Watch Kevin Speak 23 Languages and Hear His Tips!
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- čas přidán 27. 05. 2017
- Another fantastic interview for everyone today! I'm talking with Kevin Fei Sun, an incredible genuine polyglot who speaks 7 languages fluently (English, Serbian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and very, very impressive Mandarin and Russian, two of the world’s most difficult languages) but has studied and is moderately conversational in many more - he speaks a whopping 23 languages in this video. This is a long one, folks, the longest video I’ve ever made but there’s some really fantastic tips in here for all you aspiring polyglots out there!
For those of you who would just like to skip directly to the parts you’re most interested in:
0:47 Kevin speaks 23 languages!
6:44 Biggest misconceptions about language learning
8:11 How does Kevin start learning a new language
11:12 What’s Kevin’s process for building up to fluency in a new language
17:00 How does Kevin maintain all the languages he’s learned
Here's a link to the polyglot meetup we talked about:
mundolingo.org/
Thanks for visiting Ari in Beijing! I've honed my Mandarin Chinese to near native-level fluency through a variety of tips and tricks that I share with you each week. So whether you're studying Mandarin, Cantonese, English, another language, or are simply interested in language in general, please SUBSCRIBE and stick around for a while!
/ ariinbeijing
Man that's pretty good going. Usually these "polyglots" are quite gimmicky but he seems to have a pretty good pronunciation and grasp of most of these languages. And yes, דקדוק is grammar :) "אבל אי אפשר להגיד "הרבה דומה" אלא "דומה מאוד
xinxian kongqi yeah this guy is super genuine, I can confirm his Mandarin is incredible, I can tell his Farsi's legit too and his Hebrew, the others I can't say for sure but they certainly sound right!
ariinbeijing Do you speak Farsi? Any tips on where to find good learning materials? Or did you take classes?
His Turkish was also correct, although it was only one sentence. The Uzbek sounded plausible, but I only speak some Turkish so can't say if it was 100% accurate. The Spanish sounded really pretty good.
xinxian kongqi I don't, I'm just somewhat familiar with it because I grew up around a lot of Iranians
eh, his japanese pronunciation was very... gaijin
that being said, i'm not much better and i'm sure mine would be worse if i spent my time learning 20+ languages
also he said "i'm studying japanese too but i don't think i'm very skilled", or tried to, so he gets a pass
I'm Indian and he speaks better Hindi than me.
Most people do.
ari - fangirling when he started speaking all of the languages!xD
Tapiboba I think I need a new pair of pants
He seems like a genuine expert. I can understand French and Hindi , and he was very proficient in both of them.
I was born and raised in Switzerland among Russian and Serbian immigrants (congregating in the Orthodox Church). I am not too bad at languages and was always interested in different cultures. I was growing up speaking the Swiss German Dialect, High German, Russian, Serbian, French and Italian. My Russian is as it was spoken a hundred years ago by our immigrants who fled during the revolution and spread throughout the world (even China, especially Harbin and Shang Hai). Some children of the immigrants were less interested in keeping the language and cultivating it, however I was, and eagerly read our classics, especially Gogol.(being encouraged and helped by our elders). BUT, and that is the point I want to make, you have to be interested and love different cultures. If you want to learn Russian, Chinese or whatever language you must love the people and their culture, only then will you make an effort and enjoy learning it.
You two boys have a special talent for languages, probably a very keen musical ear and photographic memory which are very helpful in learning to imitate the sounds of a language and memorize grammar and vocabulary. Not everyone can do what you do!
I do have a pretty good ear, but I lack memory and
have to repeat things many times in order to retain them, which makes learning more difficult. So called "destiny" brought me to live in The U S where I also attended Greek and Rumanian Churches and studied the language of those Communities, (hanging out with the other old people in Church )
Greek was easy because I had ancient Greek in school and modern Greek is very simple in comparison. For some reason I had a hard time with Rumanian, although it is a latin language with many loan words from Slavic languages and Greek. The verbs and generally the grammar are as difficult as in all other latin languages. (The Services of the Orthodox Church which I know by heart in Church Slavonic and are the same in the Greek and Rumanian Church ( the original text was in Greek) helped me a lot).Now I am pretty fluent in Greek and Rumanian, but not that good in English
and still have a heavy accent, no matter how hard I try, i still sound like Bela Lugosi (that's what some Americans have told me.)
I knew many Russians from China. The rector of the Russian Cathedral in San Francisco was a Chinese convert, Fr. Iliya Wen, born in 1896, reposed in 2007, at a 110 years. Most Russians had great memories of China and related many experiences to me which awoke my interest in the people and culture a long time ago, but I didn't have the time to study the language then. Now, that I am old, I do, and began studying Chinese four years ago. ( also to exercise the brain and keep Alzheimer's at bay). The prononciation is no problem for me ( the Chinese at the restaurants understand everything I say, lol) however,
memorizing the characters and vocabulary is hard, but that is good, the brain has to work!
You two boys are pretty good at lingos, congrats! puno vam zdravlja, uspeha i srece u zivotu! (uveren sam da me razumete, pa ne treba vam prevod)
.
WOW!!! His code switching is on point!!! I just did my first multi-language video and it was sooo hard to do more than just a couple in one day but it's sooo fun! I have a LONG ways to go in all of the languages.
Though my favorite thing is learning alphabets!!
Although his pronunciation was a bit off, his urdu and Arabic was outstanding. From what I understood of his Spanish, it was amazing. Imagine all these other languages! OUTSTANDING!
Truth Is truth yea his Spanish was perfect
Can confirm his russian is good
I speak 5 languages and he speak 23. HOLY COW BATMAN!!!!
5 is a still a lot!!!!!
bruh i speak 4 dude :(
i speak 1 currently but i'm learning 2 others
I think what would've been great is to have captions to understand what he was saying in the languages he was speaking in the beggining but always something very inspiring to become or close to
Chameleon2898 don't you understand all these languages?;)
Jannis Adamek lol 😂😂 nah I certainly wished I did but that's what the captions would be for lol
He was speaking of learning one language after another.
Hi Kevin! He’s my friend lol. By the way I agree with his suggestion. I also like to go over the grammar rules of the language and get the big picture before building vocabulary and getting fluent
Impressive! Simply impressive! Obviously he hasn't a super high level in all these languages, but it's still remarkable to see him able to speak fluently in all of them! More Kevin!!
I am Romanian and i can say he had pretty good accent if he did not stop to think the words and make a pause in between it would be just like any Native.
I totally agree with learning about the grammatical structure. It makes the language not such a mystery. I don't have a degree in Linguistics, but I started learning about it so that I can be more effective with my language learning
When he started speaking Polish my mouth dropped 😂
SAME
But obviously it wasn’t perfect, because it’s a hard ass language
@@proudpole4819 no shit sherlock
@@jammyyammyy proszę się uspokoić
his Hindi is incredible!!!
I always come back to this video, Kevin is such an interesting polyglot.
I m so happy that u learned Uzbek after that u can learn uyghur , Tatar and Azeri, Turkmen and Turkish. Uzbek leads you to 10 more Turkic languages . Your Arabic , Farsi , Hindi and French will help also . Thx you for sharing .
Continue to do these types of videos! They are great and I love the content keep up the work
I've always loved languages, and learn a smattering here and there. I'm thrilled to have found your channel! The tip about the materials on grammatical structure/description was awesome. I think I tend to learn kind of backwards-from "big picture" to details, so I have a new tool to try.
Thank you both very much for this! very informative.
Very interesting! Appreciate it! Thank you.
Your channel is fantastic bro. Now, this guy... out of this world!
2:42 turkish was good " i can speak a lil Turkish because?????" XD
Standing ovation for this guy.
He did pretty well in the couple languages that I understood.
I’m actually impressed. It’s. Not like he did portugués, French, Spanish, and Italian and is like I speak 4 languages which is true). He did so many languages that are not even remotely similar! Arabic, Hindi, chinese Mandarin, wow.
Great video....love the way Kevin says half way through "erm...where shall I go now..." - so mnay languages he doesn't know which to do next :))
The audio is really low in this video. Hard to hear even with youtube and my mac turned all the way up.
Hey mate, I'm here again practising my listening skills. hahha great video thanks
wow... as a Lebanese his Arabic is pretty great and his French accent is on point !!
Your content is actually good, but the audio volume is pretty low. I set my computer's to the maximum and still could barely hear what you guys were saying. Kind of an important issue in a languages channel, right? :P
this is awesome! The only ones I speak are English, Turkish, Spanish, and a tiny tiny bit of German, Italian, and French (bc I’m an opera singer). Kevin I wanted to know why you can speak a little bit of Turkish! left us hanging on “çünkü...” 😂 but props to you for learning! it’s my first language so I wouldn’t know but a lot of people who are learning it say it’s tricky!
also either Uzbek is very similar to Turkish (and I should maybe try to learn it!) or the Turkish part went on just a little bit longer than was listed?
Insane changes in the way you see langs from these videos and the new ones. Now you´re a polyglot yourself, congrats! 加油，积少成多！
Hi 小码，just wanted to let you know I love the channel. Hope you can get even more subscribers soon! I've been studying mandarin in college for 2 years now and I'm interested in Cantonese as well. Any recommendations for good texts and resources?
Just saw that u had a playlist on it. Will look now haha.
His French is incredible!
Wooow this is so motivating omg
I am wondering how you would do with signed languages? I would think you both would pick it up pretty quickly! Love to see a video for this!
wish you had a better mic for this. still an awesome video though. thanks for the upload!
Impressive! wow :D inspiring. Could you please put on some subtitles?
Amazing achievement!
please tell us your routine to learn a new language please like what are the steps please do a video of that please man
DUDE, YES, THE ALPHABET THING! :D FINALLY SOMEONE errr, more reputable or so, SAID IT! AHHHHH! *THANK YOU!*
Great video! Pump up the volume though.
omg tell him to watch Thai T.V series and movies...especially comedies because humour is an effective way to learn a language. Love your channel by the way keep it up
Gostei de ouvi-lo falar português. Ele falou bem, por sinal. I liked listen to him speaking português, my language. He speaks well.
I'm so jealous of your Arabic!! 😃
Who when studying and learning an languange, what should I learn first in spanish, I already know the alphabet and how the pronunciation works, but what about vocabulary and grammer? And for vocabulary, should I learn just single words or full basic sentences to get more vocabulary that way?
Greetings from Brazil !!!
I can vouch for the ones I speak: German, Portuguese (native language), Spanish and Japanese! I understand some French and Italian too and that sounded good! Nice!
This guy is incredible! His english is as good as any I've heard. if I close my eyes & listen I would think he was native
Your English is very poor.
Very impressive and inspirational! Thanks for sharing!
Mandarin was indeed on point - I suppose hes familar with Shanghainese as well!
Frederik Rasmussen you know he does also speak Shanghainese, but he forgot to record for this interview unfortunately
ah too bad. Im looking forward to that as im just getting into that (cute) dialect. Cheers.
I didnt' believe him until I heard him talk Arabic. Excellent
Woah is it just me or did his Ablanian sound like the language that Sims speak? Probably just me
i was a bit surprised when he spoke in Bahasa Indonesia. He spoke pretty good but it's just the pronunciation that he needs to improve. but on top of that i'm so inspired by this video
Hey can u please do a video on tips for learning more than 1 language I am learning Arabic and French. I speak English & Spanish thx :)
His Hind sounds really good :)
Wow! How does he not confuse words and phrases in his mind?!?
His Bahasa Indonesia and Hindu is passable. I won't judge his Chinese coz. he's Chinese. (I speak Cantonese, English, Bahasa Malaysia and do understand basic Tamil, and basic Japanese and Korean since I took some classes when my friends needed someone to practice with in school). Most of it sometimes forgotten but sometimes recall back. Overall he's pretty good.
My neighbors from Germany (they are in their mid 60's), the husband was invited as a consultant for an Oil & Gas firm. The husband speaks English with thick accent but the wife doesn't speak English and it was their first time staying in South East Asia for over a year (3 years contract). Anyway the wife decided to self learn the local languages & in less than 3 months she learned Bahasa easily and a bit of Tamil. She find that English was the hardest. I noticed that German words/pronounce words pretty similar to Bahasa. Because she learned Bahasa and watched local Hong Kong TV shows with Bahasa Malaysia subtitles, she picked up Cantonese. (LOL)
I do agree with you about social interaction. She shared that she goes to the market (wet market) on purpose daily &
initially she tried talked to random neighbors (many of my neighbors in my apartment are actually non-locals) so she ended up a bit confused & she bought a lot of tapes, books on languages but it was a bit "boring/static". So her crash course was from the market since majority of the folks there are talkative, she gets to learn about fruits, veges, herbs, food which are visually exciting with the smell (so that's her "flashcard"). So less thn 3 months - for a late 60s lady. Now this was back when there's Internet/CZcams ain't big on language sharing and apps. Like what your friend (Jien/Jewish Chinese guy) said, regardless of age, humans can learn new languages.
When I go to the local Japanese Foundation library near my place at Kuala Lumpur, there are a lot of Japanese senior citizens. I'm talking about those over 80s and they would purposely group together to study English and even programming language/computer. It's one of the best way to exercise the brain/memory.
C'est vraiment impressionnant !😱
great video great job both of you and the only language I understood was Arabic cuz I'm from Egypt very well done it was good . I wanted to ask what kind of jobs available for someone how speak many languages except for translation .thank you again for the videos their so interesting I'm so glad I fond you and subscribed to you 💜💜✌
Rewandahazem hasan Glad you liked it! Unfortunately not too many jobs are available specifically to hyperpolyglots, but languages open worlds man -- I'm getting a huge channel in China right now because I speak Mandarin for example
ariinbeijing thanks for replying .please consider doing a video of the steps of learning a new language . I love your channel very much keep up the good work 💜✌
Rewandahazem hasan this is a great idea. I'll put it on the roadmap!
For this alsom video am subscribing
Out of the 6 languages I speak loool I must say I was the most impressed with his Urdu (mother tongue) and Dutch (native language) it sounded very natural 👁✨👁
.... how? I speak a little Italian and Mandarin, yet I am always confusing those two languages, mixing words from one or the other where I don't mean to. I can barely manage those two, I can't imagine juggling 23 damn languages...
I tend to mix up French and Spanish
@@fryloc359 exactly
I speak Swedish, english and a tiny bit of spanish. I mix up swedish and english all the time, they are similar in many ways but yet so different.
I speak Serbian and English and can understand almost fully Japanese and a little bit of Dutch as well
I never confuse them but I often while talking in Serbian say some word on English and Japanese hoping people will understand what I want to say but since almost all people except my bestie are monolingual they give me some kind of "😑 are you serious" look
Who has this type of patience and time to learn all of this?!?! Lol whoa!!
Wow! I UNDERSTOOD YOUR ARABIC!
Hey ari! Im curious, are you willing to learn another language? I personally am on my way to become trilingual ^^ (French, English, German)
ReMiXmOaR you know I've thought about it, but I'm honestly too busy at the moment with CZcams, my day job, and increasingly my China channel which has been just exploding -- plus for me I can always go deeper into Mandarin. Depth over breadth!
I bet you didn't know that Ari and Kevin share a birthday! (July 20th!) Happy Birthday to them both! :)
脱帽している man Woow😍😍... though I was waiting for the Ancient Egyptian😂
English, Spanish, German, Some Russian here and Just finished my Chinese Course. He struggled with a few of his languages. Nice 👍🏿 Job though.
More video with kevin Ari ❤❤
I love languages, but for some reason Slavic ones have just never tickled my fancy, which is why I only speak Germanic and Romance languages and some Chinese
Bro u are wrong ,Hindi is heavily loaded with Sanskrit not Farsi.Urdu contain Farsi and Arabic.
Aqeeb Khan,no one in india and pakistan speak pure hindi/urdu
Where is he from? I mean what is his native language?
Amazing skills in these languages. But honestly I'm having a hard time getting a clear picture of how he actually studies prior to a level where he can understand and speak moderately well already.
It's hard to gauge how often and for how long he usually speaks at any given stage in his learning. And I didn't hear him say that he spends much time doing the sort of things other polyglots mention, like tons of reading, narrating own life out loud, etc.
It seems like to reach his level in so many languages he'd have to be learning languages full time and speaking with native speakers for many hours every single day. And even then I don't understand what he really does after just initially reading about the grammar. Tons of people get textbooks on a language but never make any meaningful progress, so he's clearly doing something else that is super effective.
He actually doesn't spend that much time, plus he never actually said he could speak all these languages he only really claims to be fluent in Russian in a few others. Go follow his blog he explains how he learns his languages there
9:47 That is indeed very frustrating.
You're Farsi is amazing! You should definitely travel to Iran! It would be a shame not too! Hopefully when travel is safe again ☺️
His French is 💎
o god he is a genius!
My head hurts 😳
Omg ur Persian (Farsi)Accent is AESOME
Your french is very good!
His dutch was a little weird, but understandable.
the "oo" and "oe" sounds were more like œ or ö
Your is swahili is on point.
Wow your Hebrew was pretty good!
His Portuguese was very good
His Portuguese is pretty good though
DAMN!!!!
even though this guy know all these languages, which is very impressive, he stlll uses the word "like" a lot in his descriptions . .
He sounds American so that explains that lol
Wonderful video ruined by bad audio..☹️
Turkish and Uzbek is alsa good
why no shanghainess
It's definitely impressive 👏 but saying a few word s in a language doesn't mean that you actually speak I those languages 🤣 he said in Romanian that he can't really speak it, his pronunciation was perfect though. I speak 5 languages myself and I know what I'm talking about. Unless you can have an actual full conversation or at least describe your entire day in a specific language, you shouldn't say that you speak it. My opinion!
But respect to you guys👌
Hmm ... still no Norwegian. Is Norwegian so unpopular? Or is it not challenging enough to learn for "polyglots"? - Other than that a very inspiring and motivating video!
The polyglot crowd does tend to lend itself to those that almost uniformly learn Romance Languages + Mandarin + Dutch + Russian, give or take. As a friend of Kevin's (whom you might remember from the other video) I'm grateful that I have friends like him that go well beyond the predictable (while lending themselves to these languages as well). Norwegian is actually my favorite European language! I think that the hive-mind discourages the "think different mentality" -- yes, even within the polyglot sphere! Besides, with the exception of Dutch, a lot of languages of places where English is commonly spoken tend to get overlooked. Anyone who knows the translation industry well knows that the way to go is with less-commonly-spoken languages! :) And Norwegian is more popular than you may give it credit for!
Hey Jared! OK, my English skills are probably not good enough to fully comprehend what you're trying to explain to me here I'm afraid. But I roughly understand, that Norwegian is more popular than I think, and that it tends to get overlooked because it is not far enough "beyond the predictable" as you put it. Is that what you're sayin'?
Sure I remember you from the other video! You have very impressive language skills as well, man! I find you have a very calm and pleasant persona around you (if that makes sense :)). I even started to whatch the video Ari was talking about here, but unfortunately it was too quiet for me to watch to the end.
Norwegian is also one of my favorite languages as well (that's why I was slightly disappointed not to hear it from Kevin ;)). Not only because it's so easy to learn. Its "melody" or modulation if you will is quite unique in Scandinavia. But I already forgot the most of it :(. Ha det! - Sebastian
Yet again, the way Norwegian is spoken in Oslo is certainly different than the way it is spoken in Bergen or Kautokeino. You're completely right about what I said! Also, don't worry about not understanding me, my writing (and speaking) style can be so dense that even a lot of Americans have trouble understanding me!
Yes of course there are a lot of differences inside Noway. There's that thing between Nynorsk and Bokmal, the different ways the R is pronunced, regional accents and so forth. But all in all it's more melodious than Swedish for example. I don't know how else to put it, but maybe you know what I mean.
это вы в США?
I was so shocked see him speaking in Haitian Creole I’m really impressed as Haitian🇭🇹
Creole li vreman bon
I've never seen anybody saying "like" or "it's like" such many times.
Je Nederlands is goed
Viva chile
Well i am turkish and the thing he said in video in turkish is just ''i can speak turkish''. if its ok to count the languages that we can speak even a little than probably i can speak 20 languages too
His Russian is very good for a foreigner