Awesome Answer!
Thank you so much!
@michilini: “Anway don’t forget I’m the only one who knows the full facts. I’m the one who conducted the interview, remember?
I guarantee when this interview hits the airwaves the world of language learning will never be the same again…
Wait. And. See.”
Hahaha. Ballsy. I like it.
OK then.
“I think Michilini’s main gist is that it is very unusual for a mandarin learner to be able to speak this well. @michilini: Is that a fair characterization?”
Yes and also that people who don’t speak Chinese simply don’t get to have an opinion either way on how good his spoken Chinese is. They must humbly listen to what the experts have to say - in this case native Chinese people and Chinese speakers like me - and nod along.
@Michilini:
“Yes and also that people who don’t speak Chinese simply don’t get to have an opinion either way on how good his spoken Chinese is. They must humbly listen to what the experts have to say - in this case native Chinese people and Chinese speakers like me - and nod along.”
Yeah no. Both Peter and I can pull your language knowledge apart buddy so drop the arrogance. Here’s a hint for you: Chinese is not special and neither are you.
“Will is head and shoulders above almost all YouTubers out there in terms of his spoken fluency. Literally just go and ask any Chinese person to compare Will speaking Chinese with other popular YouTubers including the ones you mention.”
You are aware that YT videos are usually not very meaningful when it comes to assessing the language skills of non-native speakers, because
- the topics are more or less prepared, that is: the videos are often scripted
- the videos may be recorded multiple times
- the non-native speakers tell the same personal stories over and over again, and …?
etc.
In short, YT videos as assessment tools are more or less useless 
“Yeah no. Both Peter and I can pull your language knowledge apart buddy so drop the arrogance. Here’s a hint for you: Chinese is not special and neither are you.”
Didn’t mean to sound arrogant or suggest Chinese is “special”. But surely you and Peter can see that no amount of language expertise or data make you qualified to comment on a learner’s spoken profficiency in Chinese since neither of you speak Chinese. This applies to any language you don’t speak. I wouldn’t ever comment on someone’s spoken Russian abilities for example.
Can we at least agree that if you don’t speak/ understand language x then your opinion on a particular learner’s spoken proficiency is not meaningful and you should ask a native speaker or a learner who has reached some level of proficiency?
UPDATE: The full podcast interview will be published this Sunday 12:00 UK time. STAY. TUNED.
“The fact that standardised testing exists doesn’t prove its validity or usefulness in assessing language proficiency. Nice try.” (@Michilini)
My impression is that you equate language proficiency in general and oral fluency in particular with some “vague feelings”. And that’s why concrete metrics / stats, tests, and other tools to objectify these notions are useless to you.
However, after teaching more than 10k hours in various areas of practical skill acquisition (especially SLA and math, but also programming basics), I’ve come to appreciate the various ways in which quantification can be used.
At the same time, I’ve become highly skeptical of the vague and emotion-based judgments of laypeople, beginners, and intermediate learners when it comes to assessing their own skill level or the competence of advanced learners and experts. Usually they simply lack
- the theoretical knowledge of relevant concepts, methods, and theories
- the practical experience of relevant patterns, etc.
- the awareness of their own cognitive biases (Dunning-Kruger, sunk cost bias, confirmation bias, etc.).
And this means that their judgments are based on - irrelevant time units (“decades”, “years”, etc.)
- non-SMART goals (some vague oral fluency, being native-like, yada yada yada),
- hyberboles (“no one can do that!”, “you have to be a genius to be able to do that”, “that’s a revolution!”, etc.)
- non-existing stats
- non-existing training / learning journals
etc.
are often without much substance.
In contrast to this, the research on expertise and expert performance (“deliberate practice”, etc.) has shown us in recent decades that quantification can be extremely valuable in all kinds of processes of practical skills acquisition (see: https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/1316502619?asin=1107137551&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1).
Therefore, my hypothesis is that Will’s mix of established language learning approaches can be reconstructed as a feedback loop based on deliberate practice that can be measured and emulated by others.
In short, there’s absolutely nothing “mysterious”, “vague”, etc. about it.
And this means further that his proficiency level in Chinese can also be tested and quantified beyond what advanced learners of Mandarin or Chinese native speakers might “feel” (or not feel).
This guy speaks fluent chinese but spoken chinese is argueably one of the easiest parts of chinese with listening and reading and writing being far more difficult? So although chinese is a category 5 language it is only in that category because of its distantness and characters. I don’t know chinese so can’t comment on the depth of his vocab and grammatical complexity but chinese is probably the easiest hard language to speak fluently like this with the only hard part being the tones but people with musical ears seem to have a lot easier time than others. This gentleman did a great job and i’m not taking away from that but spoken arabic or japanese or korean at 1.5 years might be harder? It would be interesting to hear others take on this.
“I guarantee when this interview hits the airwaves the world of language learning will never be the same again…” (@Michilini)
“Amen”, says the skeptical optimist in me,
“and let us wait for the messianic SLA things to come”
Thanks for the interesting discussion so far!
Have a nice day everyone
Peter
The slight frustration for me in all of this is that because I can speak Chinese I can fully appreciate how rare of a level Will has managed to achieve. This is obvious to anybody who speaks Chinese. But evidently it’s not easy to demonstrate to people who don’t speak the language.
As I’ve tried to explain elsewhere proportionally few learners ever get to that level regardless of time spent. There are a handful of people online who have achieved his level of spoken fluency. The idea that achieving a high level of spoken Chinese is “easier” than other aspects of the language is completely yntrue in my experience.
The hardest part of Chinese - by which I mean the aspect which most learners struggle the most to achieve regardless of time spent on task - is achieving native like spoken fluency - including accurate and natural pronunciation, native word usage etc.
good to hear also since I have you on the phone how good is the youtuber’s chinese xiaomaonyc or whatever?
isn’t this the hardest part of every language “is achieving native like spoken fluency - including accurate and natural pronunciation, native word usage etc.”?
In spanish I have never found anyone no matter how hardcore who would decieve me as a native in 2 years and thats an easy language so I imagine this guy is making really good progress but still extremely far from a native even though his pronunciation is really good? Like expressions and word choice etc and i hear chinese has enough idioms to pop the brain lol curious to hear your evaluation of him on what he could improve on. If you wrote it in another post on this thread you can just refer me to it. I haven’t read very much of this thread (lots of posts) etc.
xiaomaonyc’s Chinese is good, he can chat away fluently have no problem being understood etc. He doesn’t seem interested in perfectionism which is completely fine. For this reason his Chinese has a strong American twang and his tones are sometimes off. His YouTube titles “White guy speaks perfect Chinese” are clearly intended in jest but since people really seem to believe it they are misleading.
On the other hand Will has already passed a point where he is approaching native sounding pronunciation. Virtually nobody ever achieves a completely native sounding accent in Chinese. Spanish is my L1 so I completely agree with you that this is also the case in Spanish. But ocassionally I will meet someone who sounds eirily close to native in Spanish (Luca Lampariello is almost there) and I think Will has achieved something like that in Mandarin.
“The hardest part of Chinese - by which I mean the aspect which most learners struggle the most to achieve regardless of time spent on task - is achieving native like spoken fluency - including accurate and natural pronunciation, native word usage etc.”
That’s hard in “any” L2 to be acquired. The vast majority of language learners aren’t able to achieve this level (esp. reg. the use of tens of thousands of collocations).
Moreover, because of the “law of diminishing returns,” it’s often not time well spent to achieve a native-like language level (i.e. beyond C2).
“This is obvious to anybody who speaks Chinese.”
Unfortunately, that’s not how the SLA games are played.
As a rule, we can state in this context that beginners and intermediate learners are never really able to adequately assess the level of advanced / native-like language learners or native speakers.
So if Will’s language level is truly “native-like”, the only ones for whom his good pronunciation and correct use of idioms and especially (tens of thousands) collocations are “obvious” are Chinese native speakers.
That’s just the unfair advantage of any native speaker in any language
However, YT vids aren’t the right tools for making such an assessment (see my comment below).
YT vids aren’t the right tools for making such an assessment
Except the YouTube video is an unscripted conversational interview conducted by a native speaker who describes him as having near native conversational Chinese. She’s an experienced language teacher and accent coach who makes videos critiquing other youtubers who claim to speak perfect chinese.
Seems pretty qualified to judge.
I agree native speakers are the best judges and that non-native speakers can’t accurately judge unless they themselves have reached a native level. However, I still think as an advanced learner there are things I can appreciate about his level that beginners or non-learners evidently can’t.
How good is xiaomaonyc’s vocab cuz he says he doesn’t really read when he met up with matt vs japan and the compound nature of chinese words makes the characters very important. If you had to give him a grade or whatever on purely vocab/grammar etc people say hes like B1/Low b2 with a specialization in conversation/nativey type sayings to impress natives etc.
Yeah Luca’s kind of cheating with native italian haha but yeah his spanish is good you would really say almost native like? I feel like he is well spoken in spanish but is just a bit off on somethings like any native could/would know hes not a native?
You learned english as a child or an adult and what other languages have you learned to high levels? I see your posts are written in english. Also do you see chinese and english being very similiar in hard pronunciaton, orthography, irregular grammar etc or is this statement off?
Re Xiaoma I don’t feel qualified to comment on his European Framework level or his vocabulary level. I also saw the video in question where he said he doesn’t read. It’s not uncommon for people who have never read a book or novel to have exceptional levels of spoken Chinese. I know several people in this category - there are other ways to acquire vocabulary.
Luca’s Spanish has improved in recent years. I remember a video 10 years ago with Steve Kaufmann where they both spoke Spanish and yeah he wasn’t near native. But in more recent videos his pronunciation is really good. But yes I agree it’s totally cheating lol.
I’m bilingual English/ Spanish from childhood. My mum is Spanish. I was raised and educated in UK, spent summers in Spain, spoke Spanish at home etc. Studied French at school. Took up Mandarin five years ago. That’s my language learning autobiography in a nutshell. You won’t have to buy a copy now 
woh woh woh wait a second. I was watching the wrong video lol in the 30 minute one he is ridiculously good this has got to raise some eyebrows lol. Like the 1.5 year thing could be a lie or exaggeration (whether intentional or not) What proof does one have to verify that he has only been studying for 1.5 years? Are we going on the honor system because thats not how science works lol. If I see a video of 14 year old benchs 550 pounds it raises some eyebrows because the way the human body works lol. Anybody have any verifcation that it was only 1.5 years?
English and Chinese grammar have almost nothing in common except some very superficial similarities, subject, object, verb etc. Chinese grammar is not at all easy to master. But it is quite easy to be able to string a sentence together and be more or less undestood. As someone once said, Chinese is easy to speak badly.
“That’s my language learning autobiography in a nutshell. You won’t have to buy a copy now ;-)” lololol. Wow quite the resume.
I was commenting on luca’s recent videos like maybe 1-2 years ago. I studied them and would repetive listen to them cuz he uses limited vocab compared to real natives etc and language learning vocab i already knew.
“It’s not uncommon for people who have never read a book or novel to have exceptional levels of spoken Chinese. I know several people in this category - there are other ways to acquire vocabulary.” This I find some fault with if we are talking native level sized vocabularies because as a native who doesn’t read I can say for sure natives who do read have much larger vocabs. But if we are talking language learner impressive vocabularies than I would say maybe reading isn’t necessary to be the most eloquant speaker but the real speakers are the readers with all the adjectives/adverbs that are seldom used in speech.