Update: September 1, 2022

I wanted to add to this post because I’ve seen a couple of really good additional posts that are worth reading AND to clarify the purpose of this post.

First, the purpose of this post is to warn people who are just starting to learn Mandarin away from measuring their progress against the polyglot community. The true polyglot has a natural talent and skill which is absolutely incredible, but they are just as able to teach the average person how to learn a language as a rocket scientist is able to teach you advanced calculus. The polygloat has a marketing and sales plan which is not in your interest and is best ignored.

Now, onto some additional articles I’ve found which are really great, fairly quick reads and definitely worth sharing:

Here is a link to an internet archive from a language learner who just got sick of a few personalities in the polyglot community (namely Benny and

https://archive.ph/zRnmV

Last link I’ll post, and this is just to ensure you find the polygloat people as annoying as I do, here is their “top 10” biggest weaknesses, one of which is “perfectionism”

Polyglot Problems: 10 Polyglots Reveal Their Biggest Weaknesses

Original Post Below:

Important words:

Polyglot -> 多语种 Duō yǔzhǒng

Tiresome -> 烦人 Fánrén

When you start learning Mandarin its hard not to look at some of the videos on youtube or blogs of people who tell you they were able to quickly master the language within a seemingly short period of time. Usually those people who go to the efforts to build that presence have something to sell you which comes with a promise they can help you learn to be fluent in X number of days. Watch out if you continue dive into the language learning corner of the internet as you’ll quickly find people who not only mastered Mandarin but also several other languages. Those people get to call themselves Polyglot and they definitely have something to sell to you.

If you haven’t already met these people, here are a couple of them:

Benny the Irish Polyglot: he has been around for a long time and seems to be really skilled at learning languages. In one of his early youtube videos, he attributes his language skills to some method or technique and downplays any idea that he is naturally gifted at languages. He seems like a pretty nice guy in all the stuff I’ve read online, but if you can’t match his impressive results learning Mandarin then I’d say you’re just a normal person.

Mathias Barra: I’ve only read some of his online stuff (because a lot of it is paywalled), there are some really good tips in there such as reverting to use paper instead of just clicking and swiping on duolingo. However, he always comes back to the theme of “I’m not special, you’re just lazy” and “Us special polyglots are just bored of you losers asking us questions.” I’m not sure what Mathias is selling us (probably advertisements in exchange for our attention), but he is pretty good at it given he has 85k followers on Medium!

I feel bad singling out these two guys, especially because there are so many. Let me know who your least favourite polyglot is and I’ll add to my list!