If one person could be called a Polyglot person, it would be Mr. Xiaoma. The man behind the successful YouTube channel named Xiaomanyc is Arieh Smith, a born and raised New Yorker. Growing up in the US his main language was English, with a few but rather unsuccessful tries to learn Latin, Hebrew, and Greek in school. But then during college he got the chance to learn Chinese, and even live in China. Now he masters “near-native level Mandarin Chinese” and uses this skill regularly. In his YouTube Video he often “undercover” shocks locals by perfectly speaking their languages, including rare dialects. He even “got fluent in Spanish from my apartment” during the first coronavirus outbreak stay-at-home-order.
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Polyglot Xiaoma YouTube Channel – Watch this!
With a total of more than 612 million views and 4.5 million subscribers, his channel is booming. His three most-viewed videos have each more than 45 million views. They each follow the about same concept “white guy shocks native speakers by ordering food in perfect language”. He usually always has a friend on his side to film the shenanigans around New York City, usually in Chinatown. Those three Top-Viewed videos are all in Chinese, but Arieh Smith aka Xiaoma speaks way more languages, and more dialects. Among others, probably he even doesn’t know how many languages he even speaks, he speaks Spanish, Punjabi (an Indian language), Yoruba (an African language), Navajo (a Native American language) or Arabic. He definitely has a thing for rare or almost extinct languages – which is more than awesome!
Check out a few of the videos below to get a glimpse of the surprise of natives, suddenly having a “plain white guy” speaking their own (rare) language.
where to find Xiaoma online
Xiaoma YouTube Channel: youtube.com/c/小马在纽约
his 2nd YouTube Channel on how to learn languages: ariinbeijing
Xiaoma Twitter: @realXiaomanyc
Instagram: @xiaomanyc
Video: “White Guy Orders Takeout in Perfect Chinese, THIS happened…”
