I’ve actually met a South American that spoke VERY good, solid C1 English without leaving his country. He just chats in English whenever he has a chance and thinks in English; he tries to do as much as he can in English. His accent is particularly impressive but maybe because he is a musician. His grammar is similarly great. A lot of people with good accents have been musicians, I’ve noticed. Singers, to be precise.
So it is possible to reach a C1 without leaving the country, but still pretty rare.
I’ve had this idea for a while to (someday) learn Japanese, then perfect it using a Japanese server of an MMORPG. Its not necessarily the real world, but it is indeed a world.
When I was a teenager I played a lot of World of Warcraft and I spoke over voice-chat with a few foreigners whose English was excellent despite very little travel. I remember one Chilean in particular who had never left Chile but spoke Luca level English.
Well, if you want to speak with a LOT of errors and really bad pronunciation (Spanish), then watching those videos is what that will get you. It’s as if you wanted to speak English like this:
Hellos, my nayem is X. How many years do you have? You like very much to learn the languages? Me love languages, they is great. Um…it very hard speak but try help me, study great. Speak many language.
I’m not trying to make fun of him; that is just how his Spanish sounds to knowledgeable speakers.
Benny is a legit C1 due to living about a year in Spain and other countries, Moses is around a low A2.
How would you learn by teaching things that you have yourself learned incorrectly? You would just be keeping bad habits ingrained. If I were learning English and kept on saying, “The financial crisis had many AFFECTS on many Americans, they…”, how would that help me? Or if I kept on conjugating verbs incorrectly, I would learn the wrong way. Then if I taught that to somebody else, then I’m propagating mistakes.
I am proud to say I am a native English speaker and I get “affect” and “effect” confused all the time. I used to get its and it’s messed up a lot, too. It is for reasons such as these that I keep my computer nearby when I write an essay for school.
That was just an example; I couldn’t think of anything else at that moment. You really do get them mixed up? That’s a big pet peeve of mine of native English speakers.
Well, ok…it is still not correct! Sorry, I just don’t think it is something that natives or non-natives should be getting wrong. Just my biased opinion. I have trouble with using apostrophes after “s”, for what it is worth. Persons’
Returning to the main topic: I think that yes, the media really exaggerates things to get more people to watch their shows or read their newspapers. However, it seems kind of dishonest if the person that knows X languages “fluently” doesn’t correct the media.
The media originally said that the movie theater killer (Holmes?) was a “genius”. It turned out that he was just an average PhD student that was actually doing poorly, which is much better than the average person, but he was no “genius” or Einstein.
And the Indian woman that was raped on the bus a few months ago was apparently a “medical student” when she was like a medical assistant student. (requires like an associates degree or a one year certificate, not the 11+ years of post-HS education that was implied)
Then the media will say that George Bush Jr. speaks “fluent” Spanish when he really can just read off a prepared speech given to him from native speakers who also helped him with pronunciation, not knowing what each sentence or word means.
Hmm, but it is one thing to make mistakes occasionally and another to make very basic mistakes all the time, don’t you think?
It’s understandable that he would make mistakes in language X considering he is spread so thin, but I don’t understand why he is making videos about grammar when they weren’t checked for accuracy and correctness.
I’m not criticizing him for his mistakes. I’m criticizing him for teaching wrong things about topics that he doesn’t understand and in a lesser manner for espousing a “method” when he has reached a disappointing level after 3,4 months of serious study.
The vast majority of polyglots do not have a youtube or on-line presence and one should also not discount the possibility that some youtubers may suffer from undiagnosed psychological disorders that may cause them to have an unrealistic view of their own abilities, importance or the rest of the world’s interest in their activities. A lot of the praise they receive is not genuine and is posted by people who find them amusing and wish to keep the entertainment going. I cannot believe that there are really that many people who want to see 100 videos of someone wearing crazy hats or walking around the mall?
I’ve only seen Laoshu bumbling along with basic phrases and broken sentences in his Level-Up videos. Does he have a language he can actually speak fluently?
@LFJ
Is his Mandarin ok? I mean, it was his college major. I’m assuming that it is one of his strongest languages.
And isn’t he married to a Chinese woman? I don’t know if she is a Mandarin or Cantonese speaker but they say that his Mandarin is better than his Cantonese.
@polyglot2
I actually thought that the people supporting the youtube polyglots were being serious. A lot of their fans are probably people that don’t know any foreign languages so they don’t really know if the polyglots are as good as they say they are.
I guess his Mandarin is okay, but I’d really expect more in that case! I don’t know how much he can speak on different topics or how well he’d actually survive in some places in China.
Edit:
After watching a more detailed Level Up with Mandarin, I’d say with luck he’s probably a low B1 based on the description here:
I’ve never taken any such exam so I’m not really sure of the reference, but even on basic topics of language learning he still seems to do a lot of thinking and doesn’t speak fluidly, and has increasing strain when leaving the familiar topic.
Hmm, is a low B1 what you would expect with a college major? Maybe he was distracted by all the other languages? It’s obviously a lot harder for a native English speaker to have a B1 in Mandarin than a romance language, also.
That’s kind of disappointing to hear because Asian languages are his bread and butter.
Really? When I said I’ve mostly seen him “bumbling along with basic phrases and broken sentences” in his Level Up videos, it was most often Asian languages, particularly Southeast Asian. He doesn’t seem to really know them beyond basic phrases and simple broken sentences spoken with strain.
I don’t know how his Japanese is, but if his Mandarin is supposed to be the best, I don’t think he speaks any of them really well. He probably just has a bunch of A1 and A2 languages, but that may just be what he enjoys.
My reference is only my experience though. My Mandarin has been completely self-taught and I’ve never taken the HSK or any proficiency exam, so I’m not so sure how to grade folks or even myself, but I’ve been learning it since 2001ish, started coming to China in 2007 and have been living here for over a year now and translate professionally.
Stephen Krashen mentioned how he gets “its” and “it’s” confused, and he’s Stephen Krashen.
Well, I think, natives are even more likely to get some homophones wrong than learners. For instance, den/denn and das/dass in German, from what I see on forums (even though there’s a slight difference in pronunciation of these).
That may be true because nonnative learners may have more recently paid attention to such things. However, there are a lot of natives who not only make such mistakes for being inattentive but actually no longer know the difference, if they ever paid attention in school in the first place!
I guess it is now “acceptable” to get basic things like “its/it’s” wrong but I personally still think that it is inexcusable. It’s a very basic thing in English and…ugh, I just don’t think it’s acceptable, let’s put it at that. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery.