Top 10 FAKE Polyglot Tricks EXPOSED!!! You won't believe number 3

Thanks man! Gonna use these tips!

“You might as well speak Portuguese, which is Spanish spoken in French.” I completely lost it.

Number 4, I studied Russian and accidentally learned 6 other Slavic language without Realizing I was side questing

I've been learning a new language intensively for a year and a half, practising every day, and I honestly feel like those videos where people "sneezed and suddenly became fluent in a new language" are making light of the time and effort it actually takes.

The only language I have studied quite a lot and read a lot is Spanish. When I check these ''polyglot speaks 15 languages'' I normally go to the part where they speak Spanish and find that not only is it very basic, but they make a lot of mistakes that people generally stop once they leave absolute beginner level. The trick is simply that when you meet a new person the conversation is almost always exactly the same, so if you just learn how to follow those rails in that initial-type conversation, you could easily pretend to speak ten languages.

I didn't have a French person tell me I was speaking horribly, but they did switch to English right after I said bonjour. Then again, I can't blame them. Working at a gas station in Quebec, on the border of Ontario, I'm sure they hear all sorts of anglophones butchering their language. It still made me appreciate the folks in Mexico who appreciate you trying to speak Spanish and will even help you out.

As someone who was born and raised in Portugal, "You might as well speak Portuguese, which is Spanish spoken in French" made me laugh. What a simple and effective way to describe it. 😂

Every Polyglot Video on Youtube where they meet other Polyglots: "Hey! My Name is [name], I learned [language] when I was in [place], I have many friends who are speaking [language]. Yes, I like speaking [language] very much. Do you also speak [language]?" - "Oh yes, I learned [language] when I was in [place], I like speaking [language] a lot!"

The hyperpolyglot interactions always remind me of the Kids in the Hall sketch "I Speak No English," where the clerk speaks to the customer in perfect English: "I've learned this sentence phonetically, but I know nothing of its syntax or grammar. I assure you, I speak no English."

Number 9, I spent a summer in US in a Russian immigrant bungalow colony. My spouse is a native Russian speaker. Any attempt of mine to speak Russian in the colony, was always answered in English, by the colony members. If I tried it in our bungalow , I was told (most likely correctly) that my Russian was terrible. If I tried speaking Russian to our 18 month old child, the child would burst out laughing. I think the child gave me the most accurate review.

Richard Fenyman told a story in his autobiography about a time he went to Brazil as ... I think it was basically a guest lecturer for a semester? So he spent some time trying to learn to speak (Brazilian) Portuguese even though he was told he could lecture in English because he figured the students would learn better if they weren't trying to learn and translate at the same time. He was later on an airplane with a Portuguese couple and was talking to them and they were amazed that he spoke even a little bit of Portuguese, so he started to explain how/why he knew it, and realized partway into a sentence that he'd forgotten how to say "so" in Portuguese. However, he also realized that, when there's an English word derived from Latin, the Romance languages will quite frequently have a close cognate, so he thought "consequently = consequentemente" and used that. Which impressed them even more that he knew such long words.

#11 Be very generous with the level of linguistic complexity, nuance and detail you put into subtitles

Brilliant! Finally someone talked about these things! I see “polyglots” speaking Spanish TERRIBLY with so much confidence. It’s insane. And my own audience is often really good at English, but they just don’t have the confidence when they speak. Confidence is so powerful.

My husband trained as an interpreter nearly fifty years ago although he ended up in a completely different profession. His French, although without a trace of an English accent, is now quite ropey because he rarely gets a chance to speak it. The language he knew least well (Latin American Spanish) is now exceptional because there's a Latino community in London and he uses it often. Immersion in a language is the best way and use it or lose it is totally true.

My cousin is a polyglot, although I'm not sure if she would fit the definition of a hyperpolyglot. She speaks, reads and writes German, Polish, Russian, Greek, and Khmer fluently. She also has a basic reading and conversational level of Hebrew, Spanish, Portugese and Italian. The thing is though you wouldn't know she was a polyglot unless you asked, or unless you were a family member who knew her well enough to know how many languages she spoke. She doesn't go around waving her language proficiency in people's faces, she's not on YouTube trying to sell courses, she just happens to a) be able to learn new languages fairly easily and b) loves to travel and engage with different cultures. I am always highly suspicious of people making claims like being a hyperglot when they are either doing it to make money off people, or doing it for views and attention. This was good information you presented here.

I’m so glad someone made this video. Thank you. I’ve been studying mandarin for over 10 years and I’ve been doing it without any formal classes. It’s been a slog. And you are right, my family is Dutch and that language is technically much easier to speak but the Dutch are a lot harder to please than the Chinese. And so thanks to the wonderful kindness of all the poor people who have suffered through conversations with me, I have persisted. For better or worse. But it’s really something else to see how many YouTubers have mastered mandarin in 6 months. And I’m still over here trying to ask the shop keeper where they keep the honey but I keep asking her where they keep their bees. And you’re telling me you learned to read in 6 months? Really? Reaaaallly? Those people definitely exist because I’ve met them, but those people are beautiful freaks of nature but they know they are special. They aren’t out their telling everyone “you can achieve the same thing my elite athlete brain can do… if you just study more and do some productivity hacks”

I've noticed this many years ago, when polyglot videos started coming up. I'm fluent in 4 languages, and it really bothered/frustrated me that some "polyglots" who obviously do not know how to speak the language pretends to speak it. I wrote a comment on one of those videos and was downvoted into oblivion for calling them out. So, thank you very much for making this video and exposing the truth of these languages grifters.

Very interesting because I follow a European polyglot here who claims to speak a lot of languages and he IS good at identifying them. I've watched dozens of his videos and it struck me that he always uses the same phrases with people in their language. "I like [country] very much, I like the food especially. I like to make new friends. It's fun to meet new people." And when they invariably ask him how he can speak [language], he says, "I speak [language] because I have a friend here who speaks it." It's always the same phrases. But he never gets into a real discussion with them (unlike a couple of others I follow here, who can tackle any subject and respond intelligently). You've given me a lot to think about.

I could not t agree more on your comment of "do not pick Hungarian with all the cases". A bilingual (English - German) guest specialist at my work place once proudly announced that he cracked the code of Hungarian language by studying the menu in the cafeteria and catefully analyzing the elevator security tab for 2 weeks. He explained us what he made of the endings and the sentence structure. None of them were correct or even slightly close to what was really happening. He then made up his mind to impress the cafeteria lady by asking for milk for his coffee in Hungarian. He said it was a great thing thst cow and milk starts with the same two letters in Hungarian so it would be easy to remember. Well, it was easy to mix up so he asked for a coffee with a cow (sometimes with THE cow when he accidentally used a definitive article). The cafeteria lady acted like nothing happened, did not bat an eyelid and gave him milk and he was so happy.

There's a certain YouTube polyglot I saw speaking Spanish in a couple of videos. He was not actually saying what he wrote in the subtitles, not even close. He would say very basic things, sometimes even getting those things wrong, but then write something much more advanced in the subtitles. I'm left to assume he is probably doing that with other languages as well, and mostly trusting people won't pick up on it.