Exposing fake polyglots: Warning signs and red flags

I originally wasn't going to make this video but I feel compelled to because I'm mad you see I made a video a while ago that went whatever the equivalent of viral is for Linguistics content if you don't know me I'm Dr Taylor Jones I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania the best of the other IVs and I make humorous flippant some would even say glib YouTube content about Linguistics and language learning it may be silly but it's always accurate and backed by peer-reviewed Empirical research anyway in my baby viral video I gave sort of tongue and cheek tips for faking being an online polyglot I called out a few YouTubers but not by name who I think are charlatans snake oil salesmen as my channel has grown so have theirs and their viewership has far surpassed mine I'm not mad about that what I'm mad about is that some of them are literally using all 10 of my tips and getting away with it one has even had the audacity to have his assistant send me an email asking if I would interview him on my channel and bask in the Magnificent Glory of a man who claims to speak over 50 languages I'm sorry did I say 50 I went back when factchecking my script and the email says and I quote 100 languages conversationally and 12 languages fluently no you don't this is unacceptable the original video was supposed to be funny and not really a how-to but I realized I left a lot out especially if you don't want to be a Huer suppose you don't want to fake it you want to spot a fraud aha so that's what we're doing today I'm going to equip you with some tools to know what to look for to determine if things maybe aren't adding up to 112 I'm Dr Taylor Jones and I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and this is language Jones this week's video is sponsored by my sense of righteous indignation people are misrepresenting themselves on the internet and that's not right there's not a sponsor sponsor but if you'd like to support the channel you can do so right here on YouTube with super thanks and super chat or you can head over to patreon.com language Jones and become a patreon the more patrons I have the more certain I am to be able to pay the mortgage but my promise to you is that I will never accept sponsorship from better help now on to unmasking confidence Men some people have a meter I have a Geer counter and these are the things that make it ping one sheer numbers one internet polyglot recently claimed he would explain how he learns any language in 24 hours another claims to speak over 100 languages really let's do some math here since Linguistics is basically just math masquerading as a Humanity anyway I'm an American so I'll take the US state Department's stats here they divide languages into four categories where one is the easiest and four is the hardest for a native English speaker category one languages include languages like Dutch which is English spoken silly it is mopi it is inbook French which is the source of all fancy English like circum navigation or shakri or junqua or toodles yes really or Spanish which is the language you hear in America when you go outside category two includes includes languages like German or Swahili Category 3 has languages like Albanian amaric Armenian and azani all the way down to Ukrainian Urdu USC and Vietnamese category 4 has super hard languages which includes Arabic Japanese and a handful of others I'm assuming Zulu is there they have over 75 years of experience getting people ready to be diplomats and spies and stuff and they know how long this stuff takes category 1 languages take between 600 and 750 class hours to become proficient that's not self-study and that's assuming homework and proficient is a three on the inter agency language Round Table scale the scale goes to five and increments of 1 half starting at zero so let's be generous and assume a claim that you speak a language is the low level of proficiency and let's assume that you're a Super Genius so you don't need 750 hours you can do it in 600 and let's assume you're a super duper genius and you don't need real life contact with actual speakers you can just learn from your flash card app that gives you literally random sentences in your target language and teaches you no grammar that's still let's see if we do the math um 50 languages times 600 hours is 30,000 hours let's say you dedicate eight hours a day to language study because you don't have a job and you're an independently wealthy super duper genius that's still 3,750 days so obviously you're a highly motivated independently wealthy super duper genius and you take no days off that's 10 years 100 languages that's 20 years and that's assuming that you can come up with 50 languages like Dutch and Swedish and danish that are related to English and related to each other category three languages ones with significant linguistic and cultural differences but not super hard take approximately 1100 hours to get passively okay at and that's most languages that's 55,000 hours or almost 19 years of full-time 8 hour a day study or 38 years for 100 languages that math ain't math and that's if you don't ever need to go back and review anything that you've already learned so the first language you learned 20 years ago needs no further practice now learning hello and a few pleasantries in 50 languages that can be done in the span of a week but that's not what anybody means by speaking a language two how do they talk do they only ever talk about learning languages and themselves one thing I pay attention for is intermediate and advanced grammar this varies by language but I can give you a few examples for French if you're going to say something in the future everything is future so you wouldn't say when I am in France I will eat a million baguettes you would have to say the equivalent of when I will be in France I will eat a million baguettes this is a subtle difference and while it's not hard it really messes up native English speakers and it takes time to learn similarly more complex sentences with subordinate clauses require you to learn the subjunctive and anything non-vertical that is hypothetical subjunctive modality conditionals and so on is often more tricky so even if you don't know the language they're claiming to speak does the translation indicate that they're saying things like I wish I had had the opportunity to do do thus and such and if I ever go back to nortu I will do so or is it all I think nort language is beautiful basically are you hearing things like I want to X Y and Z or hearing things like before I left nortu I wish I had had the opportunity to X Y and Z sticking with French beginners and intermediate students will even mess up Basics like saying Nota latter often means I once heard someone tell a bereaved mner the equivalent of don't hesitate to call me for at least it lightens the Mood by the way leave me a comment for the algorithm with a time that you misspoke embarrassingly in another language I had some great replies last time I asked this and now my channel has like 40,000 more subscribers so this should be entertaining for all of us anyway I almost never hear even intermediate grammatical Concepts from purported polyglots although I will say that the women online seem to be better about this three this is building on two but beyond how they talk what actual subject matter do they discuss the hyperpolyglots basically only ever discuss being a hper polyglot because that's all they can they can maybe buy food haggle in a Marketplace talk about how beautiful whatever language is and talk about how they like learning languages that's basically it you know what I take that back I haven't seen any of them actually haggle that would be kind of impressive instead of haggling they show the people who reacted with Wow which isn't even a real compliment is a face- saving strategy deployed when a weird foreign tryhard shows up to your food stand with a camera unannounced that's part of why in my video on Quebec French I made a point of saying some fancy things just cuz I can and I want listeners who know it's up to know that I can I can do that in French and sort of in Chinese after an undergraduate degree in it a lot of self-study but everything else I speak I speak at what I would call a phrasebook level that'll get you surprisingly far but I would never portray it as fluent four building on the previous few do they ever actually use the language Jody Foster and Bradley Cooper have given interviews on French TV where they talk about stuff politics a new film on the most egregious of the YouTube polyglots I haven't seen talk about anything really but not only are they talking about interesting topics we're talking about jod Foster now like in the previous point but they're doing so unscripted and with real people if I see one of these guys extemporaneously give a nuanced picture of the geopolitical situation in the Middle East and how it relates to Nato and the war in Ukraine I will literally eat my hat hell if one of them so much as gives a nuanced description of the science of learning Ali two hats so if the person purporting to speak a bunch of languages only speaks them in controlled situations where they're either talking directly to camera like me right now or they're shocking locals and be very skeptical five jump Cuts if you see an interview in another language assuming you can even find one compare the rate of jump cuts when the interviewer is talking versus the interview being able to speak fluently and articulately after post-production is not the same as being able to communicate effectively in the moment and at a certain pace of edits you should be wondering why so many edits are necessary and what they're trying to hide disfluencies mispronunciations using Google Translate for a hot second six something to sell I'm not saying everybody with something to sell is bad I have merch and I may develop course materials later but are they claiming that you should buy something from them to learn a language based on their claim that they speak a lot and therefore know it's effective having studied even actually speaking a lot of languages is nowhere near as effective for a teacher as understanding course design knowing the science of memory familiar with the academic literature on second language acquisition a good friend of mine speaks French Italian Portuguese and Spanish he is the absolute last person I would ask to teach me a beginner Spanish since he's got a 30,000 foot view of the whole romance language family and a bajillion neural Pathways already primed for cognates and similar grammatical structures of course he thinks it's not hard to learn you could practically infer Spanish from what you already know at that point then again I accidentally did that once and it didn't go well and you all won't let me forget it this point is especially true if the thing they're selling doesn't make a lot of sense so there's one who has what are effectively batch generated flashcards of random sentences and the idea is that if you study enough you'll just Intuit grammar this is unhinged I know people who studied Mandarin for years in classroom settings who never piece together the subject position in a subject verb object sentence as opposed to a topic common sentence are always definite and that you need to move things around if it's indefinite for instance sangaran lla means the three men came and you'd have to say yo saren or lla anger in to mean some or any three men came this is just not something you're going to Intuit it from flashcards this is not something native English speakers int it after years in country or after years of college level study if it's not explicitly taught moreover the same application I'm thinking of very frequently has transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet which is great that doesn't match the audio that they've included but I can do a full review later seven I didn't think this would need to be said but claiming to speak dead languages especially minority languages were the last speaker recently died there's something truly perverse about this one because not only is the only person who could verify it dead but it's profiting off their cultural heritage which died with them patting your resume with unverifiable information is bad enough but claiming to be the secret last speaker of Tao for example is not just self-aggrandizing it's cruel and it's a desecration of the Dead say what you will about Benny or Luca whoever but they didn't claim to speak like Central Alaskan upic or anything to my knowledge and no I'm not saying don't add Gothic to your resume if you're an old timey philologist you can say you speak Acadian and I'm not going to get mad if you can't order a coffee since that language died before coffee was discovered and also that's not what you do in a Cadian you besiege cities you abduct women you sacrifice to the gods and whatever so if you can do all that then and I mean don't do all that but more power to you but currently endangered languages or recently defunct ones that's low and lastly number eight claiming expertise in linguistic subfields with no degree and no Publications if you put put something like optimality theory on your resume you'd better believe I'm going to go to Google Scholar and put in your name and optimality theory that one sounds great and is not at all what it sounds like I know this video was less jokey jokey hahahha than my previous polyglot video but again I'm pretty annoyed at what I'm seeing and I really want to help save you the YouTube viewer and potential consumer of these products from being taken in by conmen why is it always men # notallmen thank you to all my patrons if you like this video and you want to help support me to make more content like this please think about either donating right here on YouTube or becoming a patron at patreon.com language Jones and of course like subscribe comment and share I'm trying to make videos more regularly and aiming for every Wednesday although obviously it's maybe not Wednesday when this was released but I'm doing my best for those of you who are curious how I study I've been doing live streams semi-regularly on Sundays and Mondays I did a few months of Persian and I'll probably go back to it and the last few months have been Hebrew and Arabic later I might go back to Spanish and Mandarin we'll see until next time happy learning and don't believe everything that you see on the internet

Channel: languagejones

Views: 303,826

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Id: JoUXT2uuS38

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024