Polyglots are not scammers! Laoshu is not a fraud! #Laoshu505000

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last year um this year [Music] a small number of people are now leading the charge against the polyglot movement here on youtube there are people arguing passionately that this is a scam i'm not one of them i'm not here to tell you that it's a scam my analysis of what's wrong with it is quite a bit different i would compare it to coming on the internet and promising people passionately that if only you adopted a vegan diet it'll cure your acne if only you adopted a vegan diet you can quit all your meds you'll never have any need for accutane or any other harmful chemicals that have terrible side effects ever again you won't have to spend 20 a month on expensive soaps and gels you'll have clear perfect skin if you just eat a vegan diet like me there are so many people who will say to you if you dare to criticize this type of movement on the internet this type of marketing scheme this type of community on the internet there's so many people say to you what's the harm it's warm it's friendly it's positive it's encouraging people need encouragement people need encouragement to get out there and try people need encouragement to try improving their diet improving their exercise improving their sleep and you know if that doesn't work and it doesn't cure your acne at least at least you tried and it's heartbreaking and it's tragic and it ruins people's lives and nobody stops to consider the strange tragedy for these people who sign up for this life-changing experience and then find their chagrin that no matter how hard they try they can't get the promised results i'm learning mandarin and and moses is the person who originally inspired me to start learning mandarin i found his channel a little over a year ago and i thought he was just this incredibly fascinating person and i thought it was amazing how many languages he could speak in the sort of interactions he was able to have with strangers just by the virtue of of him being able to speak to them in the language of um you know their home and i i thought it was so cool um so a little over a year ago i decided that i was going to start learning mandarin i'm still learning mandarin making that decision was a was a a life-changing thing me starting this journey of language learning has given me confidence it's helped me dream bigger it has shown me what i can accomplish when i set my mind to something [Music] uh judezo uh wow [Music] [Music] foreign improve my mandarin a lot this year so what is fluency all of these programs are promising you fluency in six months in three months in 60 days in a certain finite number of hours measured on the app sign up now what is fluency very clearly fluency in a language does not mean standing on a street corner like moses mccormack and repeating the same handful of memorized phrases again and again without being able to even understand the person's reply meeting people and saying arabic is a beautiful language i like to speak arabic i studied on my own i don't have a t-shirt like this is all he did again and again and he became this idol people worshiped but he was an idol with feet of clay and i mean it's tragic comic what you see in the comments and if you even just talk to other people who study languages online they'll always say something like oh well i study chinese myself so i can tell that his chinese is really bad but i assume he speaks these other languages really well that someone else will say oh well cambodian is my first language so i can tell his cambodian is really bad but i assume he speaks chinese really well there are these charitable assumptions on all sides and what this guy was selling and i do mean selling was a false ideology and a broken method to attain something that was unattainable now in what sense do i mean unattainable i mean it's something like hot ice i think it's something like a square circle what do we mean by fluency is it attainable in six months or even let's say two years my answer is no it's completely impossible i would even make a claim that it's kind of biologically impossible if we think in evolutionary terms about the biological function of language something these polyglot youtubers avoid doing or dealing with can you memorize enough japanese to pass an exam the jlpt standardized exam in two years yes can you memorize enough chinese to pass the standardized hsk exams in two years yes but you can't have fluency right what is fluency english is my first language i can take out a newspaper right now a newspaper that was published today and i can leaf through it i can read you an article i've never seen before with no preparation no dictionary no checking my phone no walk requests i can read you aloud pieces of an article and then i can pause and i can make spontaneous commentary original commentary and i can i can turn to my girlfriend off camera and ask her her opinion and she disagrees with me in that language we can talk about it and then i can say oh well this is the next thing the article says all right i can go through a newspaper article with no preparation i've never seen before now i can talk in a meaningful way about its content i can dispute it with original vocabulary original sentence constructions made up on that spot can you do that in any language other than your mother tongue and if so how many years did it take you to get there do you think moses mccormack do you think laoshu 55 000 this famous youtube do you think he could take out a chinese newspaper and read the news in chinese and comment on it that way for yourself at home even with a language as closely related to english as german if you speak absolutely no german today you're born and raised speaking english how close do you think you could come to that standard of fluency in german in just two years if you worked your ass off if you worked so hard every day after two years do you think you could hold up a copy of today's german newspaper and sit here on youtube and do analysis and commentary in german in french these are the easiest languages if your first language is english and how does that compare to the challenge presented by chinese by japanese by some of the most difficult the most foreign languages in the world what can you really accomplish in two years or in six months and i understand that people are eager to lead a more meaningful life and they latch on to this image of a new and better life presented to them by the polyglot youtubers and they want to sign up and they say me too and there's something moving and it's childlike in its pathos okay they want to be somebody more sophisticated more cosmopolitan but are they really willing to examine what their desires are because a whole lot of these people are motivated by money fame power respect sex you think sex isn't a part of it just scroll through the titles of laoshu's videos i don't even have to add commentary on that front how many of these people are dreaming of flying away to japan where suddenly they're just so much more sexually attractive to all these japanese men or all these japanese women that they had to struggle to get a date growing up in chicago but then they fly to japan and they're the one black guy who speaks japanese and everyone wants to sleep with them you don't think that's a fantasy being very consciously and intentionally packaged and presented to the audience by laoshu you don't think there are white guys who think if they learn to speak thai and fly to thailand they learn to speak vietnamese and fly to vietnam and what for every pot there is a lid somewhere in the kitchen for some people they're thinking about going to brazil for some people it's africa but yeah when i list off those motives money fame power respect sex not necessarily in that or for a whole lot of these people it's sex it's sexuality there are women who are not too terribly good looking in this world and they look at someone like lindy botes and they think she's become famous she's become admired not because of her looks but because she has this amazing accomplishment in language learning that could be me too i could i could be the apple of every man's eye in korea if only i hit the books and learn korean this is catering to some of the baser motives in human nature and look i don't think anyone has presented this as a get rich quick scheme but it is very obvious that for many of the youtubers peddling this trade that's exactly what it is many of the people who came on the internet promising you that you could cure your acne if only you got on the same diet that i'm on right now by the way i happen to eat a vegan diet i just don't believe it's the cure for acne throw away your accutane throw away your tinctures throw away all the medical advice you've ever seen or read the cure the cure is this crazy diet you've never heard about all right a lot of those people didn't start out motivated by money they started out inspired by what they considered sincerely enough to be their own miraculous results right and that's the most pathetic part of all right there are people who are so deluded that they really think they became fluent in chinese in six months there are people who go and memorize a couple of set phrases and film themselves for youtube in a chinese restaurant saying those set memorized phrases again and again and they delude themselves and they delude their audience into thinking they're fluent that they become fluent in six months or two years or whatever it may be okay those who are deceived themselves are the most pitiable of all but this happens in successive stages okay some of them started off sincerely enough just wanting to share their miraculous results of the audience never entered their minds they'd be making money out of it but then that youtube money starts coming in and then the brand deals start coming in and then the partnerships start coming in and then you publish an ebook pay 599 to download a pdf right maybe you start getting your own line of branded products step by step what started off as sincere becomes commercialized and it's very important to recognize at step one that even when it was sincere it was complete [ __ ] the promises being made by polyglots are just as biologically impossible as me promising you that you can cure your acne with a vegan diet and you can only really appreciate that if you think about biologically what acne really is not just its appearance on the surface right and so having talked about what fluency is in operation as you might demonstrate it in a youtube video working with a newspaper let's just think for a second about what fluency means biologically okay the cavity in my skull that i use to form these complex sounds did not evolve for the purpose of human language okay the shape of our mouths just like the mouth of a wolf howling at the moon as different as that may be a wolf also has a long snout right but what we have in common is that when a wolf is a little baby is a little infant it drinks milk from its mother's breast crabs don't do this snakes don't do this right the brotherhood of mammals is that we all evolved to breastfeed and then one way or another we have to have this special structure with the shape of our lips and the roof of our mouth which is designed to form a latch for breastfeeding that is what we're evolved to do that is crucial to our survival anyone lacking that structure in a state of nature over the last several thousand years or several million years could not survive to the next generation and wolves just like humans can make the sound of the vowel oh they can say crows can't canaries can't snakes can't so on throughout the rest of the animal kingdom and we have adapted this very strange innate ability to drink milk into an ability to communicate with our own mothers that is learned while we're cradled in their arms breastfeeding we are evolved to understand one language and one language only and it takes us about 20 years to learn practicing 24 7 around the clock and that is your first language and there are many many people i'd love to know the percentage who were born and raised with english as the only language they know and they can't do what i just described as a test of fluency in their own first language they can't take out a newspaper read off the news discuss it come up with original observations right whether you think of this as a learning disability or mental disability or just a lack of fluency in your own first language right even this measure is something not everyone would pass not everyone in their years of schooling and their years spent speaking to their parents develop that high level of verbal ability that high level of language fluency even in their first language okay now if you want to take that weight of a couple million years of evolution and throw it over your shoulders and you want to start again learning the rudiments of meaning in a new language as a newborn baby does if you want to start all over again in chinese okay you have my sympathy you have my support but you're actually attempting to do something that's almost biologically impossible i've said this in a separate video it [ __ ] you up it comes at a price it comes at a terrible cost i was speaking chinese over skype the other day with a friend of my girlfriend and in the middle of a sentence i laughed from chinese into the lotion language and i haven't spoken laotian for for more than 10 years hasn't really been it's a language i learned many many years ago okay it's awful carrying with you fragments of multiple languages and trying to keep them straight and there is a cost because all those hours you're spending practicing the simplest rudiments of the language are hours that you are not spending on the more sophisticated aspects of language culture history right do you want to speak chinese or do you want to know about china do you want to know the history and politics of china perhaps the literature of china most of that reading most of that research you're going to have to do in english if english is your first language and if you spend five years just working as hard as you can hitting the books as hard as you can in chinese how much better are you going to speak chinese than the average native speaker when they're 5 years old when they're 10 years old when they're 15 years old how many years is it going to take you to catch up in your level of language ability in chinese with a lisping teenager okay and then what are all the things you didn't learn what are the things you didn't do with your life just by making that commitment to achieve fluency in one language okay i don't think it's evil for human beings to want money i don't think it's evil for human beings to want fame or sex you have to decide do you want it that way do you want it for that reason do you want to sleep with that woman or that man because they're the kind of person who would sleep with any black guy who happens to speak japanese or they would sleep with any white guy who happens to speak tai is that who you want to be is that what you want to be rewarded for this sick thrill that laoshu you know i think for the first time he really commodified this as a form of entertainment for the world this thrill of oh wow i can't believe it you're a black guy but you speak cambodian he speaks very very poor cambodian he speaks just a few parts of cambodia but nevertheless these people just have incredibly low standards for him because he's a black guy and probably also because the way he dresses and frankly if he were a white guy wearing a nice suit and he spoke cambodian people might ask oh so what did were you with the military in cambodia oh did you do humanitarian work anybody were you a christian missionary there are a lot of white guys to speak important or are you a guy who got married due cambodia it wouldn't it wouldn't be that surprising and they'd have higher expectations believe me i've been in that situation i've been in so many situations where i speak laotian and people expect me to be completely fluent in lotion they assume about lotion grandkids by now you know what i mean like oh yeah so you're one of those oh you must have been with the cia and you you've spoken for years you married no you know like i studied the language for like a year and a half or something guys like i'm not i'm not that confident in the language come on you know oh you know uh a lot of this reflects you know the bigotry of low expectations and it is bigotry pure and simple if you go to his channel and search for the words black guy and then scroll through the the channels or black man just scroll through the names of his videos think about what it is he's commodified think about what it is he's he's commercializing you know really and a lot of them make references to the the women especially being amazed or being and i've seen him give narratives about women whom he supposedly could have slept with but didn't because he was married at the time japanese women and someone who wanted to sleep with him because they were so impressed that he was a black guy who spoke if somebody wants to speak with you just because you're an exotic foreigner who memorized a few sentences a few pages of a phrase book in their language is that someone you want to sleep with is that someone you want to seduce all right we all want sex but you want sex on those terms is that who you want to be if you want to be famous if you want to make money okay if you want to be respected by others if you want to earn other people's respect okay is this the way you want to do it the problem with the whole polyglot subculture on youtube is not that it's encouraging people to study languages is not that it's encouraging people to achieve fluency it's that it's encouraging people to pursue money fame power respect sex by living a lie [Music] maybe we can we can practice