you picked my video I'm so flattered because there's a ton of videos out
there and you chose mine and that's awesome but like why said no YouTube
forever I've just curious because there's like tons of multilingual
polyglot stuff out there and there's people that speak way more languages
than me I mean like six seven eight nine ten blah blah blah blah blah I only speak
English Chinese and Japanese like compared to that that's not very much at
all but I guess I got you in here and what might keep you is I studied Chinese
and Japanese to a very high level and quite frankly to get to a college level
and Chinese and Japanese especially with reading and writing I feel like I could
have learned to do a spoken self introduction in about ten other
languages just to be honest so today we're going to start with Chinese an
introduction japanese an introduction in then english at the very end and i'm gonna
give you some language learning advice that's really long overdue so let's get
started here and do you mind if I make myself comfortable because yeah I just
uh I'm sitting here and uh I'm gonna read off of a script wait did the other
people read the script am I allowed to read off of the script heck I'm doing it
anyway it's my channel I don't really care how other people did their videos
I'm gonna do it my way okay so let's start (Chinese) self intro
First this channel is named after the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai. If you search for Shanghai on google, you can see it and the bunt tourist area.
Shanghai is where I have lived many years and where my graduate school is so the name is related to Shanghai.
This channel is new and I am new to YouTube and making videos. The videos are made using a GoPro hero 7. This is a good fit because it’s small and
I can keep it in my pocket in case something interesting happens suddenly and pull it out.
In May of 2019, when the channel was started the videos were a little rough. I used an old camera, they had sound quality issues, lighting issues, and the video size didn’t fit the YouTube screen.
and all kinds of different problems. Maybe you’re wondering why this channel suddenly got popular.
I'm thinking that - I'm trying to figure that one out myself
Last year I made 20 videos in 8 months, which is very few videos but that’s when I still had grad school classes to take.
I went on a vacation to Burma in July, 2019 and while there I did a little prank on some Chinese tourists.
Their reaction was very interesting because they are from Shanghai and I study in Shanghai.
So, they called me the girl that is "half from their hometown" (idk how to translate that ha ha)
I think it's cute. Right? It's cute.
That video was uploaded in December 2019 and had almost no views for over 70 days.
Some other youtubers did a lot of speaking Chinese prank videos in the months after that YouTube slowly suggested my video to their fans.
Because the YouTube algorithm suggested my videos after theirs, it make my channel become bigger and bigger very fast.
This month Youtube finally started suggesting my videos to people who like Japan.
I'm very happy to get some more diversity in this channel's fan base.
One thing that made me really happy in the beginning was Filipinos supporting my channel. I made one comparison video about Japan and the Philippines and
2,000 Filipinos watched it, some liked it
Did you press the like button by the way?
38 subscribed. That made me think this channel had hope. I want to give a special thank you to my Filipino friends.
Thank You Philippines hey man you guys rock
Thank you Philippines. I really love you guys.
But it’s not just Filipinos watching this channel. YouTube stats showed me 45% of views. Thanks for the support from back home.
hey thanks America you know we gotta look out for each other
I have my own theories about why these speaking Chinese videos are so popular
Americans want people to stop saying we don’t travel at all and we don’t know any other languages.
What do you think? What do you guys think? I have my own theory about why these Speaking Chinese videos are so popular. But who the heck knows?
Write it in the comments if you have a good theory. So, back to what I was saying.
This stereotype is wrong. I have met enough America expats and travelers in the world to say that this stereotype is completely out of line with what I’ve seen.
I’m so thrilled that the other 55% of views are from so many countries around the world. I want to introduce the beauty of Asia with you all.
and a lot of people ask me why I speak English so slowly and clearly in some of
these videos that's because a lot of the viewers are not native speakers if you
were curious that's the reason why all right let's move on
Lastly, I want to say that the language videos on this channel are not a good representation of my language ability
and know what my Chinese and Japanese levels actually are.
They are mostly just simple funny conversations, they are for your entertainment. It's for fun!
in watching these you cannot see the depth of academic Chinese and Japanese I have learned, nor can you see any of the work I put into essay writing, reading level
For example, I’ve read 150 Chinese and Japanese books, and hand writing characters That's really hard actually.
That's where the difficulty is. The hardest part of Chinese and Japanese is right there.
Actually, none of the short conversational language videos on YouTube or short introductions will ever show you someone’s real depth of knowledge.
It's too simple. This self into I'm doing is also very simple.
This is a very simple self-introduction in Chinese it's not nearly as intimidating as some of
the presentations I had to do at Fudan University but hey let's move on
Next is the Japanese self intro.
Let's move on the the Japanese here we go I didn't like that like sitting like this is killing
my back man I gotta get through alright let's go to this (Japanese) Japanese version self intro
I was born in Detroit Michigan, USA and grew up in the suburbs. My family worked for Chrysler. I did an internship Chrysler one summer and started to love cars.
I research the automotive industry in Asia at grad school now.
I didn’t watch youtube very much in since moving abroad.
I don’t know much about the other people that make videos. I always favored reading above TV.
I love reading novels.
Most of the books I read are translated from English to Chinese or Japanese. My favorite short story is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I have read it many times in English, Chinese, and Japanese.
For those who are thinking of studying Japanese with kanji (characters) well you can
but you're gonna be limited in what you can do with it so they were passionate
hat was a big challenge for me, but now I can generally write several pages in Chinese and Japanese characters without a lot of problems.
I lived in Harbin, Beijing, Shanghai and also lived in Japan two times. I have spent about 6 years in China and 2 years in Japan.
This is a very Chinese gesture.
I have spent about 6 years in China and 2 years in Japan. I went to Chinese language school in the morning Monday through Friday and taught English to kids in the evening.
After passing HSK 6, I started learning Japanese in China at a language school.
Yes I studied Japanese at a Chinese school, or a school in China. Kinda weird.
Because I learned with Chinese people, I have a slight Chinese accent when I speak Japanese.
I don’t have an American accent. I can change between languages every fast because I had to do it on a daily basis for many years.
I keep doing that back and forth through this too- it's not something that I just picked up it's
just something that happened over a long period of time and I did make an effort
to learn how to do it. My mannerisms change when I change languages as well. This is just a habit. I subconsciously imitated the people around me.
I'm really not doing that on purpose you may have
noticed it in some of the videos is totally not on purpose
I did research to add to my 70 page thesis about US-Japanese relations and automotive trade friction that I'm writing.
Here I'm making a video and I'm supposed to be fixing my thesis alright thanks youtube or it's my fault
Graduation will be June, 2020.
that's not true anymore because of the you know what
problem I had to delay graduation that really sucks okay moving on
After that I want to work for an American car company in China or work for the US government doing work in US-Chinese relations.
Hobbies! This the important part. My hobbies are hiking, reading, drawing, youtube, and playing the violin. Drawing was always my number one hobby.
I was considering going to art school when I was in high school.
So you can see a lot of artsy stuff in my videos.
I have a Japanese boyfriend now. We met off of a language exchange app called Hellotalk in August, 2019. He is a Japanese salaryman that lives
in China near Shanghai. We love to travel the world together.
I love Star Wars and Harry Potter. I have read every single Harry Potter book in English, Chinese, and Japanese multiple times.
yeah I'm a little bit of a nerd in some ways not
quite an anime nerd but I got my other nerdy things going on
Chinese and Japanese however, are not my hobbies. They are my profession. I have fun studying but it’s not just for fun.
After this is there is language advice in the next section is professional advice, not really advice for people that study language as a hobby.
I realize that not everybody is learning a language for like their career but my
advice is more for if you really want to like use it for your job or to get into
school so oh gosh let me adjust here again language learning tips these are
way overdue because I have been asked to do
some advice videos for a long time haven't gotten to it sorry about that
but we're gonna do it now and I gotta find the right position here how about
this is this comfy I I don't know I feel awkward hold up I'm still reading off of
a script I'm sorry I got so much I want to say I don't want to forget anything
usually I don't even have a script for these videos I just go for it but today
there's so much on my mind all right first of all you should know that I
didn't know any foreign languages at all for most of my life it's not like I grew
up in the environment where I needed to use a bunch of foreign languages I
really didn't know anything for a long time as an adult I started self studying
Chinese and I hear a lot about self studying I really cannot promote self
studying I really just can't it's very good for the beginning when you first
get into something but if you really want to get deep into a language you're
gonna need some professional training it just depends on what you're trying to
use it for and I started off with some YouTube videos iTunes podcasts before
moving to China in 2012 but that can only get you so far
and then I enrolled in a Chinese language school in Harbin and I studied
with Russians and South Korean students and I had a Chinese teacher for four
hours every day Monday through Friday like it was intense and we had a small
classroom with only like a few students and it was just a full immersion
environment there was no language other than Chinese being spoken in that
classroom even from day one and then I studied at home every day for
two hours after work and you know that's that's a lot I don't think a lot of
people have that kind of time they have families they have lives I didn't I
became a hermit I kind of had to remove myself from the foreign community and
China and Japan to to make my language level progress I started living with
Chinese roommates who knew zero English and that's been wonderful that's helped
a lot and I've lived with Chinese people for seven years the very best of all the
roommates I had was a 65 year old Chinese grandma she was awesome I wish I
was doing YouTube then I could have had some great videos of her and I
sometimes I want to pull my hair out when I hear other people giving advice
I'm like no don't do that oh my gosh don't study all these languages at the
same time I don't know if it's your hobby just want to learn a
self-introduction in each language then fine but if you really want to use it
I just cannot advise you to heart learn so many languages at once as an adult
unless they're really similar to your native language or something's going on
but I'm qualified to give this advice because I've been a language teacher for
eight years although I taught English I did tutor people in Chinese before all right
so first of all learning the language isn't usually free sometimes you have to
pay a lot of money I'm not even going to talk about how much I paid for my
Chinese and Japanese lessons we're just not even gonna go
there but it was a pretty good chunk of change the self-studying is cool but
like I said it only gets you so far it's kind of like me I play the violin poorly
don't ask me for violin videos it's gonna be embarrassing unless you want to
laugh in that case I'll make them but it's kind of like when people tell me oh
I played the violin and I said wow cool where'd you study and they say oh I
learned off of youtube or I self studied the violin I'm like well it's cool it
makes people happy and I I should be one to talk I'm really I don't have any
violin skills really and I studied with a teacher too but uhm and that's cool
and it'll be fun and I'm I mean I enjoy it but just like me I'm not gonna be
playing with any Symphony Orchestras anytime soon it's gonna be strictly a
hobby but it brings joy to a lot of people and that's great and if that's
what you're trying to do I totally get it I totally understand that my Western
colleagues in China and Japan they just said they struggled a lot with learning
the local language and I told them all these apps and books are great they
didn't seem satisfied with that answer but then I told them you should study
about six hours every day I told them you should study about six hours every
day you should study about six hours every day
and many of them had jobs and families like how do you do that not everyone has
as much free time as me that's a lot of free time but I did that like six hours
of study every day for about three years already well that look that's what it
took to to get where I am today but you know really time is your major
that's that's the biggest factor but here are some suggestions I have unless
you grew up in an environment where you were speaking multiple languages as a kid
don't be the jack of all trades and master of none because I see a lot of
that a lot of that people speaking a bunch of languages and over stretching
their boundaries and then they end up not being able to speak any of them very
well or very few of them well I only speak three languages and I would really
like to take on Korean but quite frankly I'm limited on my time I don't have
all the time in the world and quite frankly I think learning good Korean and
learning business level Korean would require living in Korea for a while so
I'm really hesitant to take on that commitment number two if you want to
study to an academic or business level I don't recommend that adults study two
languages at the same time like okay sometimes it depends on the language
you're studying if it's Spanish - Portuguese maybe you could do that
pretty easily but I recommend if you're trying to do that do what I did and get
to a high level in one of the languages before you take on the second one I
waited to pass hsk six before I took on Japanese and that was back in 2015 so I
passed hsk six and then I took on Japanese but maybe hsk five would be
enough and you could start learning the next language number three language has
four aspects I mean each culture emphasizes different things if you come
to China though emphasize reading and writing ability in English if you go to
America they'll emphasize speaking ability and whatever language you're
learning but really it's a four factor equation here it's about reading
speaking writing and listening and your goal should not be able to just write
well and do the others poorly or just speak well and to the others poorly they
should ideally all be on about the same level and that's
and I've only just now gotten most of my stuff on the same level that took a long
time beginners and this is especially important for people in China that I was
teaching English to in Japan don't start with books start with some audio lessons
and survival phrases and learn those before you get into writing and if
you're a busy person you can listen to them every day in your car on the way to
work or on the train and I I listen to stuff like that especially with
japanesepod101.com and chineseclass101.com and that's in the
link below I'm sponsored by them
right now and I like to promote a product that I've actually used and I
did use their products for many many years number five last one make language
a part of your everyday life you won't be able to study for long if you're
doing it in a really boring boring way like just open the book and write stuff
down and try to make it a little more fun than that make some foreign friends
or do language exchange like I did on hello talk how many people is looking at
this right now we're from hello talk I'm just kind of curious there might be
quite a few they found me on hellotalk I was obsessed with that app I met like
200 people from hello talk in person 200 Japanese people in Tokyo in Shanghai in
Tokyo again and like had coffee with them because I love people so much I
just want to have coffee with the whole world
that's my goal and you can do some meetup groups I did meetups in the
Detroit area mix your hobbies with studying I took violin lessons in
Chinese like that's killing two birds with one stone for sure all right
that's my channel intro which was very long overdue I hope you understand a
little bit more about who I am and what I'm doing alright thanks so much
see you next time