I think that's a big thing that I preach, which is you don't need to be
the best. You just have to have fun with it; it's a hobby for everyone.
Some people get so strung out and so annoyed and worried at becoming
a perfectionist, and especially when they get in front of a
camera, so I try to not do that.
Today I have a mystery guest, who goes by the name of Language Simp.
I don't know what his name is.
I presume he has a name.
Maybe he was born Language Simp. But he is a motivator, an
entertainer, a tremendous polyglot.
He's a former user of LingQ and he claims to like my videos and like LingQ.
So for all of these reasons, I want to talk to him.
So first of all, Language Simp, can you tell us what your name is?
Or is that a secret?
You're trying to get my personal information out of me
right from the start, Steve?
I wasn't expecting that!
Give me an alias.
I say that my legal birth name is Language Simp.
So for the case of this interview, we will confirm that it is,
in fact, my legal birth name.
But I am curious, Steve...
Do you know what the word "simp" means?
Well, I'm assuming it has something to do with "simple".
"Simpleton" maybe?
It does not.
It's very Gen Z.
And I'll say that kind of the whole crux of my channel is Gen Z humor and getting
Gen Z type people into languages.
That would be Gen Zed in Canada, okay?
Gen Zed.
Just so you know.
I don't even call English "English."
I call English "American," so I don't know about that.
But, basically, a "simp" is someone who goes after women, but
tthey're not very good at it.
They're kind of desperate; that type thing.
So in my sense, I'm desperate for languages.
A simp...
You can be a simp for someone, but I'm a simp for languages.
That's good.
At least in that case, it's one sided.
You can pursue the language and you don't need the language to respond.
Whereas if you go for a woman and she doesn't want you,
you're kind of out of luck.
But in the case of languages, even if I'm not speaking the language well
and I'm struggling, I can just have fun with it at, at any level, you know,
I don't need to be perfectly fluent.
And I think that's a big thing that I preach, which is:
you don't need to be the best.
You just have to have fun with it.
It's a hobby for everyone.
Some people get so strung out and so annoyed and worried at becoming a
perfectionist, and especially when they get in front of a camera. So I try not to do that.
I couldn't agree more.
I think 100% that's true.
And the other fun thing about being a Language Simp is that
you can pursue five languages and none of the languages get jealous.
Whereas if you are pursuing five women, you might start getting
into trouble at some point.
Yes.
I've never pursued five women, but five languages at the same time?
Yes.
Although
it gets a little rough when you're studying three at the same time,
which I knew you were doing Turkish, Farsi, and Arabic at the same time.
That must have, uh... I gave up!
Well, it's good to admit that you can give up and not be embarrassed to share that.
I've put Turkish on the back burner, and I want to
get enough exposure to the Arabic script that I get good at it.
With Arabic, too, you've got Egyptian, Levantine, Fusha, so
there's enough there to keep me busy.
Actually, I was looking at Turkish just yesterday, so...
Any of the languages, I'm sure you've had the same experience, that you start a
language, you leave it, it's always there.
It's like a girlfriend that you can go and visit whenever you want.
It's not a love affair, but you go there and you enjoy being
together and it's fine.
Well, as long as you didn't move on to another woman, but yeah,
I understand what you're saying.
Depends what you mean by "move on to" too.
Yeah, for sure.
A funny thing with the Arabic script...
I'm someone who loves alphabets.
I don't know if you've seen my videos.
I actually
recited the Arabic and Russian alphabets for 10 hours straight,
just continually on livestream.
And a lot of people enjoyed that, but I actually can't read
very well, and that's why I stopped using LingQ back in the day.
I have a lazy eye. I don't know if you can see that very well,
but I've got an eye kind of going off to the side.
And it makes it really difficult to read. And it's gotten a lot worse.
But back in the day, I used to...
I was studying Russian on LingQ for about a year
I was in a lot of pain because it's
hard to read.
It stresses my eyes.
And instead of giving up, like a normal person, or just going to audio only
content, I doubled down and started to do it for three hours a day, timed.
So there was a point in my life where I wore an eye patch on my right eye.
And I was just using LingQ and just studying the Mini Stories
and stuff for three hours a day. And torturing myself. But it worked!
And my Russian is pretty decent.
You are a simp with an eyepatch. I was a pirate. A simp pirate with
an eyepatch using Steve Kaufman's beautiful site. So... But no, I think
three at once is a lot. Two at once, I mean, it's kind of got advantages
and disadvantages. The advantages of focusing on one is you improve more
quickly in the one where you're focused.
The advantage of doing two is that you get a bit of a break from one and you
go to another, so things stay fresh.
At the end of the day, I don't know whether you're further ahead doing
one at a time and then doing the other, focusing on it, or whether
you're better off to do two at a time.
I don't know.
Personal preference.
Yeah, I mean, you can definitely study a few at a time, but
it just slows the progress.
But I always tell people, sometimes people come to me, they
say they feel this burnout and they really don't want to continue.
And I always say, "Just quit."
"Take a break."
As you said, when you come back to it, you're not going to lose everything.
I mean, maybe the few things that you learned right at the end
will be a little fuzzy, but...
Take a break.
Go study another.
This is a hobby for everyone.
I think a big part of my channel, too, is kind of showing how...
You get a lot of polyglots out there who love to shock people or show off
their skills in highly edited videos.
And I like to show them, no, it's fine if you make a mistake.
It's fine if
you're not perfect in a language. You don't have to be that guy who
studies French for three straight years to become perfect at it.
Do what you want, have fun with it and see where it goes.
First of all, for those who don't know Language Simp, I'm going to
leave a link in the description box.
I've only heard you in Arabic.
I've heard you in Russian. And you are very good, very competent.
Also, I'm surprised here in our conversation to find out that
you're actually quite a serious guy. Because the persona
that you find on your videos is very much more sort of a goofy guy. A goofy
guy who nevertheless motivates people to learn languages by being goofy, which I
think is good. Because at school sometimes languages are presented as something
very serious and we can't make mistakes.
And if we get, you know, four out of ten wrong, then that's bad.
And all of that stuff.
And you basically ignore all of that stuff and just enjoy your
languages and do very well at it.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
So how did you get started in learning languages?
I actually watched a World War II movie back in the day, and I heard
French in it, and I just fell in love.
I thought it was the most sophisticated thing on the planet.
Thought it was pretentious, but in a good way.
I kind of fantasized about being in Paris in a nice cafe speaking this
luxurious language to someone and feeling all preppy. And so I started studying it
on January 1, 2019. So that was the first time I started studying a language. And
I dedicated my life to it right away.
And then I found you and some other people online, and I just realized
that people can learn languages.
I didn't even know, as an American growing up, everyone says, "Oh, you should learn
Mexican!" But no one really did it.
I never saw anyone who was successful in that.
So I decided, or I realized, "Wow, this is actually possible!"
People have done it, and it's possible with multiple languages,
and it can be a lifestyle.
So, I fell in love with it, started learning French, and never looked back.
So which languages do you speak now?
And you don't have to tell me whether you're "B2" or "C1" or whatever.
Just, which languages do you speak?
I like to say that I speak languages at a "D1" level, just to completely
surpass that scale and just show people that it's kind of nonsense in a way.
So I'd say I'm D1 in French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and then
I've studied a bunch of others, flirted with Portuguese and Danish and stuff.
But I also... a big part of me is that I don't like to claim that I "speak" languages
because people get so worried about that.
On the definition, the definition of fluency, "Can I speak this?"
And I like to surpass that and say, have fun with it.
So that's my answer.
You know that Danish has the largest number of phonemes of
different sounds of any language?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, for sure.
When I was an engineer... So I actually quit my engineering job to be a
YouTuber now, but when I was an engineer, I worked with a bunch of Danes, and
that's why I started studying Danish. And yeah, they speak like, I don't even know.
It's the most insane thing I've ever heard.
But, uh, when you said "phonemes," I actually have no idea what that means
because I also stay away from linguistics.
Not a fan.
It's a good idea to stay away from linguistics. But some of those terms,
you know, you end up using them.
So a phoneme is just a sound, like any sound.
Uh, guh, huh, puh.
Those are all phonemes from what I gather.
I don't know.
I use the term.
I use a lot of terms that I don't know what they mean.
Uh, you know, so phonemes.
I think, I think for me, it's just, uh, I want to just enjoy the language
and I like learning it and feeling almost like prehistoric before we had
all these studies. We just communicate with people, we learn it, we don't
have to see it written all the time.
We don't have to know what the conjugations mean.
We just know how to say it because we have enough exposure.
And that's kind of the way I approach it.
But at any rate, Arabic and Russian are very different.
Not to mention French and Spanish, which are similar to each other.
And you do very well in all of those languages.
I'm very impressed.
Oh, I really appreciate that.
I mean, if I could hear this back in 2019, when I was watching your videos
and almost crashing my car because I was driving to internship interviews.
And I had your YouTube videos on while I was driving.
And then I would have to change them, you know, because they're only
10, 15 minutes long, which I do not advocate for in any sense of the word.
Well, you need voice commands, voice commands in your car, you know.
Yeah, that probably would have been better. But if I could see right now
that in 2023, Steve Kaufman himself, the LingoSteve, The Linguist would
be telling me that, I don't even know.
I don't know what would have happened.
So I really appreciate it.
And I'm just a simple guy that started making videos, but like
you and like many others, Luca and others who are enthusiastic about
language learning, we do have an ability to influence other people.
So we do good things, like it's a good thing to learn languages.
It's good for people.
It's good for people's ability to communicate with others.
So it's nice to do something that's a good thing.
So you do a good thing.
I think I do a good thing in making these videos.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah.
And I think.
keeping it fun and showing people how it can be funny.
I mean, I think language learning is inherently funny.
If I walk up to a French guy and I say, "un baguette" instead of "une baguette,"
they might laugh because, you know, our brains, psychologically, what we
find funny is something unexpected.
So, when someone says, "un baguette," they might laugh. But they're not laughing
at you, they're laughing with you.
Yeah, but rarely do they laugh.
Like, rarely do they... it's a bit jarring.
It's funny that there are things, you know, when foreigners speak a language,
there are things that are not jarring.
Like, an accent is not jarring, but wrong gender, unfortunately, is a bit jarring.
And, uh, I can't remember the name of that American actress who, um, she spoke
beautiful French, like pronunciation?
Excellent.
And actors and actresses are very good at imitating accents, but
she got most of her genders wrong.
You would think 50%, you know, she'd be correct.
So genders is tough, especially in French, because in Spanish, you got
the O - A that's going to help you along. But in French it's difficult.
Oh yeah, for sure.
Until you get to "un skillet," right?
That's the confusing one.
That one always got me.
But yeah, I think that people just need to see that it's really
fun and it's not intimidating.
They need to give it a go.
I mean, someone who's watching this, if you're hesitating, you're worried about
judgment or anything, as Steve said, people aren't going to laugh at you.
And when they do, from my perspective, you can laugh with them.
And if it's a funny experience...
And I think that...
There's just so many routes to take comedy with language learning as well
because switching languages so that someone doesn't understand you talking
behind their back, all that type of stuff.
It's just common tropes that are really hilarious.
I've had a few of those with Chinese, but not as many as people think.
People think if you're riding an elevator with a group of, you know,
Japanese, and they're laughing, they're not laughing at you.
You know, they have other things to talk about besides you, but
people get quite self-conscious.
They think other people are talking about them.
They're not.
But, uh, yeah, have fun, absolutely.
And if you want to be totally comfortable, speak your own language.
When you're learning another language, there are going to be moments that
are not comfortable where you can't remember a word and you make mistakes.
And that just is part of the process.
So how did you get out of this Language Simp idea?
Like I've... there are different people like serious, like Steve Kaufman is out there
seriously talking about language learning.
And you do everything that's goofy.
I always wanted to be a YouTuber.
I've been making YouTube videos since about 2010 or something like that.
Ever since I was just, I mean, I'm only 25, so I was, you know,
just a young kid, but I always wanted to be a YouTuber, and then I
actually got into it through TikTok.
When TikTok became popular, I started making language sketches where, like,
a police officer would chase me, and I would speak different languages, so
he couldn't understand me, but then, coincidentally, the police officer
knows those languages. And just just these stupid goofy encounters like that,
which were obviously scripted. But people loved it, and they would sometimes rack up,
you know, tens of millions of views.
So that got me popular. Yeah, I mean I have a short video like that of a
police officer that has 50 million views on YouTube. Like yeah, some
crazy stuff. But... So people love that, you know, someone who can switch
languages in a dangerous situation.
It makes it funny.
And so I got popular on TikTok, got to like a million followers on that.
And then I got an engineering job, kind of fell off. And then decided,
no, I'm going to give YouTube a try. And then it just worked.
So here I am.
And I'm so grateful.
I mean, my childhood dream completed.
So can I ask you a question?
So there you are at 19, essentially unilingual in English.
Correct?
And your family, you spoke just had English at home.
Correct.
So often, you know, my situation was different.
Obviously I was born in Sweden.
We moved to Canada.
I heard different languages and stuff.
And so people say, well, you know, if as a young child, you hear different
languages, you have an advantage.
Perhaps so.
But the majority of polyglots that I have met, and I've gone to
polyglot conferences, grew up in a monolingual, unilingual environment.
And suddenly they were turned on, they wanted to learn languages, and lo and
behold, they can learn many languages.
And so you are an example of that.
If there's a will, there's a way.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
You definitely don't need any prior exposure or anything like that.
I mean, I'm proof of that.
It's only been like almost five years, but...
And I feel like most of the languages that I'm good at, I started, you
know, in the first two years and haven't even touched that much.
So it's super possible.
It's not that hard of a thing for people to do.
Yeah, and especially, and I mean, you're a great example of being older and
still being able to learn languages.
So I hate when people make those excuses.
If there's a will, there's a way.
If you want to do it, you can absolutely.
Okay, well, we should probably leave it there and I'm now going to go on
your channel. And I'm a bit scared because I don't know, you know, I
mean, here I can control what happens.
Once I get on your channel, it's no longer under my control. But
we're going to give it a try.
You're doomed.
You're doomed, Steve.