of my grandmother was hungarian) I fully understand it but because I haven't spoken in twenty years(since she died) I almost lost my vocabulary completly. Now I'm studying Latin(classical Latin pron.) but I'm far from being fluent.(I can probably understand 70-80% of sentences just because romanian is la latin language, spekaing wise I'm not fluemt at all) Even with five is hard if you don't use them daily. I don't know what to say, maybe it's real but I'm sure lots of them are frauds.

[@REGAL-uf1nz]

Exactly. The guy who asked the question may sound faster and more in control but his Romanian is bad bad, especially at ”am văzut că vorbești foarte mult limbile străine”, which is very unnatural.

[@Daviddaze]

To refresh hungarian there's Frederickusz interviews and Agi Szabados stories and Blikk tv with captions 😊

[@PAWfessionalTennis]

@@REGAL-uf1nz That's Alberto from "Impara l'italiano con Italiano Automatico". His channel is great for learning Italian. And he's very nice, I met him in Berlin at the polyglot gathering in 2015. I believe at the time when they filmed this he had only been learning Romanian for a short while, later he actually lived in Romania for a year or too, so I bet he got better by now. I can't judge that though, as I don't speak Romanian at all. But he did speak English, Spanish and German with me (and even interviewed me in Italian for his channel :D But it's a short video with only a thousand views or so) But all of theses guys in the video here usually don't publish content like "SHOCKING native speakers with perfect ...." This one here was just one video to promote language learning, I believe

[@REGAL-uf1nz]

@@PAWfessionalTennis I get it now. Kudos to him. Looking forward to check him.

[@mike200017]

There are different categories of "polyglots" on youtube. There are definitely a few genuine people who, after an inordinate amount of dedication, have a good level of proficiency in many languages, but they are definitely not common (a niche community that existed long before youtube). Then, there are sort of polyglots, but really linguists, that know a lot about a lot of languages, academically, which I find very interesting, but they don't claim to speak the languages that they can describe and talk about (or "read"), but are sometimes confused with polyglots. Then, you have the Xiaoma-style "polyglots" that mostly just learn some basics of rare languages or dialects and use that as a fun way to break the ice or make contact with people (although, Xiaoma can get pretentious about his skills). Then, you have the street magicians that have some very basic knowledge of a ton of rare languages so they can give the illusion to most people who can't speak any of these languages, that they can just have a conversation with any random stranger in a rare language, when most of the time their "conversations" consist of a few phrases with very poor grammar and terrible pronunciation in front of a native speaker who is just polite enough to play along. Up to this point, I think all these people are OK, in my book, taking what they do for what it is, as long as they are not overselling it or pushing scam products. But then, you have the frauds, who straight-up pretend to be proficient in lots of languages and are selling the false hope that [insert platform / method / book of choice] can allow anyone, with minimal time investment, to just become proficient in any language they want. This is just setting people up to be disappointed when their unrealistic expectations aren't met. It's the linguistic equivalent to selling a miracle diet that requires no exercise or cut-backs, sold with dubious "before" and "after" pictures. As someone who has learned 6 languages, who is functional in 4 of those, and fluent in 2, I can say that you cannot achieve or maintain proficiency in a language without significant time and effort.

[@theblitz6794]

We need someone reacting to Metatron reacting to people

[@lifigrugru6396]

by 6 min the hungarian try is good. He made a few mistakes, but its acceptabel even if its load to hear he is not native. The most failing to speak hungarian are the adhesive verbs, and the high amount the sound alignment in my languige. its 99% how we write, we say to. the ABC still 32 character.

[@MarcelNL]

I came here in 6 minutes. (Last time that that happened, the lady was very disappointed.)

[@Luigi-hn1hu]

metatron will be pleased instead

[@lugo_9969]

Xiaoma from New York is an impressive 'one month beginner' in a ton of languages. But he rarely goes beyond that , apart from chinese....he sounds like a glorified tourist to me. Its good , but way way behind a long-term foreign resident in these countries. And his enthusiasm for food kinda disturbs me. 😢

[@raulepure9840]

Regarding the first sample with romanian, no one of them spoke romanian as a native, it was credible, but it could be staged, the conversation was simple.

[@HDJess]

He's definitely not fluent in Romanian, both speakers' pronunciation was off and it sounds like a learned phrase, rather than free speech. The construct "cu cartea de citit" (with the reading book) is also something we'd never say in Romanian and could only make sense if he used Google Translate to learn that. We'd understand what he meant, but it doesn't make sense grammatically. There are no "reading books", he probably wanted to say "citind o carte" or "citind dintr-o carte" (by reading a book).

[@rakhya-y3p]

A reaction video to a reaction video. lol

[@REGAL-uf1nz]

His Romanian is not that bad. Of course it is very slow, has some weird accent on the î / ă / â sounds like most foreigners do and the level of conversation is super basic, but all in all he sounds ok and even uses natural filler words (a lot of ”și”). Far from impressive but not a complete fraud, unless he is marketing himself as native level.

[@michelefrau6072]

I think the original reactor chose a wrong video (btw where is the link?), it seems quite old, probably at least 15 years old, it seems to be from a polyglot gathering, featuring a young Luca and another well-known polyglot (whose name I can't recall at the moment), so this happened long before the trend of fake polyglots on KZbin. Emanuele doesn’t even seem to have his own channel (I didn’t check other social networks either, as I’m not active on them), so it doesn’t look like he’s trying to sell anything. Instead, it seems more like someone casually showing off and practicing his skills among peers. The video likely belongs to another person, showcasing the abilities of their friends. He even admits that his Portuguese is bad and poor-an unusual bold move for someone claiming to be a "gigachad hyperpolyglot."

[@utopianjourney]

The first guy definitely doesn't speak portuguese... he uses portuguese as someone that just moved here and is trying to learn so people around him, in a shop or so, start to trying to teach him. but also he has a little of a brazilian accent wich make me believe that he did try to learn it (brazilian portuguese resources are more available online then european portuguese), but just started. overhall his portuguese is comparable of any turist that tried to learn a little bit on the plane to portugal... comparative to colin firth in love actually.

[@bleekcer]

The Hungarian sounds genuine to me, the guy has an obvious accent, which everybody has, who hasn't lived in Hungary for like decades, and even then most of them still have an accent. But it sounds like how all those people speak Hungarian, who have been in Hungary for a while and learnt it, sounds like logically building up the words and sentences, and not like just like trying to imitate the sounds, that never really works.

[@mattymaloy3949]

This has got me thinking metatron doesn’t speak English and just spends hours and hours memorising google translate scripts

[@oleksandrbyelyenko435]

Oh yeah. I am subscribed to this guy

[@originalbradcock]

I myself french english portuguese (but not using it so i'am forgetting it) and learning japanese. For sure this guy's portuguese is not even close to beginner.

[@Fetrovsky]

I'm fluent in English and Spanish. I could get by as a tourist in bad French and Italian.

[@dylanhinkel3548]

The 3rd syllable of interlocutor is stressed in english.

[@tboncz]

Hey Metatron, I speak 6 pretty fluent. I wouldn’t mind going live with you haha or help on a video.

[@language.wanderer]

Megatron, those videos about you reviewing other people's videos are f*cking boring bro. Please make some stuff on your own, as you used to do. There are so many interesting subjects to explore. Your sincere fan.

[@robertfaucher3750]

Unfortunately I was born in a country where English is the main language, so in my opinion I don't even know one language (lol). Is English even a language? Sometimes I wonder if its just a big practical joke. Absolute comical language,

[@DaveLopez575]

Metatron on the hunt for hyper-clickbait pseudo-glots

[@sledgehog1]

Hey Metatron, I'm a native European Portuguese speaker and despite the fact that Emanuele made some mistakes with the verb tenses("Eu escolheu" instead of "Eu escolhi") and translating things directly from English ("Tenho sido em Portugal", translated directly from "I've been to Portugal" instead of "(Estive em)/(Fui a) Portugal") he pronounced words well and overall did a good job, having in mind European Portuguese is a sort of "inverted pyramid" of a language, meaning the higher you climb the tougher it gets. So, without wanting to take away from Emanuele's effort in his languages journey, the video only reinforces the fact most "KZbin polyglots" are just a marketing trick and any claims to be a polyglot are to be taken with a truck load's worth of salt...

[@estrafalario5612]

2:04 un sosia di Elio dagli Elio E Le Storie Tese non ci può deludere!

[@jhoughjr1]

I dabble in learning languages but dont spend much time on it. I can phonetically read cyrillic mostly which is fun. I can read some french cant speak much but the variety is fun.

[@Bruh-cg2fk]

reactions academy

[@vew3rita]

Both his Romanian and Hungarian sound funny. His timing is off like he is thinking his sentence word by word and his accent is off. But it might not be his fault, the speakers of both of this languages don't really correct a new speaker because they think that it's good enough that somebody who doesn't need to use the language is learning it.

[@mgtowwolf3714]

He done so many mistakes speaking portuguese that he's at level zero. Basic errors: 1. "Eu escolheu" - that's wrong as saying "I are", it should be "Eu escolhi", he is saiyng "I" but conjugating with the "he/she". 2. "Tenho sido em Portugal", this means "I used to be Portugal" like "I'm Portugal", terrible. Just like in spanish we (portuguese) have 2 verbs to replace the english "to Be", and he choose the wrong one, very bad. Very basic. No chance he can have even a basic conversation in portuguese.

[@YouTubalcaine]

I'm not a hyperpolyglot, but I play one on Duolingo.

[@run2fire]

Steve Kauffman? His Polish is bad. But I guess he can speak French since he lived in France when he was young.

[@kobayashimaruaikiken]

Alright but... the fact is that he's VERY good with Slavic languages, not with Portuguese and Romanian. He's the real deal.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

15 languages at 21? Sure! You just didn't go to school, didn't sleep and didn't record your every week youtube videos. Then of course - 15 languages at the age of 21 is doable. Also, he's in for a surprise - I am native Polish speaker 😄

[@tudorpop961]

The so called romanian native speaker said “vorbește foarte multe limbile străine” which make him not a native speaker most probably a second generation immigrant The correct way is “vorbești foarte multe limbi străine” or “vorbiți” if you use polite pronouns.

[@Glassandcandy]

This is day 15 of commenting on every new video until he does Cajun French and Louisiana Creole.

[@Nasraniksatria]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿: THIS IS SPARTA 🇺🇿: BU SPARTA 🇳🇵: यो स्पाता हो 🇲🇳: ЭНЭ БОЛ СПАРТА 🇯🇵: これはスパータです 🇬🇪: ეს არის სკარტა 🇮🇩: INI SPARTA Tatar: БУ СПАРТА 🇲🇲: ဒါက Sparta ပါ(Burmese is hard)

[@johnnyquid-xj4kk]

3 languages, and that’s hard

[@hglundahl]

7:16 His Hungarian = / > my Italian or Spanish.

[@Nasraniksatria]

I know a little bit of a lot of languages, does that make me a fake polyglot? Or does it make me the worst polyglot ? Either way I do like to learn languages. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿: Hello 🇲🇳: Сайн уу 🇮🇩: Halo 🇮🇷: سلام 🇺🇿: Salom 🇳🇵: नमस्कर 🇯🇵:こんにちは Tibetan: བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་ལེགས Tatar: Салом