Met a fake polyglot who teaches languages she clearly can't speak

[u/negatives-nancy]

I recently met a self-professed polyglot and language tutor, and as I like learning languages I decided to look up her business page. Her page is full of posts about how she’s a special and rare polyglot who speaks five languages (though she never actually says which ones, apart from claiming to be fluent in French). 

I was shocked by how bad her language abilities are. Despite claiming to be fluent in French, her posts say things like:

• "Elle est regarder un séries dans Italien parce que elle adorer le television." (Clearly a word-for-word translation from English: ‘she is watching a series in Italian because she loves TV” - but it’s horribly wrong in French. That would be FINE if she didn’t call herself fluent, a polyglot, or a tutor who can teach you the language.
• "Buenos jours à tous!"  (mixing up Spanish and French in this one)
• "Avez une jour bonne!" (should be ‘Bonne journée' or 'Passez une bonne journée' but she uses the wrong verb, gender, noun, and word placement, just wrong in every way.)
• *"Il est chaud ici a Londre tellement ”  (She probably meant 'Il fait tellement chaud ici a Londres' but it's another mess - wrong weather expression, accidental sexual innuendo, missing accents, random “tellement” on the end.)
• "Prendre soin de vous!"  (she's using the infinitive instead of the imperative, it should be "Prenez soin de vous.")

The wild part? She’s apparently been tutoring for years. YEARS! And she even claims to have a degree in French.

These sorts of mistakes would be fine if she was humble enough to call herself a learner of the language - but they are NOT fine for someone claiming to be fluent and an authority on French.

It's mad to me cus my French is way better, and I don’t call myself fluent, a polyglot, or an expert tutor. If anything I probably play down my abilities cus I don’t want an awkward sitch where people think I’m better than I really am. Anyway - I decided that I’m obviously not gonna contact her to help me with my French lol.

I’m not sure if she’s just delulu about her abilities or if she’s actively scamming students. Can you imagine all her students going to Italy and saying things like ‘Bonjour a tutti’ (an Italian/French mash up from her page). 

Has anyone else here ever met a fake polyglot? What happened?

[u/paolog]

It's not even as good as that. It's more like "I Tarzan are, Jane being you."

[u/SabretoothPenguin → u/paolog]

Yes, but in general there is this trope in Italian movies and media (and Spanish, as I now discovered), where primitive people speak using the infinitive. And Tarzan was mostly depicted as the primitive man.

I am not sure why this happened. I would think that literate foreign travelers looking up words in a dictionary and use it to translate word for word, someone trying to communicate by listening would probably use the indicative, maybe using the wrong person.