The Polyglot Community / Conlangers / General Language Learning Autism - Attention seekers that barely speak the languages they claim, pretentious language creators, grifters shilling language learning scams and more!

[Spob]

May I ask what language it is?
I'm not sure about in China, but in parts of the world where your diaspora is, its quite possible it's surviving there and they may have classes etc (although very possibly could not be the cases too)
I think learning dead languages, and especially the languages of your ancestors, is important. You're keeping your culture alive.
If you can't find any good modern textbooks try and find some linguistic overviews on the language. I'm sure some grad student has at least written an introduction to the features and sounds. You might need to learn some linguistic terminology, but that will only help you in learning more of your language and others in the future.

I'm also ethnically Chinese and deep into this linguistics shit, and while I have relatives who speak dialects, I was only ever taught Mandarin.

To my knowledge, the only countries not argued to be part of China that really speak some form of Chinese in any major capacity would probably be Singapore, but also Malaysia.

I've heard Thailand has a pretty high number of Teochew immigrants among their large Chinese population, but apparently, Chinese Thais these days are fairly assimilated into the local populace, and just have Thai first and last names and grow up speaking Thai, making them a little more like, say, Italian Americans.

But yeah sorry to hear about that. And the resource paucity issue is definitely concerning, and something I've encountered with my own heritage dialects. I'd honestly recommend just learning Mandarin, since it's more useful (and that's what my parents forced me to study lol).

 

[Glad I couldn't help]

Updates on MattvsJapan:

The channel is still dead, but if you look at the comments on the last video, the most recent comments are from two years, so he still mods the comments or has a janny to do for him. He was last on Twitter in December 2024. Apparently, he is still working with Ken Cannon. Just recently, Matt sent an email to mailing list promoting another of Ken's course, this one promising to teach your '25% of the Japanese language ... in three days'. It also named dropped George from Japanese from Zero. George Trombly has been a Japanese teacher since the 1990's, and a series of Japanese and Korean language textbooks and some Japanese YouTube lessons to accompany them.

George found out about this email and ... he was not pleased.

 

[Becomemysoulreaver12]

I've been trying to learn japanese for a while (still at N5 so I am very retarded still), but as others have mentioned here it seems like all these grifter scammers fag always go for japanese and I am very tired of youtube recommending me those videos.
Also dont know if someone has mentioned it in the thread already, but in the japanese learning communities there is this thing where in order to reach a fully fluent level they speak japanese every day, and ONLY japanese, no matter where they live, I am sad to say that the people that form the community may be a bit mentally disturbed.

Great OP, wish the thread was a bit more active.

 

[beets4borshenko]

 

[Polychromos]

I think this guy is still way to nice. I obviously don't speak 46 languages, but it's really apparent how horrendous his pronunciation is for most of the languages. Even the ones, where people say he might have some knowledge. I don't think he knows German or Arabic at a B1 level.
I'm honestly almost amazed, how he managed to make so many different languages sound the same.
It's also very funny that he comments about European grammar being hard, while showing of languages that have equally complex grammar. Also I feel like languages that have less strict grammar are actually harder to master because the native way of speaking is way harder to grasp.
(Every mistake in this post is ironic and really funny.)

 

[Panzerfrau]

>pajeet
>people can't even say if he can speak a language or not because his accent makes him incomprehensible

Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

By the way, I'd like to see some content similar to this video (tearing down """polyglot""" scammers), but with a more focus on actual grammar and vocab analysis, not just pronunciation and accent. Any recommendations?

 

[Polychromos]

By the way, I'd like to see some content similar to this video (tearing down """polyglot""" scammers), but with a more focus on actual grammar and vocab analysis, not just pronunciation and accent. Any recommendations?

I think they don't really exist, because most of the stuff these polyglots say is really short and either constructed by another person or straight up google translate. So I guess it's not really worth it to start a community effort to expose something so obviously fake.
I think it's really sad that even the channels that try to expose the scammers, seem to have too much respect for the bigger youtubers. They are rarely explicitly named and are given way more benefit of the doubt.