I fucking hate the "you assumed I don't speak your language because I'm white" content so fucking much.
First of all, the double standard. Anyone who's been an ESOL learner in an English speaking country knows what I'm talking about. Even if your grammar and usage is perfectly understandable, a bunch of crackers will laugh at you behind your back for having the slightest accent. Even if you don't, you have to deal with the delightful "compliment" of "wow, you don't even sound like <your ethnic group>!" But Mark Zuckerberg muddles his way through a mandarin interview with a hideous accent and everyone starts being amazed at how "fluent" he is.
Second, the only reason this shit even exists is because so many fucking white people live in these places and don't even bother trying to learn the language. If that wasn't the case, people wouldn't go around assuming that white people don't speak the language. You know what happens when you don't speak perfect English in an Anglo country? People call you racial slurs and tell you to "go back to your country". Whitey gets monetization, PoC get racism.
Lastly, there's always an element of belittling the PoC involved. At best its a sort of "haha, you're stupid for assuming". You've also got the "I've cracked your secret code, deceitful yellow person," angle. The absolute worst are the smug assholes who try to correct PoC on their own fucking language as if all English speakers adhere perfectly to textbook usage.
During COVID these assholes became somehow even more insufferable because they couldn't sexpat to their favored destinations so they started harassing immigrant communities in their home towns. I saw one asshole absolutely butcher trying to order food in Japanese at a Japanese restaurant in the US. When the waitress asked him to order in English he actually had the nerve to ask her "so you're not actually Japanese, are you?" Like he just cracked a massive illuminati conspiracy.
It's all very :lmayo: performative cryptocolonialist flex attempts, and I hate it.
i saw an interview with some guy who worked for I think Olympus (the camera company) in some documentary about the corruption in the mid-2000s. Anyway he was a white guy who at least couldn't speak english, his interview was done in japanese. This guy should start a youtube channel where he goes to anglo countries and does "oh you thought i could speak the language but i actually can't!" content
Yeah you hit the nail on the head. Shit is so arrogant.
cracked your code
I speak Spanish at a reasonably decent level and when my fellow mayos (especially family) find out they’re always like “that’s cool, now you’ll know if they’re talking shit in front of you” and I’m just like how are you behaving or treating people that you’re main concern is they’re talking about you 24/7
I mean at this point calling white people 鬼子 is so ingrained in my speech that I probably would want to make sure they don't know what I'm saying lol. It's not like I mean anything by it but its obviously got negative connotations.
so many fucking white people live in these places and don’t even bother trying to learn the language.
tbh, most (all?) of them aren't immigrants. they're just there to teach for a year or Barclays transferred them there, and then they go back home. hardly worth the investment of time to learn, particularly the murderously difficult Asian tonal languages. In cities like Shanghai or Beijing (or NYC) one can live quite a good life without ever learning the local language, or indeed interacting with the locals at all.
There are people who don't plan to live there long but pick up a few of the courtesy phrases just to get by.
On the other hand, there are people who have been living there decades who struggle to order a beer.
I can respect the former since they at least make an effort but there's sooooo fucking many of the latter that it's sad.
Been guilty of the same. It’s been years and I still struggle to understand English with an Indian accent.
I feel you, but it helps to remember it's just a matter of exposure.
If you're a native English speaker, you can understand other Englishes pretty rapidly if you just hang around folks speaking that English or watch media with it
I love the Indianisms "please do the needful" and "prepone" its just so efficient. Like yeah please do what I asked/what is necessary. And prepone is just common sense, we have a postpone, why not prepone?
If there are places where there are more white tourists then residents, people would still assume a white person does not speak the language even if every resident did. Since they're more likely to be a tourist
white guy: i hope she likes that im ordering in japanese
cashier: oh god HE STINKS!
youtube lets you A/B test thumbnails and I think even titles... so i suppose if you're dedicated enough to it you'll have some evolutionary shit happen where you land on checkout-aisle tabloids
As long as they arrange the pictures into someone making a :so-true: or :stirner-shocked: face.
I like xiaoma but i am :lmayo:
In all his videos the people are so excited to see someone who is interested in their culture, its cute.
The second one is all kinds of red flags though, not for me
It's totally 100% a variant of white savior syndrome. People like this are addicted to the "ZOMG you can speak (whatever native langauge)! Let's all worship the hairy paleface!" And then the paleface amazes the natives by threatening to blot out the sun, or making avocado toast, or some similar superhuman feat that nobody from the native culture can do.
I'd kinda like to see the inverse, where a POC amazes a bunch of white people with their mastery of english and white culture, by making casserole, clapping for random things, doing a school shooting, etc.
as a reward, they get initiated into the tribe, visiting the mayonaise aisle in the local supermarket as a rite of passage.
Literally destroying SJW feminist cultural Marxists with logic and reason. :so-true:
Quoting Hamilton in a perfect Jud Crandall Mainer accent while doing a TikTok dance, followed by putting ranch dressing on things. And then doing a school shooting.
Lmao foreigners are so impressed when I can place their country on a map. I think the reason this content works so well is that americans set the bar so low.
Xiaoma's content did make me want to study a language more though. Being able to communicate with people in their native tongue helps people open up and feel comfortable.
That second thumbnail in particular is especially fucking weird and uncomfortable
The top guy isn't as obnoxious as his headlines are. Videos like that inspired me to learn Portuguese as a means to create a cultural bridge. The bottom type look like the type of obnoxious people you get in Latin America. Sometimes they come to my town for an "authentic" experience and their minds get blown when I switch from my accent to an Upstate New York accent I picked up while living there.
youtube polyglots struggle through a sentence with a thick ass english accent and be like damn I'm Mr.worldwide I speak 12 languages fluently
there really isnt an absolute ranking for language difficulty
a russian speaker or something will obviously find polish easier
I would say the hardest languages to speak would be ones that have difficult phonemes or rare traits that few other languages have. e.g. Pirahã has a lot of rare features that make it extremely difficult for non-native speakers to learn.
Depends on what language(s) you already know, as having a very distant language to your target language means that you'll have to spend a lot more time learning basic building blocks. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are notorious for being complete mindfucks for English speakers because the writing system, grammar, and method of speech are very disconnected from the way that English developed as a language.
If you're an English-only speaker and want to put numbers to it, a common reference for language difficulty, the Foreign Service Institute, puts both Polish and Vietnamese in Class III - "Hard Languages". The FSI quantifies that as languages that should take about 1,100 hours (~44 weeks) of class to get to a "Professional Working Proficiency".
In my school in India we had a classmate who was from East Asia who was born and raised in India and spoke Hindi and Marathi. People were similarly surprised when she spoke.
It was particularly funny when we were on a school trip and a temple we were visiting tried to get her to pay (they charged tourists). She got kinda mad and the moment she opened her mouth they were like oh nevermind
You don't need someone from East Asia for that. People from Northeastern India get the same treatment. From being thought of as foreigners to being called "chnkes" as a slur.
:kitty-cri-screm: cooking in someone else's kitchen is a nightmare when you know them WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS???
yeah lemme flex my lingual prowess by asking where every fucking tool is... okay actually that is a flex if you know all the names of everything in the kitchen. who even knows that in their native lang
We need to reverse this trend by having poc go around talking to white people
Nigerian Prince STUNS local suburban housewife with check for $50,000
Xiaomanyc is genuinely the most entertaining thing I've ever seen on YouTube.
I studied abroad in Bajookieland, so I learned to speak perfect Bajookanese. this give me the idea to make a video like this with some of the Bajookers in my city that is atleast 8 minutes long to qualify for a mid-break advertisement.
