The Linguist's Guide to Mastering ANY Language in 2025

Starting off 2025 with a video that will hopefully motivate you to keep studying that language! If it's Mandarin or Korean, you're going to get a HUGE head start with this video.

The 3 things to mastering any language:
1. Structuring the Syntax
2. Mastering the Morphology
3. Winning the Writing System & Phonetics

Chapters:
1. Syntax Intro: 1:05
- Syntax - Chinese: 1:20
- Syntax - Korean: 4:50
2. Morphology Intro: 9:05
- Morphology - Chinese: 9:34
- Morphology - Korean: 13:24
3. Writing System & Phonetics: 17:50

Please let me know if you liked this video, and what you'd like to see in the future!

XOXO
Julesy

[francisnopantses]

Jules, Here's the funny story of how the Japanese writing system helped teach me some Czech. I was in Prague with some Czech friends. They tried to teach me to say the Czech name of the town "Praha", but it was not going well. I am L1 American English with that weird back of throat r. I had studied German and French and Japanese but no Slavic languages. Ger and Fr have a back of throat r too (both different from English though). We were walking by a tourist shop selling guides in various languages and there was one in Japanese. For fun I sounded out the katakana: PORAHA. "That's it, that's it!" they yelled. I was confused, I had been amusing myself. "Say what you just said again!" "Poraha?" I asked. See, it turns out the r in Praha is a flap or tap very similar to the Japanese r (which I would liken to English d), but I had all along been trying to use an English r to sound it out and it had been coming off all wrong to them. So yeah, Roman letters got in my way, Japanese kana did the trick!

[yuenatv]

i learnt so much from this video, especially when you broke down chinese morphology. Also since I’m dabbling in Korean too, your grammar breakdowns were perfect!! thank you :))

[betchaos]

Thank you for explaining the topic and subject markers, i kept seeing things like (+topic) and (+subject) in learning recourses with 0 explanation as to what it meant, glad to find its not that complicated

[im_jacobf]

This video was awesome! I am not a linguist or anything, but I've always thought that if I wasn't in my current career I would likely have gone to school for linguistics with a specialty in Asian languages. I know Japanese and I am learning Mandarin and Korean, and Japanese is very similar to Korean in how they also modify their verbs to express all of the different situations like you mentioned.

Korean and Japanese are quite interesting as languages since they do not share a common ancestral language, yet they share a lot in common grammatically (likely due to how close they are and how much natural back and forth they've had throughout history). They also have a lot of vocabulary that is close due to the influence that Chinese had on both languages.

A useful example to see one word that went from Chinese -> Korean and Japanese that are very similar:
运动 - yun4dong4 - exercise
운동 - un dong - exercise
運動 - un dou - exercise

Pretty cool stuff! Also, the traditional form of 运动 is written with the exact same characters as the Japanese word: 運動. Can talk for a long time about the differences and similarities between simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, and Japanese kanji though so won't digress about it here :D

[kareninthevalley]

Right now I'm participating in a Korean language zoom which is mostly beginners &class leaders who were learners, and it's really helping me see how hard it is for people who've never learned another language. I took Spanish from 8th grade (1977) to junior year in college (1984) and i never learned how to dialogue because of my shyness and stage fright, but i learned a lot about reading it. I love Hangul because it makes sense to me, and i agree with you about focusing on it for a long time. It takes time for it to "click" unless one is some sort of talent or genius. But that moment makes everything else easier! The biggest block for me in any language is knowing the terminology for verb tenses and conjugations before learning how to apply them. They never clicked for me in English as a tool/method, I simply absorbed their uses from my environment. I wonder how often it's a stumbling block for other learners (if you'd commenjt on this I'm interested in your insight.) In this age of internet, it's easier to learn that aspect of korean by absorption of others speaking it. p.s. I love linguists, and some of my favorite reads growing up were alternative societies (SF & fantasy) with either linguist heroes (Lewis) or non-natives having to learn a language (Tepper) or even the invention of secret language (Haden Elgin.) Also probably a good influence on my being able to grasp the basics pf Korean.

[ΣοφίαΣαραντίδου-μχ]

Great video! Could you maybe do a video in the future about the r sound in Mandarin? I'm really confused, because sometimes I hear it closer to an [ɹ] and other times closer to a [ʐ]. Is it an allophone?

[rauschma]

What helped me tremendously with pronouncing Mandarin were videos that had diagrams of the mouth with tongue positions: Once you know that for some consonants, the tongue goes up (sh, ch, zh, etc.) and for some consonants, the tongue goes down (x, q, j, etc.), the pronunciation is relatively easy (vs., say, the Spanish R which took me ages to get – somewhat – right). But I would not have figured it out by only listening to native speakers.

[hanna]

Love your videos, you're sharing so many helpful things. thank you!

[karinakatr]

Please make more Korean content i think it’s really helpful and I genuinely enjoy your Korean videos cause I’m trying to learn it!!🫶🏻

[vaniar.]

I understood you live in Korea from that little thing at the bottom of the door that keeps it open. Saw it in korea, friends noticed that i liked it and gave me one from home!

[Abyss-tkow]

I'm always inspired to learn a new language ik 4 languages fluently TYSM for sharing

[mlsterlous]

I'm glad to learn that the last Chinese character is an important one, especially after studying the language for 4 months. Somehow, nobody mentioned that to me until now :) (though I did suspect it).

[francisnopantses]

Literary classical Latin also preferred the verb at the end and syntax specialists believe from that and from ancient Greek and Sanskrit evidence that Proto-Indo-European was also verb final. What do you think of that? This can also explain some weirdness and inconsistencies in the modern dialects between how they implement SVO. (And romance languages often still use SOV with pronouns, eg: Je t'aime.)

[francisnopantses]

It's interesting to see how happy and excited you get describing grammar. 😊

[SkincarewithAliKhalid]

We can learn grammar easily naturally by listening more

[j]

5:02 "[SOV] makes it very unique": SOV the most common word order cross-linguistically
5:07 "German": German is fundamentally V2; some clauses appear as SOV but I think it's not right to say German is SOV.

[joehelmick]

Also, Chinese morphology in which there is no subject-verb agreement, no verb inflection, and no tense is actually very simple and easy to understan. Julesy, why do you find that aspect of Chinese difficult to understand?

[milamonster]

I think you did an excellent overview. I am learning Korean ( and Spanish, I’m a native English speaker ) and I get overwhelmed by the amount of verb endings and how specific they can be and often confuse them. If you have time can you do a video on comprehensible input recommendations ? Particularly for Korean ?

[PeebeesPet]

English does have topic/comment structures. They're just not common.
Eg. In the library there are many books.

[nybble]

Everyone: hangul is very consistent!
Me, trying to understand some part in a phrase for 10 minutes, giving up, letting google translate to listen to it, only to discover that I actually know those words, but they were affected by EACH OTHER to the point of being utterly unrecognizable: 🤯