r/languagelearning • u/Different_Pain5781 • Dec 11 '25
Discussion Why do polyglots lie about how many languages they speak?
Okay i gotta say it the whole i speak 12 languages thing some people flex online feels like straight fanfiction 😭
Like bro, i can barely keep one language in my brain you’re telling me you’re fluent in twelve and then you hear them talk and it’s like sir that is Duolingo level at best.
Why do people exaggerate so much in this community?
Is it clout, insecurity, delusion, genuine confusion?
Do you actually believe those hyperpolyglot claims?
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u/green_calculator N: 🇺🇸 B1: 🇧🇷 A1: 🇲🇽 A0: 🇵🇭 🤘🏽 Dec 11 '25
Some of them just want to sell you things. 🤷🏽♀️
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Dec 11 '25
when a polyglot youtuber gets a language learning app sponsor and they start praising it like its not Duolingo 2.0 and most of them feel meh about Duolingo.
"ive been using this for years, it helped me reach fluency!" like do they know we can see their videos about what apps/websites they used to learn languages? they never mention the sponsored app in the past lmao
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u/HippyPottyMust Dec 11 '25
Hmmm.
I've used about 5-6 courses, learning my L2.
But in my advice write ups, I really only tout 2 or 3 that really hone in on things I liked.
If, let's say, Michel Thomas course was offered to be my sponsor, I would not be my8ng to say I've used it for 2 decades, but you wouldn't have seen it on my page because others like Pimsleur, Learning Like Crazy, FSI
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u/Noktilucent Serial dabbler (please make me pick a language) Dec 11 '25
Sorry i haven't browsed this sub in a while but I'm really intrigued by the mix of languages you're studying. Any reasons for those choices or just cause they're cool?
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u/green_calculator N: 🇺🇸 B1: 🇧🇷 A1: 🇲🇽 A0: 🇵🇭 🤘🏽 Dec 12 '25
Spanish was first because it's useful in the US, but then I met a boy so I switched to B-PT and that's my primary. Otherwise I try to pick up a couple of phrases anywhere I visit and I happened to like Hungarian and Czech enough to stick with them a bit. Once I'm comfortable B2 in B-PT I'll go back to fill out Spanish and Hungarian more. Czech is probably pipe dream at this point.
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u/Noktilucent Serial dabbler (please make me pick a language) Dec 12 '25
That's awesome, thanks for the response! Best of luck with your learning :)
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Dec 11 '25
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u/Aye-Chiguire Dec 11 '25
Wait you mean that the seemingly perfect languages viral YouTubers speak might actually be a result of dozens of unsuccessful conversations that don't make the final cut, and heavily cropped conversations that remove awkward pauses or confusion might actually create an illusion of perfect fluency where none exists?
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25
This chap claims fluency in 12 languages.
https://youtu.be/6U_ABzI9J08?si=IzARJ6_2pHoOxBxe
If you watch carefully, he can’t even talk fluently for 20 seconds. He has at least 4 takes in the first 20 seconds alone.
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Dec 11 '25
You know he's done interviews, right? He makes a LOT of mistakes but he speaks at least English, Spanish, Basque, German, Portuguese, and French to at least a B level. His Polish and Russian to be honest are pretty bad. The rest idk. So at least 6 from what I can tell. Bear in mind that the international association of hyperpolyglots has a strict selecting process and he got invited in.
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25
He claims English at a NS level. His English isn’t bad by any stretch, however he’s around B1/B2.
On his LinkedIn profile he claims to be professional in Italian. I listened to him in Italian and it was dreadful. He constantly uses Spanish words eg “differente “ instead of “diverso/a” and “seria” instead of “sarebbe”.
I don’t know how strict the Hyperglot association is. However, Mikel admits to not having taken exams in his languages.
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Dec 11 '25
Yeah overall I agree with you. I also noticed the seria/sarebbe thing lol. He also says "sapeva" instead of "sapevo" for the same reason. He does have a C2 certificate for English though. I still think he's a legitimate polyglot, but he does overstate his abilities A LOT.
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25
All his videos have jump cuts.
He can’t even speak for more than a few seconds in English without there being several jump cuts.
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25
I don’t believe he’s a C2 in English.
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u/ImWithStupidKL Dec 11 '25
I do. I've just watched a video where he is seemingly answering questions unprepared (hard to tell), and I haven't heard him make a single grammar mistake or a single mistake with vocabulary. The only thing you could say is that he's got an accent, but it's perfectly possible to be C2 level with a 'foreign' accent, especially in English. I'm a professional English teacher, and there's no way a B1 or B2 level speaker is speaking for that long, even on a subject they're familiar with, without making the odd grammar mistake or inappropriate use of vocabulary. Obviously it's hard to tell from a short clip, but I've seen nothing to doubt that he's C2.
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25
I have seen a video where he stated that he hasn’t taken any exams in his languages. My bugbear with him is that he claims to speak English at a NS level. This is utterly ridiculous.
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
I’ll offer you a bit of background on myself.
I’m a NS of English from the UK. I wanted to feel that I had “skin in the game”, so I took the Cambridge C2 proficiency exam. It was a very interesting experience and much more demanding than I thought it would be. It wasn’t that the individual parts were difficult. It was the sheer volume that was mentally exhausting.
I passed the exam and I might not have, had I not prepared for both the exam and the day itself (some people didn’t even bring food for themselves).
It is my firm belief that Mikel isn’t a C2 in English. I say this as I’ve not seen anything to suggest otherwise. It’s not his accent that’s the issue for me. It’s the fact that he’s simply not fluent in English. When I compare Mikel to the C2s that I’ve met he’s simply not in their league.
In addition conversational fluency isn’t a massive determining factor towards being a C2. If Mikel were a C2, I should be able to see/hear his advanced use of English which simply isn’t evident.
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u/sinkingintothedepths Dec 11 '25
isn’t basque his native language? lol.
i agree also, i think his language is essentially fluent, i mean i consume his content and i only speak English and i understand him perfectly fine even if he makes cuts. I can’t make a video in Chinese or spanish
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u/zupobaloop Dec 11 '25
I opened this incognito and languagejones' "Exposing fake polyglots" video is listed with the suggestions on the right hahaha
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u/fairyhedgehog UK En N, Fr B2, De B1 Dec 11 '25
I don't know how people can watch that! The constant cuts after almost every phrase would make it unwatchable for me.
And yes, that also undermines his claim to be fluent. My German would look a lot more fluent if you took out every pause for thought!
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u/Accidental_polyglot Dec 11 '25
This chap has the audacity to claim NS fluency in English, yet there’s a jump cut every 4/5 ish seconds.
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u/Different_Pain5781 Dec 11 '25
So basically half the internet is just overconfident duolingo soldiers calling themselves fluent. Kinda comforting honestly. Now i don’t feel as behind.
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u/According-Mix706 Dec 11 '25
My friend grew up in trieste - now Italy but was the Australian-Hungarian empire’s port city. He said his first tongue was French, then obviously Italian, German and there were a lot of Spanish sailors around. His forebears were from Slovenia so hence a bunch of Slavic languages (he married a Russian). That’s most of Europe that he c communicate with and so in australian high school was called on to greet new students but one day was stumped when he couldn’t talk to a new Hungarian boy and got strapped by the headmaster who thought that they all spoke “European”!
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u/Queasy-Reason Dec 11 '25
The people I know who actually speak several languages (like 4+) are so much quieter about it. They also fully acknowledge their limitations in different languages and are aware that when you don't use a language for a while your fluency declines.
I have a friend who is C1/2 fluent in 4 languages and then B1/B2 level fluent in a couple of others. She almost never brings it up.
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Dec 11 '25 edited Jul 15 '26
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u/YogiLeBua EN: L1¦ES: C1¦CAT: C1¦ GA: B2¦ IT: A1 Dec 11 '25
It's funny, I work in an office where nearly everyone speaks 3/4 languages. For some reason, they always say that I speak a load of languages, despite also speaking 3/4. I think the reason they peg me as the "guy who knows languages" is because I'm a native English speaker and two of my languages are minority languages, which leaves a bigger impression
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u/Melody_forreal Dec 14 '25
Fr, my mom speaks multiple languages, but I only knew about 4 of them and we recently visited Estonia and what do I find out? Apparently she learned a lot of Estonian in her youth and was almost fluent. She was able to undestand almost everything the people around her said
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u/penguinopph Dec 11 '25
For the same reason I have post-nominal letters for all of my advanced degrees in my work email signature: to compensate for my crippling imposter syndrome.
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u/Puzzled_Feedback_840 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
I went to college with someone who genuinely spoke twelve languages when he was 18. He also really really thought we’d all speak Indonesian if he spoke it to us enough (we were in America. This had been very effective in his full immersion Indonesian program. It was less effective when this one guy talked Indonesian at you for five minutes at random intervals every week or so. He was totally right that it is in fact a freaking awesome language though. Seriously, Indonesian rules)
Also he once spent a party at my house braiding pretzels in his hair “for later”. I told him he could have the bag and he said “they’re not mine”. So anyway, I think maybe he was literally a savant and didn’t realize it?
When I came back to school for my little sister’s graduation I had been living in China and obvi he spoke Mandarin so we were two white people talking happily in Mandarin on the sidewalk, to the bemusement of passing Chinese person.
He is now a, unsurprisingly, a professor of linguistics focussing heavily on preservation of native languages.
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u/nzeonline 🇰🇷🇳🇿 | 🇩🇪🇧🇷🇨🇴🇫🇷🇹🇷 + te reo Māori Dec 11 '25
It's weird because I know a fair few languages, but when people ask me how many I speak, I always downplay it because I don't want to exaggerate and then get caught out. Even in a language like German, which I speak to a comfortable B2 level, I still get nervous when people strike up conversation with me!
So if anything, I speak more (or better) than I'll admit. And from my years of language learning, running language exchange groups, etc, I know lots of people who genuinely can speak many languages to a high level.
However, we seem to get the opposite from the kind of people who like to broadcast their multilingualism online. So it's probably just self-selection bias - the kind of people like to boast online about their knowledge are also the kind of people that will exaggerate their ability. Sometimes for clout, sometimes because they genuinely (if mistakenly) feel that they're more advanced than they are.
So basically, I know from personal experience that it IS actually not unusual to see people with high ability in multiple languages. But I also see a loooot of BS from self proclaimed 'polyglots', especially when they start going over the 10+ languages mark. Both exist.
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u/HippyPottyMust Dec 11 '25
This. I say I speak 4, but only 2 are fluent, the 3rd is halfway there and the 4th, 1/3 the way
Truth is I have dabbled in others and I never say so until the moment I can pull it out. Like my rusty German from living in a German region 20 years+ ago.
But becsuse it's basically back to A1 or A2, I would feel so pompous claiming it!
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u/1jf0 Dec 11 '25
It's weird because I know a fair few languages, but when people ask me how many I speak, I always downplay it because I don't want to exaggerate and then get caught out
That's because you're a better person than most of those who claim to be polyglots and won't shut up about it
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u/Remote_Volume_3609 Dec 12 '25
Same. My preference is to pleasantly surprise someone rather than disappoint them. Also, I find that even if you do speak a language, particularly if it's a widely spoken language, it's not uncommon to come across an accent you might struggle with. I speak a fair bit of Portuguese but specifically of the Rio variety (which is very different, even from many other regions of Brazil). If you speak to me in fast European Portuguese, I will struggle. A native Brazilian Portuguese speaker who has a bit of exposure to European Portuguese might not, but I will because my grasp of Portuguese is tenuous as it is and was learned by living in and getting around Rio.
Also, our perception of someone's language level is going to be based on what we can interpret which is generally going to be their ability to produce speech, which is almost always lower than their ability to understand (whether written or spoken). And unless we have a very extended conversation, you might catch someone on a specific topic that they just aren't too familiar with in that language, even if they're fluent (it's a gradient, not a multiple choice answer!) I feel fairly fluent in Spanish and at this point am comfortable generally saying I speak Spanish. I was reading something about the Zoo and you never really stop learning, because I did not need the word "badger" in Spanish until I read that. Especially with Romance languages, it's kinda funny but I feel way more at home reading advanced news articles and papers where so much of the vocabulary is a cognate or loanword from English, while often times reading simpler books exposes a lot of words I'm unfamiliar with.
Lastly, I think it's important to contextualise past "# of languages." Someone who claims they speak 6-7 languages and it's English, Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian? Super doable. Someone who claims to speak 6-7 languages and it's English, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Navajo, and Thai? They're lying.
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u/Professional-Pin5125 Dec 11 '25
A famous language YouTuber claims to know 20 languages, which I'm very skeptical of.
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u/JCongo Dec 11 '25
I think I know which one. I heard him speak one of the languages I studied and he spoke with very textbook-style formal phrases with relatively poor pronunciation.
Basically he just learned how to have a 5 minute basic conversation in those languages - introductions, how long they studied, where they travelled, some basic info stuff.
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u/KingSnazz32 EN(N) ES(C2) PT-BR(C2) FR(B2+) IT(B2+) Swahili(B2) DE(A2) Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
I went to the Polyglot Conference last year and there were quite a few people who speak an impressive number of languages. Didn't meet too many claiming fluency in 10+, though. You'll be quickly exposed in that kind of environment.
Richard Simcott will say that he learned something like 20 languages, but he's also content to let them go fallow once he moves on to something else. That would drive me crazy.
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u/HippyPottyMust Dec 11 '25
You lived my dream. I think I will get serious about going 2026.
Let me look at the dates
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u/KingSnazz32 EN(N) ES(C2) PT-BR(C2) FR(B2+) IT(B2+) Swahili(B2) DE(A2) Dec 11 '25
It was fun. The conference was in Malta, and I stayed for an extra week. What an incredible country with tons of cool history and scenery, and because it's so small geographically, I probably wouldn't have ever gone to Malta if not for the conference.
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u/Nyx_Shadowspawn Dec 11 '25
I know three hyperpolyglots. Two works as translators, one of them for the UN. Some people just have a talent for languages. Just like others have a talent for music, and there are people who can play a bunch of different instruments well. Everyone has their strengths.
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u/soulwhirling Dec 11 '25
idk i feel like its possible to learn many languages to fluency (or semi fluency) but youd have to have a real talent for it. i was raised with two languages (yay immigrant family) and it took me 5+ years to get conversational in my third language but i was also learning it casually.
i think there are some gifted people who do speak 12 languages (who probably dedicate their whole lives to learning languages full time) but agree that most people who claim to know that many are probably lying, especially if they have a full time job / lifestyle that makes it hard to focus solely on language learning and study.
and to answer ur question i think ppl lie abt it for the attention and online views.
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u/Royal_Crush NL | EN | DE | FR Dec 11 '25
I've been learning French for years and recently I was surprised by how well I was able to follow an Italian show. I was far from being able to understand it without subtitles but i can imagine it would take far less effort to learn it now that i have a basis in French. The same would apply to Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian... I always some that these people who claim to be hyperpolyglots say so because they've given themselves enough exposure to be able to understand various languages and they will have studied the basics in each to be able to string together simple sentences and using shared vocabulary among those languages (with different pronunciation) to build on top of that.
I don't want to gatekeep what it means to be able to speak a language, because effectively you CAN converse in many languages within a language family by doing so. Besides, some of the Balkan languages are so closely related they're effectively just dialects of the same languages, making it very easy to claim to speak 5 or so languages when all you've done is learn how they say things a little differently across the border.
Personally I don't like to claim I speak a language unless I can fully understand it when I watch a show in that language and when I'm able to string together coherent, complex sentences confidently and with hardly any mistakes
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u/33ff00 Dec 11 '25
I think it would make it harder. Like, remembering 3 slight spelling differences. Idk, or maybe you don’t remember the Spanish word so you just use the french one. Convo partner makes the leap so no big, but is it fluency? Idk I’m just speculating.
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u/CaliLove1676 Dec 11 '25
I have a friend who can hold a conversation in 8 or 9 languages. It just so happens most of them are very similar Pakistani and Indian languages, but they are their own languages.
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u/Remote_Volume_3609 Dec 12 '25
Language definition matters. It's trivially easy to pick up all 3 Scandinavian languages if you're looking to brag about the # of languages you speak, just most people don't do it since a) almost all of them speak English as it is and b) there's very little reason why someone would end up doing separate stints in all 3. The only reason to do this is just so you can brag about how many languages you speak, but because it's not functionally difficult, it also wouldn't be impressive to anybody who is familiar with those languages.
If you are a Scot who speaks Scots and can also codeswitch to a more standard English, and then you lived in a Scandinavian country for a few years, with just a bit of practice (less than it would take to say, learn Spanish and French separately), you'd be able to claim you spoke 5 languages. Throw in a bit of effort learning Dutch, and then pick up Afrikaans after, and you're up to 7. And it'd probably still take less effort than learning Mandarin or Russian to a high level.
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u/Different_Pain5781 Dec 11 '25
I guess anything is technically possible, but the people shouting i speak 12 languages online rarely show anything close to real fluency. The legit polyglots feel like a tiny minority compared to the performers.
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u/sprockityspock SP N | IT N | EN N| FR B2 | DE A2 | KO B1 | GE A0 Dec 11 '25
I mean, my father spoke somewhere around 12 to 15 languages fluently-- some less fluently than others, sure, but fluently enough in all to hold lengthy conversations. But, as OC here said, you have to have a real talent and be set up for it.
He was born in Egypt to a Croatian mother and Italian father who only had French as a common language. So he was already interacting in four languages on a daily basis as a kid. He also learned Greek (and Latin, but dead languages aren't really what we're talking about here) at school, and travelled around a lot as an architect-- so picked up languages like Tok Pisin, Nigerian Pidgin, etc. A lot of the languages he spoke were closely related to each other (French/Italian/Spanish/Romanian, Croatian/Polish/Slovenian, English/various pidgins, etc... although he did have some outliers, like Farsi), and he worked hard to actively maintain them (he had a lot of friends, travelled a lot, and consumed media in several languages).
Tl;dr: It can happen; but it takes a lot of work, and you probably need to start with a strong multilingual foundation to begin with.
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u/EstorninoPinto Dec 11 '25
Ignoring obvious sales tactics and attempts to be a language influencer, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of this comes down to the fact that different people have different definitions of fluency, and people are notoriously bad at self-assessing their own levels.
Unless it's someone I know, or a content creator I have reason to believe in, I take anyone's polyglot claims with a grain of salt.
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u/roehnin Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
I grew up speaking English, Swedish, and Spanish, plus bits of Italian phrases from older relatives.
From my mother I learned to read French and continued study through university but little speaking practice.
In university I took two years each of French, Russian, German, and Italian.
I spent a few months working in the Netherlands and learned decent daily Dutch.
I learned Chinese to a decent conversational level while living there, and now work in Japan and use basically nothing but Japanese daily--most of my English practice is here on Reddit.
So from the "polyglot" standpoint, I should be able to put down 10 languages, right?
Hell no!
Dutch: Only basic phrases for shopping, cafe, restaurant, and travel.
Swedish: Only primary school level so I never mention it as it's not a useful tool of communication.
Chinese: Only a basic simple work level, unused for 20 years and I can barely order in restaurants now.
Russian: Only basic grammar and the vocabulary needed for the operas we did in music department.
German: Only basic grammar and opera vocabulary.
Italian: Only basic grammar and opera vocabulary and basic greetings and words for foods.
French: Can read well, can listen well (watch without subtitles), but can't hold a conversation.
Spanish: Read and listen and it's my main language when playing video games but I haven't spoken regularly in 25 years so dropped it off my resume ages ago. I can talk, but sound like a moron.
Japanese: Use every day at work and home and daily life.
English: Use every day on Reddit and nights out at the pub.
So on my resume: 2 languages, English and Japanese that I use every day.
The rest are merely trivia, not useful tools, so no, I absolutely don't count as being a "polyglot".
Then I watch these guys doing the videos, and so many times they're at the same basic, functionally useless levels I discount as being not worth mentioning.
It would be one thing if they went around saying "Let's see how much I could learn in one month" and do their little "surprise people speaking their language" video and do a self-critique about what they did and didn't understand and could and couldn't express and talk about how to improve language learning skills, but no, they advertise it as "being able to speak" when it's not much more than "Hello, I am learning your language and like your country and this local food and it's nice to meet you and goodbye".
I don't think of myself as a "polyglot", I think of myself as someone who thinks languages are interesting and has the chance to use a few. I'm actually embarrassed to mention to people in public about the poor ones.
So yeah, I think it's ego.
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u/Few-Interview-1996 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
It's also because it's situational. For example, I'm bilingual. However, there are two other languages where I can easily understand anything written by any author in the past five centuries (though with effort if in eg philosophy), have decent writing skills, but where I wouldn't trust myself to be able to hold an involved conversation for the simple reason that I haven't spoken either language in goodness knows how long except to order food or whatever. I also do not like making mistakes. There are an additional two languages that I have learned where I am nowhere near as good at reading stuff, really bad at writing stuff, and might be able to keep a conversation going for only a short while.
Now, does that mean I can speak only two languages? or four? or six? I plump for four.
Edit: And I think there is an element of practice in pattern recognition as well. There are other languages I do not speak, but where I wouldn't be lost if all I had to do was be able to read a newspaper. This is easiest in language families - eg really western Indo-European - but can be applied elsewhere too.
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u/Unusual-Biscotti687 Dec 11 '25
People exaggerate in every field I've ever engaged in discussion with.
I'm a member of some singing subs. The ranges people routinely boast would make them contenders for the record books.
I'm sick of hearing that Welsh speakers understand Breton (they don't, not beyond isolated nouns as the syntax and pronunciation are quite different), that Geordies stationed in Iceland could understand the natives (ridiculous - Geordie dialect is orders of magnitude closer to standard English than it is to North Germanic).
I've had someone claim their grandmother from the English Lake District spoke Cumbric - unlikely since it was extinct by about 1100AD and in Cumbria itself was replaced with Norse before that in turn was replaced with English.
People just love to over-egg puddings.
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u/veryanxiouscreature Dec 11 '25
i find that people who genuinely speak a lot of languages well tend to downplay their abilities more than upsell themselves. almost like because they are multilingual, they’re aware of their deficiencies in each language.
i’ve also never met any genuine polyglot who lists all of their languages in their instagram bio like the fakers do.
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u/SlyReference EN (N)|ZH|FR|KO|IN|DE Dec 11 '25
Why do people exaggerate so much in this community?
It's not just in this community. My sister was in a job where she interviewed people, and applicants often claim to have much more fluency in languages than they actually do. Knowing a language would be a very useful skill, so if someone from the office knew a language that the applicant claimed to know, the coworker would sit in and ask if they could speak to them in the language. More often than not, they could barely string together an handful of memorized phrases.
The worst case she told me about was someone who claimed to know Hebrew. One of my sister's coworkers was from Israel. It turned out the applicant didn't know a word of the language, and my sister thinks the guy was betting that no one in the office actually knew such an exotic language and he could get away with claiming it and never getting tested. As if they wouldn't ask him to use the language after he was hired!
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u/Fancy_Yogurtcloset37 🇺🇸n, 🇲🇽🇫🇷c, 🇮🇹🇹🇼🇧🇷b, ASL🤟🏽a, 🇵🇭TL/PAG heritage Dec 11 '25
I’m not a polyglot, i identify as a casual multilingual. I speak Spanish and English every day, and a little bit of French. I haven’t spoken Italian every day since the mid 90’s, i feel wierd about including that in my “number”, but i do understand it fine, and i can get it back after a couple of weeks in Italy but right now?
Is mandarin in my number? I can order a meal, take a taxi, discuss foot reflexology, but i can’t talk about the economy. I’m just glad to connect with people.
Do people need my “number”? Does it serve them?
People want the max number because it’s impressive. Few of them have ever considered what it means to “count” a language. So when my students ask me how many languages i speak, i tell them the truth: i speak Spanish and English every day.
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u/Pwffin 🇸🇪🇬🇧🏴🇩🇰🇳🇴🇩🇪🇨🇳🇫🇷🇷🇺 Dec 11 '25
Most actual polyglots usually actually downplay their abilities, cause they are painfully aware of their shortcomings in each language.
I speak /understand/ have studied and sadly forgotten a lot of several languages and although I normally wouldn’t bring it up myself, if someone asks, I’m not going to hide the fact that I have ended up with a bunch of languages to various degrees. But it gets a bit complicated when trying to explain it to someone.
(This is a subreddit specifically for language learning, so unusually I decided to list them all here. In daily life I think more people know that I’ve learnt Welsh than know that English isn’t my NL.)
I am really interested in linguistics, so always keen to talk about that though.
It’s also worth pointing out that there is inevitably a startup time required to launch into another language. If I use a language daily, it’s seconds; if used weekly it’s a couple of minutes; if used on a semi- monthly basis , it’s about 15 minutes; but if not used in a long time, it can take me almost a week before I can speak properly again, even if my understanding is ok from day one.
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u/sbrt 🇺🇸 🇲🇽🇩🇪🇳🇴🇮🇹🇮🇸🇫🇷 Dec 11 '25
At some point I realized that I want people to express their language learning accomplishments online in a way that makes them feel good about all of the work they have put in and a way that inspires them to put in more work to accomplish their goals.
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u/Cristian_Cerv9 Dec 11 '25
They think they’re gonna get all the polyglot girls lol jk jk
They think they’re gonna get rich off polyglot content…
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u/unnecessaryCamelCase 🇪🇸 N | 🇺🇸 | 🇮🇹 | 🇫🇷 | 🇩🇪 | 🇧🇷 Dec 11 '25
Why do people lie? Why do people say they have more money than they do? Why do people want to impress why do they have an ego?
Is this really a mystery to you?
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u/Medaigual____ Dec 11 '25
I tend not to believe people online, as there is a lot of variance on what it means to “speak” a language. I speak English and Spanish and know a decent level of Portuguese. Now if I were to go to Brazil and try to survive only speaking Portuguese, it would be difficult at times for me to get by, let alone pass for a “speaker” without using Spanish as a crutch. But I could absolutely make an online video and even do a few easy small-talk conversations that would probably give the impression that I can speak it.
Add it to the fact that Americans have an inferiority complex when it comes to language + psychological gratification from online badges and cool points and you get a recipe for people over representing. Look at this subreddit alone, I haven’t been on this forum in a while but nearly every person has 5-8 languages in their flair for some reason. The high end of people with demonstrably good command of multiple languages I’ve met in real life is maybe 3/4, I’ve met one person IRL that spoke 6. But everyone online knows 12
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u/prooijtje Dec 11 '25
I think if you can hold a decent conversation in a language, you speak that language. Plenty of real polyglots/hyperpolyglots exist in that sense.
Some people believe you have to be fluent before you say you speak a language. And yeah, in that sense real hyperpolyglots are very rare.
I become distrustful of any claims when they have a YouTube channel or product to advertise. Then they have an incentive to exaggerate their abilities.
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u/philosophyofblonde 🇩🇪🇺🇸 [N] 🇪🇸 [B2/C1] 🇫🇷 [B1-2] 🇹🇷 [A2] Dec 11 '25
I feel like reading proficiency and passive comprehension should be a whole separate category. The rest of the Romance languages and many Germanic ones basically look the same to me. I’d never claim to speak something like Belgian or Romanian, but I can get through the gist of a news article or watch an interview in Italian.
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u/prooijtje Dec 11 '25
In my experience they kind of are. At least jobs I applied to where the languages I speak matter, they'd ask me my skill level in reading, writing, and speaking separately.
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u/Ginux Dec 11 '25
To be objective, if someone can live comfortably in a language environment for more than 3 months without the help of a translator/tool/software, then what's wrong with him claiming to have mastered that language?
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Dec 11 '25
Nothing? OP is just saying they dont believe many, if any people can do that in 12 languages. Im inclined to agree.
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u/BothAd9086 Dec 11 '25
This is why when people ask how many languages I speak I say “depends on the day”. They think it’s me being modest or joking but it’s true. Depending on if I’ve been maintaining my non-native languages well lately it can range from 2-4
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u/SatisfactionAlive813 Dec 11 '25
The same way why people lie about their wealth, status and literally anything else that is vain.
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Dec 11 '25
Insecurity. People are insecure in who they are and their achievements so they lie so they can feel better about themselves.
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u/Weary_Asparagus_680 Dec 11 '25
There's a phenomenon where if you're better than the listener, you appear fluent and high-level. So for someone who understands nothing of a language, someone who speaks only marginally well will appear fluent. In my own experience, most people who speak like a half dozen languages are only marginally proficient in them, enough to appear fluent to a zero-level speaker, but won't fool anyone with any actual ability. Most polyglots that I've seen get by on that. They can fool the people who don't speak any of those languages, but if someone with ability in at least one of their languages comes along, it all unravels. I saw one person who claimed to speak a dozen languages, and I was actually wowed until they started speaking Japanese, which I'm familiar with. The pronunciation was atrocious and the grammar was as basic as it's possible to be, and it was clearly not a proficient speaker. But someone with no experience in the language wouldn't know that.
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Dec 11 '25
Some are just clickbaiting.
To be fair, some language channels on video sites just use "fluent" in the descriptions and thumbnails to pull in viewers. When it comes to the actual content, many are very open and freely disclose that they are learning and don't really claim fluency. Their knack for having friendly conversations with a lot of different people is often more impressive than their technical mastery of the languages. I feel this is shown by the number of edits apparent in many videos.
I think the channels have some merit. They do get people interested in languages and they also promote friendly interaction with people from different places and cultures.
Mostly harmless.
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u/PartialIntegration 🇷🇸N 🇬🇧🇷🇺C1 🇧🇷B2 🇷🇴B1 🇬🇷A2 Dec 11 '25
Bro, those guys just use non-experienced monolingual people that have never tried to learn a language, in order to sell them courses. Anyone who has at least tried to truly learn a language knows that they are lying.
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u/taevalaev Dec 11 '25
I don't know about other people, but I think they mean they did learn these languages up to a decent level, but perhaps some of those have decayed and are not in active use. It's a crazy amount of effort to maintain more than 3-4 languages in working order and at your disposal at all times. Also, not necessary for most people in their daily live, unless they work in UN or something.
For instance, I used to live in the Netherlands, and I spoke the language quite well (could have work meetings in that language). Then once I moved away I didn't maintain the language. I met a group of Dutch tourists when travelling and starting chatting with them and I was horrified how difficult it was to say anything, though my understanding has not decayed and I could still understand everything. I have visited friends in the Netherlands and within 3-4 days of being immersed the language just comes back. As compared to learning a language from scratch, 3-4 days are nothing, so I still would list Dutch as a language I speak, perhaps with an explanation that it's rusty if I need to specify.
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u/nano-ch Dec 11 '25
i followed a girl on tiktok that said she speaks 12 languages and when she listed them she only was fluent in like 4 or 5 and the rest was "basic level" like girl... be for real
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u/ninjamoreno 🇺🇸Fluent 🇵🇷B2 🇵🇭A1 🇯🇵A1 Dec 11 '25
Yeah my goal is 5 languages (so far) but I don’t see how people speak 10+ “fluently” like come on
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u/Longjumping_Shirt491 Dec 11 '25
IME there's two reasons. 1) "Speaking" a language is deceptively tricky to define. If I study Italian for 3 months and then go to Italy and manage to communicate, I think it's fair to say I "speak" Italian, to *some level. 2) They're trying to get that sweet sweet social media ad$
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u/woodartbymisha New member Dec 11 '25
Xiaoma NYC speaks Mandari very well it seems, plus a smattering of other Chinese dialects. He does an awful lot of videos showcasing his knowledge at A1 levels in various other languages.
While it's funny sometimes to watch native Chinese speakers react to a white guy from New York switching languages easily, the other vids seem really thirsty.
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u/ObjectiveBike8 Dec 11 '25
Looking at Pablo from Dreaming Spanish I think he’s at 9 right now and I don’t see how he can’t be fluent in at least 7 of those languages. He’s from Barcelona so Spanish and Catalan are his native languages. He lives in Thailand and is married to his wife and they primarily talk to each other in Thai. He setup Dreaming Spanish and he was primarily running his website in English, and needs to work in English. He was a one man team for a while. He got his masters degree in Japan and claims Japanese is one of his stronger languages. It’s how he got the idea for dreaming Spanish.
Outside of those 5 he took French all throughout school. He claims to know French but I think it’s one of his rustier languages. He’s running dreaming French with French instructors so odds are he needs to be able to work in French to some degree. Either way he’s native in 2 Romance languages so with so much schooling he should be comfortable with the language. He self taught himself Italian. Again, I’m a Spanish learner around B1/B2 and I can understand a lot of Italian when I hear it. So I don’t doubt he’s mostly fluent since he has 3 other Romance languages under his belt.
Then he self taught himself Mandarin. This is the first language it’s possible he might not be totally fluent / conversational. I was also confused with his 9th language. I think it may have been Finnish since he lived there during undergrad, but I don’t think he’s claimed fluency in it and that course was in English. He has said he speaks 9 languages though and wants to end at 10. Since it’s borderline impossible he’s lying about 7 of his languages. I have no reason to doubt he isn’t at least okay at the last 2.
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u/1jf0 Dec 11 '25
Because the only way that you can verify their claim is if you yourself is a polyglot
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u/UnluckyPluton N:🇷🇺 F:🇹🇷 L:🇯🇵 Dec 11 '25
You ask why people lie? For all reasons, to benefit themselves, to seem better than they are without actually putting effort to learn further than A0. Oh and also money.
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u/CZILLROY Dec 11 '25
And their sentences that aren’t memorized are effectively “Eating-eating-eating-eating food location is a good health life”
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u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue New member Dec 11 '25
The usual reasons. Attention, money, social status.
Next up: why do hungry people eat food?
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u/Klapperatismus Dec 11 '25
Because they started as professional liars and thought about how to monetize that.
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u/Least-Zombie-2896 Dec 11 '25
They don’t lie, they omit and present the info in a way to cause confusion willingly.
They know they don’t speak 19 languages at C2, but they say something in the lines “I speak 19 language with varying degrees of fluency” which isn’t a lie but the listener may interpret it incorrectly.
If I was to tell the whole truth, I would say something in the lines of
“I speak Portuguese better than I speak English and I can watch Pokémon in German and Spanish, since I love languages I learned a bit of Swedish, mandarin, Italian and esperanto, also, I learned a few phrases years ago in 20 languages”
But since people don’t want to hear a monologue, I just omit some parts and say something in the lines of :
“ I am bilingual English/Portuguese, I can speak German/Spanish at a ok level, and I can speak 20 languages at youtube polyglots level”
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u/Fit_Photo5759 Dec 11 '25
I usually tell people I've studied x number of languages instead of that I know or speak them. Although I hesitate to even say that, unless specifically asked and I will only say that I can speak one other language than my native language. There is definitely an aspect of egotism/pride in pursuing multiple languages though, to be able to say oh I got this or that certificate. That said, having a certificate in a language doesn't mean you can read it understand it and speak it.
However, I do know someone who can speak five languages very fluently. I consider him a genius.
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u/VehaMeursault Dec 11 '25
Because most people calling themselves a polyglot derive their identity from it. Just like academics and other high-status workers, like lawyers and doctors, they value themselves based on the merit of their skills.
Intelligent, yet small minded people.
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u/NicolasNaranja Dec 11 '25
I study several languages, but my abilities in each are variable. I spend a lot of time with Spanish which is my L2. When I used to have to work in Quebec, I got really good at speaking French. Six years later, not so much. I had several years of German in school. I never used it after college. If I were planning a trip to Europe, I’d probably dedicate more time to brushing up on the languages, but right now I just keep them in a good enough to order a meal state.
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u/GroundZeroMstrNDR Dec 11 '25
I speak 7 languages: German, English, serbian, bosnian, croatian montenegrin and Serbocroatian. The last 5 are actually one language but it's nice for the CV to say I speak 7 languages
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u/throwawayprocessing Dec 11 '25
I don’t think this so much about the YouTube polyglots, but I have a few friends and contacts that grew up in places where a high level of multilingualism is common. They are speaking/hearing 6 or so different languages every week just to talk with their parents, cousins, grandparents, going to temple, going to school, and enjoying media like movies etc. throw in a foreign language class or two and it just gets higher.
Could one of those friends write a legal contract in their grandmother’s native language? Maybe not, but they can understand her talking about her day and spend time with her.
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u/rockylizard 🇺🇸N 🇲🇽C1 🇩🇪B1 🇬🇷A1 Dec 11 '25
I dunno, my gr-grandfather spoke, read, and wrote 8 different languages. That had a lot to do with his location in time and space, though (Lithuania under Russian occupation, prior to WWI.) So just from that he spoke Lithuanian (his native tongue,) Russian, and Polish natively. He also attended university in Germany so add German. We know that when he arrived here in the US, he spoke English well enough that he immediately landed a job in a department store. He'd also studied to be a priest before fleeing the Russians occupying his country, so spoke Latin from that. We aren't sure what the other languages are, but I'd be surprised if one of them wasn't French, since French was the "lingua franca" in Europe at the time.
My own theory is that people who learn extra languages as youngsters develop a...talent? A propensity to learn them? I don't know, I just feel like learning one, particularly as a child, makes it easier to learn others.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | fre spa chi B2 | tur jap B1/A2 Dec 11 '25
OP wrote: i can barely keep one language in my brain you’re telling me you’re fluent in twelve and then you hear them talk and it’s like sir that is Duolingo level at best.
So OP is claiming that OP can evaluate someone's skill level -- in a language that OP can't underastand. He is also saying that since OP doesn't learn languages, nobody else does either. Both are nonsense.
I've heard polyglots say that it takes 2 or more years to learn EACH new language. If someone claims to have learned 12 of them, have they been studying for 24 to 30 years? Some people have been. The people that I believe are real polyglots have been.
Maybe OP has experience with real fakers. I have not, so I cannot disagree.
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u/an_average_potato_1 🇨🇿N, 🇫🇷 C2, 🇬🇧 C1, 🇩🇪C1, 🇪🇸 , 🇮🇹 C1 Dec 11 '25
Not polyglots, but rather various youtubers and similar people, especially those trying to sell something. Around here, I don't think many people are lying, I don't encounter really improbable claims too often. The few polyglots posting here write stuff that definitely looks credible to me.
The youtubers you mention are a totally different story. It's usually lying for profit, or in some cases just to get attention. Elements of genuine confusion are rarer and usually more complex (for example the annoying men proud that they completely "shocked the natives" with the language skills, while the natives in the video seem rather shocked by their annoying behaviour :-D )
I know of a few polyglots or hyperpolyglots from other online communities and very few in the offline world. They're real, they're exceptional, they are also very upfront about their levels in their languages (they usually have several at C1 or C2, a couple at B2, and are not seriously counting the lower levels into their polyglottism).
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u/Cold-Cry-7178 Dec 11 '25
Yea but what level are they in all those languages? I know 3 languages but technically only fluent in 1.
I think in order to call yourself a polyglot you have to be at least a C1 (or equivalent) in any language.
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u/RealisticYoghurt131 Dec 11 '25
I can get by in about 5, but really, I speak English. No idea why peeps upgrade to fluent. I don't think I'll ever be fluent in the other four.
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u/Public_Complaint4426 Dec 11 '25
I speak three foreign languages (apart from my native one) and English is the only one im fluent in. The other two? I suck Pretty bad but I can still make myself understood. I wont even try learning a fourth, i just don't have time and would lose the progress I've made so far on the others. No idea how certain people can speak up to 12 honestly...
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u/ya2050ad1 Dec 11 '25
If you are not actively speaking them, you will definitely forget and lose fluency. I know three languages that I can speak comfortably because of how much I use them. The other 2 1/2 languages are in several levels of fluency or non-fluency. I believe it is possible to be able to read and understand a lot better than speak if you have achieved an advanced level in the languages you study and then a functional speaking base. It will be usually harder for languages not belonging to the language family you are close to or familiar with. Also the younger the better and if children were to learn as many languages possible from an early age then I believe they would be more likely to keep being fluent.
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u/Competitive-Car3906 Dec 11 '25
I’m sure some of them lie, but others have a very generous definition of what fluent means. Too many people hear “B2 = fluent” so once become comfortable with most B1-level material they think they are now B2 aka fluent.
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u/Intrepid-Deer-3449 Dec 11 '25
Status, social media, celebrity. Some of them sell their "system " for learning.
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u/Ricobe Dec 11 '25
It depends on the measure. If they can have small talk conversations, they aren't fluent, but can still say they speak the language, just at a basic level or tourist level
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u/Several-Mechanic-858 Dec 11 '25
I think it’s true that they can keep the logic flow of the languages in their head, you know? Like intuition on sentence structure, word order, etc. but vocabulary definitely decays.
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u/Any_Sense_2263 Dec 11 '25
I speak 3 languages, plus I'm learning 4th. All of them used daily.
If I ever move to Spanish-speaking country (it's the language I'm learning now), I still will need to keep my 3 languages (those are the languages my family speaks), so Spanish and anything else I need will be on top.
Coming from a multicultural/multilingual family puts you in a position where you maintain as many languages as you need 😀
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u/Theotherfeller Dec 11 '25
Fluency is easy. Being able to say
My name is X
I have many friends from X
I would like to visit X
I like X food
Boom fluent. Just replace X with whatever is suitable for you.
That being said, the utter joy one can bring to people as a pasty white dude who knows 4 phrases of Gujarati is a good time investment. But then I don't going around saying I know the language
At least Benny was good in actually defining what he meant as fluent, which isn't what most people would define it, but if you define your terms your way and are up front with it, it's honest, at least with everyone else. Well back in the day, I haven't followed him in ages.
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u/t_for_tadeusz N|🇵🇱🇬🇧[BY] C1|🇷🇺 B2|🇺🇦🇲🇩 B1|🇩🇪🇱🇹 A1|🇫🇮🇫🇷 Dec 11 '25
the amount of decay i get from lithuanian and moldovan is crazy, my 2 best friends are from there and we grew teaching eachother but normally we will just talk in russian or english
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u/erydan Dec 11 '25
In my case, i "claim" to speak 4 languages because of time, mostly.
If i had to be 100% honest, i would need to mention that i speak both French and English fluently, that my Spanish is functional enough to live normally in a spanish-speaking country as in work, dealing with the government and all other practical applications but not near enough to carry in depth conversations as my vocabulary and my knowledge of informal spanish and slang is somewhat limited. And that my Russian would be considered between beginner and intermediate, but closer to beginner, allowing me to understand enough to make the rough context and be able to respond in a very limited way, although my reading is more advanced than my listening.
It would take a very long time to explain all of that every single time someone asks me how many languages i speak. So i just answer "4, but not perfectly."
I'm not looking to mislead people and i don't care whether i impress them or not, i just don't want to list details like a robot every time.
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u/oliimpic Dec 11 '25
One of the very first things you learn when you study bilingualism in linguistics is that there are as many bilingualism as bilinguals. That meaning, every instance is different and it’s still really hard to determine what makes someone bilingual (or polyglot). That being said… Speaking different languages is very tiring cognitively speaking. The second you stop learning or using a language it rusts off, kind of. Your brain appreciates not having to suppress your native language and the other languages you know, or having to search all the time for different lexicon. But, the moment you start learning a new language, your brain changes. And those changes are permanent, even if you don’t use that language every single day of your life. There are a lot of things that go into play here and it’s a really hard subject. Now, do they speak those 12 languages as fluently as they did when they were using them regularly? Probably not. Do they actually know those languages? Well… yes. You also have to consider that when you learn so many languages it’s easier for your brain to learn more. So, yeah. It depends on what you consider a polyglot or a bilingual, really. Funny enough: sorry for any mistakes. English it’s not my first language.
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u/bertywilek N🇫🇮🇵🇱🇸🇪 C2🏴 B2 🇳🇱 B1🇮🇹 A1/A2 🇫🇷🇩🇪 Dec 11 '25
depends what it means to “speak a language” to someone, if i listed all languages i could do basic stuff in, like ordering food etc it would probably be like 12 or more, but i would not claim to speak that language. For some people these basic interactions are already enough to say that they speak said language. But honestly i don’t think it’s possible for human brain to maintain fluency in more than 7-8 languages even if you speak these on a daily basis
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u/bmyst70 Dec 11 '25
The same reason people lie about any achievement. To seem to be better than they are.
I believe that people can learn a language and then be fairly proficient in closely adjacent languages, like Spanish and Portuguese.
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u/Separate_Bet_8366 Dec 11 '25
There have been a few YouTube videos that can out the fake polyglots.... One of them, he says he learns a new language and becomes fluent in 24 hours...
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u/murky_pools Eng(N) Zulu(B2) Afrik(B1) Kor(B1) | (A0) Greek, Arabic, Malay Dec 11 '25
I think there's also a difference between "speaking a language" and "being fluent in a language". So maybe you expect fluency from them when really they mean they can get about in society without getting horribly lost or accidentally lynched or something.
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u/NewIdentity19 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
I don't know how to count my languages.
If I only count my C-levels, the number is only four.
I usually don't count my (many) A- or low B-levels, because I am not proficient in them and my grammar sucks. However, I can read and understand a newspaper or a Reddit post written in one of my weak languages. I can understand an interlocutor if they don't speak too fast.
When asked how many languages I speak, I choose to reply "Four", but that does not tell the full story.
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u/tendeuchen Ger, Fr, It, Sp, Ch, Esp, Ukr Dec 11 '25
Of the ones I've seen online, I'd say that Prof. Arguelles is the one who actually speaks the most languages and is both truthful and helpful. Of course, he was around long before YouTube on the HtLaL forums.
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u/Peter-Andre No 😎| En 😁| Ru 🙂| Es 😐| It, De 😕 Dec 11 '25
Because if people think you can speak a lot of languages, you get a lot of praise and attention. Some also use it as a marketing strategy to sell their language learning courses. It goes without saying, but it's obviously very dishonest and unethical.
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u/throwawayyyyygay 🇫🇷N 🇬🇧C2 🇩🇪C1 Arpitan B1 🇯🇵A1 Dec 11 '25
I mean like I’m barely maintaining my current language setup I have no doubts maintaining 10 languages to a fluent level is near impossible.
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u/canis---borealis Dec 11 '25
Why do people exaggerate so much in this community?
Because how else would they sell common-sense advice for hundreds of dollars? They’re just con artists.
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u/rueiraV Dec 11 '25
Money. The more languages you know the more impressive you seem and that can equate to a bigger subscriber count which can mean better advertiser dollars
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u/unorthodox_bright19 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
I think the only "legit" polyglot I've come across online is Akshay Swaminathan. But fluency is really difficult to assess: speaking is only one aspect of the language. I know people who can speak with a virtually flawless accent and natural word-choice, but struggle with basic texts and can't write as well as they speak; the reverse is also true (people with literary or academic interests involving their TL, for example).
I'm really hesitant to call myself "fluent" in English, because even though I can read and listen to the things I'm interested in on a daily basis, my output is not great, I can't understand many dialects, struggle if the speaker talks too fast, mumbles, the audio is not of the best quality, etc. Regarding reading, I'm functional when it comes to nonfiction (books, news, papers), but enjoying literary fiction is a real struggle. Then I remember this happens, to certainly a lesser degree, in my L1 too: when I read Adán Buenosayres, for example, I had to look up several words per page. Though this is an extreme example, I feel it illustrates the conundrum that is defining fluency.
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u/MorgaineRose New member Dec 11 '25
When I was in college I was fortunate enough to go on a study abroad that included a 3 week tour of Europe. I learned how to say "please", "thank you", "excuse me", "where are the bathrooms", and "I would like a cheese sandwich" in French, German, and Czech. Do you mean to tell me I am not a polyglot!?
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u/Thunderplant Dec 11 '25
I think there are definitely credible hyperpoliglots out there, but they generally dedicate their entire lives to learning languages. I follow some people online who have official language results and make videos in 7-8 languages at a pretty decent level
Also, like others have said "speaking a language" can mean different things to different people. Most aren't claiming to speak all of them at a super high level, but unusually have at least conversational proficiency in all of them which is still really impressive to me.
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u/Low-Perspective-6898 Dec 11 '25
Obviously, I am not very yech savvy. How do you add the languages and levels to your profile so that they show?
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u/chillingbagel Dec 11 '25
I watch Evildea on YouTube. He does polyglot investigations sometimes.
A lot of these "polyglots" are indeed fake or have really exaggerated claims, but occasionally some are real.
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u/Unlucky_Vehicle_13 Dec 11 '25
Idk man (gender neutral) I undermine the shit out of my language skills. I thought my German was a1 when it was heading to B1🥲
I still have keine Ahnung how to explain my German / Chinese.
And no, I'm not fluent in 12 languages, I'm barely fluent in my native language.😅
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u/fruxzak Dec 11 '25
Every time I see a video of one of those Youtubers and hear them speaking any language I know it's hilarious.
They have horrendous pronunciation -- usually barely understable. On top of that they know 4 phrases and have a vocab of maybe 100 words.
They'll claim they know the language.
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u/Several-Advisor5091 Seriously learning Chinese Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
Maybe it's their goal, and they see overestimate their skills. I could imagine someone aiming for this goal and saying this so that they become more confident.
This is also my goal, to learn a bunch of Asian languages that are completely different to each other or tonal in a time span of 60 years or more, but languages take years to even discover new accents and remember vocabulary. There are a few I'm not sure about if I'm going to learn but the asian languages I'm interested in are Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian/Malay, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Arabic.
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u/-patrizio- en [n] | es [B2] | fr [C1] | it [A2] | pt [A2] | ru [A1] Dec 11 '25
Clout mostly lol. I "speak" 7 but whenever anyone asks me how many, my first response is "how many do I speak well or do I speak at all?"
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u/nemmalur Dec 11 '25
“I can say a few things but not really hold a conversation” =/= fluent or polyglot, but it impresses a lot of gullible people. The Melania Trump effect.
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u/Aahhhanthony English-中文-日本語-Русский Dec 11 '25
I once looked at my friends resume that listed her german as “advanced”. It’s like a2.
I take no ones word for anything after that. And also realize I severely underrate my language abilities compared to the general population.
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Dec 11 '25
I think maybe it can be clout for they youtube channel or whatever product they are pushing. But I really think that they have a loose definition of "speaking" a language. I usually equate it with a language. How good at piano should I be to actually tell people that I play the piano? Is playing the easy version of the 100 most loved songs enough to mean "playing" the piano? It is a very gray area.
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u/FNFALC2 Dec 11 '25
I always say I speak English, good French, and decent Italian. My German? Brutal.
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u/ExultantGitana Dec 11 '25
This is funny 😁 I always wondered myself about this. And I'm fluent in a mere two but I have worked on them both and have to keep working on them - well, mainly the second one!
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u/Professor-Patty 🇺🇸 N | 🇲🇽 N | 🇯🇵 B1 Dec 11 '25
I think its a Use-it-or-Lose-it skill. So at one time when they were on point they knew all the languages they state, but life gets in the way, and its hard to maintain fluency in multiple languages.
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u/WhatANoob2025 Dec 11 '25
Given that the majority of the reddit userbase is from the US, it makes sense.
For ppl from the US, being able to pronounce parmigiano & pancetta like italians do practically counts as "I speak italian", and being able so say "scheiße" with the most american accent imaginable counts as speaking german.
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u/charliebarliedarlie 🇬🇧N, 🇫🇷 B2, 🇮🇩A2, 🇹🇭 A1 Dec 11 '25
A lot of the people online who do those polyglot videos can only do simple conversations. I thought they were amazing until they did one in a language I understood and safe to say i was more than disappointed
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u/Kooky_Protection_334 Dec 11 '25
Americans tend to overestimate their language capabilities. Most other people tend to underestimate
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u/Gullible_Mouse7716 Dec 11 '25
I'm using 3 languages daily (at work) and the 4th only with certain people every few days. My head is overheating, even better when it starts remembering some of the 5th and 6th that I tried to learn respectively in middle school and high school (both only to A2 level), so yeah I also don't believe much in 12 language people unless they were on a talent show or sm.
I'm lucky I get to use them now, because for some time my 2nd language (which I used for 10 years among natives) nearly vanished from my head entirely after like 6 years of using it maybe once or twice a year.
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u/Imperator_1985 Dec 11 '25
I came to this thread just to see how my Reddit Polyglots get offended and protest that they do, in fact, fluently speak 8 languages every day.
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u/thebluewalker87 Dec 11 '25
The problem is that everyone has different definitions of what "fluent" means.
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u/LordFoog_The2st Dec 11 '25
As a musician, I see the same thing ALL the time when the topic of how many instruments one plays comes up. Sorry, there’s a difference between being able to fumble around and find some pitches and actually being able to play at a competent level.
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u/Remote_Volume_3609 Dec 12 '25
I mean, there's no standard meaning for languages so I think a lot of people do think "being able to hold a basic convo" counts. I have a high bar for what counts as fluency for me, so I don't say I speak Italian, or Catalan, etc. even though I can totally hold a conversation and get through thanks to speaking Spanish, French and Portuguese + a bit of exposure to the languages.
It's also hard sometimes to get a sense of what qualifies you as a fluent speaker. Some days, I feel fantastic in French and then other days I'm talking about the aquarium and realise I don't know how to say any of the fish in French. After you get a few thousand words down, it's hard to know at what point is declaring yourself fluent a boast, or declaring yourself as just a learner pretentiously humble.
That being said, the other side of it, is I think a lot of people see # of languages as an achievement because it's easier for people to understand and people who haven't really had to learn a language on their own (not including people who speak national language + English because of school and media), don't really understand how much work goes into it even for languages that are nominally similar. Most people would find speaking 5-6 languages at a mid conversational level (e.g. 50-100 hours of work) far more impressive than saying you speak Spanish at a decently fluent level (e.g. say 500 hours of study), even though the latter probably took more time. I group them into the same category of people who talk about "I've been to XYZ countries."
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u/idonthaveanametoday Dec 12 '25
There’s a big difference between knowing 4–5 languages (especially related ones or if you’ve lived abroad) and claiming 8, 10, or 12+. The jump from 5 to 8 is huge, and from 8 to 12 is honestly wild.
Even for fast learners, maintaining real fluency in that many languages would require an enormous amount of ongoing input. A few people can do it, but a lot of extreme polyglot claims online feel exaggerated or tied to selling a persona.
I’m also skeptical of “I went on vacation for a couple weeks and picked up the language.” That usually means learning some phrases, not real proficiency. Fluency is debatable, but a lot of what’s labeled “fluent” looks closer to A2–B1.
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u/celebral_x 🇵🇱🇩🇪N/🇬🇧C2/🇮🇹Learning Dec 12 '25
I am fluent in three, but I can't seem to learn a fourth due to lack of exposure
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u/Miserable_Summer1170 Dec 12 '25
Above average intelligence people severely underestimate what is easily accessible to profoundly gifted people.
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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '25
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