Exposing fake polyglots: Warning signs and red flags

Conmen, hucksters, and charlatans are trying to separate you from your money, and in this video I expose (more) ways to spot a fraud.

#language #languagelearning #polyglot #hyperpolyglot #languages

[tigerlagayan]

i mixed up “waffen” and “waffeln” when I met some Germans years ago and now I’m the American who told them I eat guns for breakfast

[red]

I shocked locals with this one trick: I learnt Japanese for 20 years.

[malvoliosf]

In Vietnamese, I tried to ask for hot water, and instead requested “male fluids”.

[IRanOutOfPhrases]

Mistranslation story:

I went to Japan with my wife. We don't know Japanese. We went into a pop-up sake bar. No english menus. The guy running it also didn't know any English. Regardless, he was super friendly towards us. I was able to use my phone to mostly translate the hand-written menu to order food, and then we blindly picked various sakes, because even if we could read, it would have meant absolutely nothing. We hit that place three times total since it was literally next door to our hotel and the guy was awesome (would hook us up with free food too, which was great, lol)

We would sometimes type messages in our phone and use google to translate so we could converse a bit more on a very superficial level. Nothing deep just some basic "how long has this bar been open?" and "how long are you staying in town?" type messages. At one point, my wife and I were having our own conversation and he shows us a message:

"Is there any hope?"

I froze, lol. The good news is, my most immediate response was, "Uh.... Yes?" But I was stuck staring at it for a bit trying to figure out what was up. There's no way this dude was trying to engage in me a deep, philosophical discussion out of the blue.

I think the confusion on my face led him to realize that something got lost in the translation. The follow-up message was,
"Is there any request?" as in, did we need anything else in the moment.

Language is a fickle thing, lol

[MathAdam]

I witnessed a lawyer telling a roomful of Mexicans that he was an avocado. We never let him forget it.

[bookreviewsfromareadingmac]

In Hebrew, I accidentally told someone that I was going to be late because I committed suicide. I was trying to say that I had gotten lost.

[katipunanball]

You forgot the most important function of Akkadian, writing complaints to your copper supplier about his terrible customer service and broken promises on the copper deliveries.

[firstcanonkill]

I mixed up にんじん/ninjin (carrot) and 人間/ningen (human) and accidentally exclaimed to my friend “I used to grow humans and trade them for other produce.” He nearly cried laughing.

[malvoliosf]

Not really a linguistic error so much as a brain fart, but once tried to fend off a Korean evangelist by telling her 나는 유대인이다 naneun yudaein-ida “I am Jewish”, but misspoke and said 나는 예수다 naneun yesuda “I am Jesus Christ.”

Anyway, it worked.

[TheKlopka]

It's not a single event, but my Japanese friends kept saying I spoke like a yakuza. I thought I was sounding badass...no, they were trying to say I'm being rude and should be more polite

[zephlodwick]

The man who was confirmed to speak the most languages was a Canadian man who had to pass an hour-long test with a native speaker to be considered fluent. He spoke 42 languages and worked as a court bailiff.

[sunliya]

I once short-circuited in my first-year Mandarin Chinese class in college. English is my first language and I've studied Spanish since I was young. I wanted to say, "We don't know, " but instead of saying, "Wǒmen bù zhīdào, " I said, "Wǒmen bù zhīdamos." My brain decided to conjugate the Chinese verb as if it were Spanish. The best part is that Chinese verbs don't even conjugate.

[spman]

I spent two years living in Japan. I studied daily. I spent well over a thousand hours studying. I call my Japanese "conversational" and I am being exceptionally generous. When I hear people claiming you can learn a language in some tiny amount of time it gives me eye spasms.

[щосьдивне]

I remembered seeing a tiktok video from a famous "hyperpolyglot" where he said he would pay 15$ (can't remember the exact number) to someone whose language he couldn't guess. There was a girl whose language he couldn't guess, and when she said what it was, he started "speaking in that language" to prove that he knew it. As a result, he did not pay her and put it on tik tok anyway
And, to be honest, I'm tired of videos where he "speaks ukrainian", but in reality it's russian with a strange accent so that nothing is understood

[realbland]

"i will never accept a sponsor from better help" language jones i love you

[Nero_Karel]

Not my own experience, but my Dutch tutor in uni once told us how he'd answered a Dutch store clerk who asked him if he needed any help "Nee bedankt, ik kom alleen klaar." Didn't sound too wild to us at first because "Ich komm allein klar" in German just means "I can manage fine on my own" but in Dutch it's "I'm reaching orgasm alone"

[valentinaaugustina]

should i become the first woman polyglot scammer? hashtag feminism or sth

[miscellaneousfarrugia]

I’ve been annoyed by this sort of thing since I saw a “TWO POLYGLOTS MEETING!!!” video which consisted of them cycling through languages saying “Do you speak [language]?” “Yes, a bit!” so great to hear a professional backing up my irritation.

[Huehuecoyote]

I live in Amsterdam and I already met a relatively famous fake polyglot a few times at the street.
He used to post videos like "I will give you 5 bucks if I don't speak your language". Clearly he was only able to speak a few random words, so people caught on to that and started exposing the guy.
Now his videos are more like "I will give you 5 bucks if I cannot recognise your language".
Way less impressive, way less expensive.

[stvjful]

I was warned against the false friend “préservatifs” in French, and yet still managed to ask an older teacher in the school if she added condoms to her homemade jam…