wish i was a polyglot...

It's not about being 'good'. He derives a sense of pleasure from surprising foreigners, and for whatever reason has made it his life's mission to keep getting that dopamine rush via that method. The downside to that is he is not actually that efficient in any language, outside of really basic and heavily rehearsed talking points. If you want to dedicate all of your waking hours to something like that then go ahead, you and anyone else could do it too.

oh well at least im not black

>>75939500
Why don't you learn Chinese and go around talking to Chinese people then?

>>75941135
your grandchildren will be

>>75941258
a cambridge professor told me yesterday to give up on Cantonese

he said it is so difficult there is not a single foreigner alive who can speak it like a native - that the best i could hope for would be an adequate but noticeably poor version of it

and he said that from my pronounciation of the little i did know i would never master the tones unless i made it a fulltime study and that trying to learn it at the same time as a Physics degree is pointless

>>75941368
you wish, abubakar

>>75941404
>not a single foreigner alive who can speak it like a native - that the best i could hope for would be an adequate but noticeably poor version of it

Well yeah no shit. Are you a white guy? What, do you want to larp full time as an Asian in Hong Kong or something? Nobody is expecting you to sound like a native.

>>75939500
>mandarin, cantonese, szechuan, korean and japanese
same language.

>>75941617
was thinking about living + lecturing in hongkong, yeah

>>75941404
You don't need to be perfect just understandable
Just learn a few basic sentences at first and really focus on pronunciation and tones
Practice your pronunciation and tones everday until you can say basic sentences at an understandable level.
And by focus on pronunciation and tone I mean know exactly how to pronounce each sound linguistically. Record yourself and compare with native speakers.
Go to /djt/ for tips on learning Chinese characters.

>>75941804
Assuming you are in your early twenties there's no reason you couldn't pick up Cantonese now and continue studying it through the years; you have a long life ahead of you. If weebs can learn a writing system as complex as Japanese to read some smut, then Cantonese tones should in no way be insurmountable, even if you have to prioritize as a physics undergrad. Literally the only difference between you sounding like a native in Cantonese to not sounding like a native is the people there thinking "Oh, this white foreigner must have grown up here" to "Oh, this white foreigner must have moved here". The professor sounds like a needlessly defeatist dipshit.

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how many languages do I need to speak to become a polyglot?

i can already speak spanish, english, french and basic catalan.

>>75942248
Polyglot nerds are weird, they won't consider you a polyglot unless you speak 10 languages all from different lang families.For everyone else 3+ languages is enough to be a polyglot.

>>75942379
10 points for each language.
Add 10 more for each different language family.
Add 20 for each new writing system (latin alphabet doesn't count).
Add 40 for each minority/endangered/meme language.
If you have more than 100 points, you win the linguistic dick measuring contest.

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>>75941668
>>>/pol/

>>75943000
50 only ripppp. Languagelet.