Fake Polyglots

Great video maestro =)

Fantastic video Richard! Always a pleasure to hear your thoughts.

Отличная видео друг

Very inspiring talk. I am more of a "full I-pad" person. With an A1 level I talk like crazy but then I realise how big a language is, I feel demotivated at times and shut up until at least the very end of the B2 levels. At C1 or C2 I start to speak non-stop and confidently again.
I am also surprised with the definition of a polyglot being a person speaking 4 languages at B1+. I would fit in that definition (mother tongue + 2xC2 + 1xB1 + 1xA2~B1). But one of them is similar to another and I mix them up often, so the caviats to the definition also apply to me.

Great discussion! Merci beaucoup Richard. Je me trouve un peu déçue de n'être pas capable de vue des commentaires du live stream ! J'adore être spectatrice aux drames.

Oh Sam, stop acting the goat lad. Wind your neck in

Very informative, thank you again for taking the time to make this. Greetings from Spain :)

Great video! I always find it interesting that when you meet someone and you tell them you are a surgeon or general practicioner, no one bats an eye, but when you say you speak a foreign language they will ask you so many questions and at the end some people will not believe that you speak Russian or German because they heard those languages are too difficult or they tried to learn those languages themselves and they failed. Funny thing is I am neither a surgeon nor a general practioner, but no one cared to ask and no one tried to prove I was a phony. (^_^)

Great video Richard. I usually do not care what other people do and what they claim to be or not but the polyglot topic is indeed a tricky one. I in general, say that I learn an x amount of languages, rather than saying I speak them. Even if I speak all of them to an certain extend. Unless I know that I do have a level, where I can preety much do anything in this language. What I am wondering more about are the people who plan to become a polyglot from the very start of their language learning. This seem to be the newest trend. And I am always suprised when I see some of them starting from scratch with 5 languages at once. I kind of feel like those are the people you give the term polyglot a bit of an iffy taste. I started learning languages because it is so much fun to me and I love to communicate with people in their native languages. Never have I ever thought about what that will turn me into, let alone whether I will become a polyglot or not. That is the reason I mainly consume content from people like you, Luca or Steven, as you did not care about things like that when starting learning languages back in the days.

Thanks for the video, Richard. Good topic and handled well. Looking forward to more good topics from you.

I don’t want to be rude but I’m genuinely interested what habits lead to his lips being distinct. Perhaps he licks his lips and I see he runs his fingers along them sometimes. I hope it’s not rude to be curious about that openly. Perhaps it’s running his teeth across his mouth to remove skin? I like how he responded to Sam :) good man.

I never heard him spoke any languages other than English before.

voice of reason!!!

richard in greek for trilingual we would say τρίγλωσσος.
Something that has been on my mind is why are we so harsh on judging someone's level in a foreign language, when for example there are people who are not educated and speak multiple languages in order to communicate with others on everyday situations or for going shopping, buying stuff eg people living near borders or speaking multiple languages like in India. it doesn't necessarily mean that one in order to be "certified polyglot" needs to be able to work using this language. So then we have double standards for native polyglots and others where they can say basic things and get by but not necessarily use it in a work environment.
Also on the other hand I know multiple people who have been prepared very well for an exam,passed so they got their certification but if they are found in a social event they wouldn't be able to speak it, out of fear or embarrassment etc. so what about them?
I would say if the level that someone has permits them to get by in their everyday life then that is acceptable.

Is is possible to speak a generic form of a language that would hold true for specific features of individual languages where you can't really communicate with anyone but can still convey meanings just by substituting the generic symbols by specific words? You know, just like math. Both are mostly left-brain phenomena.

Thanks for your well balanced review

I think rather than saying that someone isn't fluent unless they can speak like a newspaper it should be someone is fluent once they can speak at the level that they need to in order to comfortably get by in that language. I am not an overly smart person, even in English I tend to use simpler words more than complicated words but I would still be considered fluent.

This video was awesome. The part I find interesting is the part of learning a language in a month. I personally don't know how fast someone can learn a language, but it takes time. Even when time passes, we're still learning.

Sam reminds me of Tony Blair. The turd that won't flush.

Polyglots have different levels in respect of each languages they study, so there are only persons interested in languages so respect.

I am Sam. Sam I am.

You are so beautiful. Thank you so much for motivation.

Greetings from Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬

Pete Buttgage comes to mind.

I watched that Icelandic interview. It's impressive, but it's obvious they're going easy on him. I used to dabble in Icelandic because I was curious about how hard it is. I didn't get to a very high level and I don't normally understand Icelandic. I could still kind if follow that interview.

Another very enjoyable video. Sam is way too funny, you can literally hear Richard speaking several different languages in each of those live videos 🤣 or maybe he could check your 1 hour interview in German which is absolutely fantastic and shows that your level in German is super high (German is my native language). Actually some kind of update (or follow up) of that interview you did in German would be amazing (how to raise your children with multiple languages) - maybe your ideas have changed since then or there's something you might add. Anyways thanks again for those videos, keep them coming! :)

That was a great video, thank you Richard!

Hah, when you said you were going to use your iPad to show the dunning Kruger effect I was expecting you to draw some line with an app 😆

I had a dream of becoming a polyglot after hearing about Heinrich Schliemann in my Latin class.
Unfortunately, I got ill and hadn't the possibility to concentrate on language learning.
Now however I am restarting. 30+ years later. 4 languages to be a polyglot... hmmm... two to go then. I have three to choose from.

I really don't care if someone had not achieve the advanced level. I am consider myself as fluent in spanish. I can talk to people in Spain to a certain degree about everthing. But I don't consider my Spanish at an advanced level. I know how hard this is to get there. Since two years I am trying to achieve that level. I am not judging anybody who stick on an intermediate or even lower level. The only problem which I have with some of the "Fake polyglots" is when they lie to their audience. When they say, for example that they had learned Spanish from zero to fluency in 30 days and later came out that they had 5 years Spanish in school.

Ei má, esse vídeo é só o mi disbuiado. É da hora, sem gueri gueri. Esse cara é fera!

One of the best videos I've seen on the topic. I used to feel particularly angry watching interviews of some self-proclaimed polyglots speaking far too much Spanish when they were supposed to be speaking Portuguese, Russian when it was Ukrainian, and so on. I found it grating, arrogant to assume others should just decipher their speech and just unbearable to see them receive praise for such a mediocre effort. I realized that I had to let that resentment go, because really, I was upset that I wasn't being recognized for speaking those languages better (or so I thought). I do think self-deception is the main problem and theirs to deal with, but to some extent, they do give a false impression of what it takes to be fluent and mislead people who are unfamiliar with language learning. It's always about speaking, never understanding the language. Anyway, it still bothers me when mediocrity gets celebrated, but I try not to dwell on it and spend that energy instead trying to close the gap between what there is to know and what I know, of which I am always so painfully aware.

The fluency in a language can only be determined by the people who speak that language as a mother tounge.

норм русский 😎 аьнд ай лайк хаьу йыу апрэуч да кўэщчан, да мэйн топик

"I covered about 2200 words, but I'm definitely not fluent yet..."

And some people claim to be fluent with a set of 800 - 1000 words.

This word "fluent", does it really need to be over interpreted?

The great thing about knowledge is that it's unfakable (for very long). It's either you know, or you don't know.

Great video Richard! Thank you for sticking it out till the end!

Years ago I met a woman from Aruba online who claimed to be half Japanese and speak perfect Japanese as a second language learner. At this point I was spending many hours online speaking to Native Japanese people so I invited her to our skype group. This women over and over corrected my Japanese when the natives were not there. She would nitpick my accent and criticize me about everything even if it wasn't just the language. I had completely accepted that her Japanese was far superior to mine and was treating her as my senpai. Then one day the Native Japanese people in the group pointed out that over the months they have never heard her speak Japanese a single time even though I only spoke to them in Japanese. At this point we realized that her entier online persona was a sham and that she wasn't the person she was saying she is at all. Watch out for people who manipulate your self consciousness with languages.

I don’t know who these fake polyglots are. I have been learning German for a year, 45 minutes a day, and I have basic A2 German. It takes me ages to commit German words to memory, and to understand the structures. It will take me many years before I can understand normal German. I am told that my pronunciation is good. I understand podcasts and videos for French speakers, after 18 months hard work, but I cannot yet understand a film in French. Sometimes I understand the dialogue, sometimes not. Oddly enough French seems so similar to English. I could become dispirited looking at the progress made by others, but I am convinced it takes massive amounts of hard work to master a language. Some say it gets easier the more languages you learn.

I've heard foreign people saying that English is easy when it comes to grammar but difficult vocabulary-wise because there are so many words in common use meaning nearly the same thing but using exactly the right word at the right time is particularly hard thing to learn when it comes to English. But isn't this true of every language? Aren't they just saying this because English is the only language they know to an advanced level? I don't know because English is my first language.
Maybe the second language speakers have a point about vocabulary. English often has several options for nouns, verbs or adjectives referring to simple everyday things (like work, labour or toil... Or small, little, mini, miniature, tiny, minute, and so on.) I was looking for equivalent words in Japanese meaning very small that are current words and not archaic or literary, and there seemed to be nowhere near as many... (or maybe i need to look harder... I'm not sure!)