Skype Me Maybe - sung in 30+ languages by 17 polyglots!
Language Lovers Unite
Just over a month ago, Benny Lewis (better known as Benny the Irish Polyglot from his site http://www.fluentin3months.com) contacted me and asked me to be part of a project he was working on that would bring many of the familiar faces in the Internet Polyglot World together. The project – a music video clip!
It’s amazing to have been part of this internet Polyglot Community over the past six years or so. It often feels a little more like Days of Our Lives rather than a bunch of people loving learning about languages and cultures around the world, with people getting very passionate about their opinions and beliefs on different aspects of language learning and linguistics.
This clip transcends that and I was really happy to see the faces (and voices) that appeared in it willing to put ‘stuff’ aside and come together for something like this.
I hope that this clip inspires you to take up the challenge and really dive into learning languages and have fun while learning languages. At the very least, I hope it brings a smile to your face.
You can read the full write-up on the background of this clip in Benny’s blog –
I’ve pasted a section from Benny’s blog here to introduce you to the different polyglots you see in the clip:
The following is an excerpt from the write-up on this ‘Skype Me Maybe’ clip from Benny Lewis’ blog – http://www.fluentin3months.com/skype/. Anytime in the next section you see the words ‘me’, it refers to ‘Benny’, not ‘Stuart Jay Raj’. 🙂
————————————
Contributors
Going through each person in order they appeared (after me), those who sang in the video are:
Susanna Zaraysky
Susanna was a huge help for a big chunk of the lyrics that people would base their translations on, and she introduced me to some of the polyglots in this video that I knew of, but hadn’t ever been in touch with. The variation and inclusion of certain well known polyglots wouldn’t have been possible without her!
You can see more of her on her site Create your world, and her Youtube channel.
Also, you may remember her because she has already guest posted on this blog twice! Once about having Music and TV for homework, and once on Women’s day and language learning for women. And this isn’t the first time we’ve done a video together! When we met up in San Francisco, we recorded multilingual chats with people in the street there.
Richard Simcott
Richard is one of the most famous polyglots (or hyperpolyglots) thanks to a video he made in a tonne of languages. He has since made many more videos, interviewing other polyglots, and was very rightly voted as the *MehrsprachICH *polyglot ambassador, and is very passionate about helping people to learn more than just one language.
He’s also super nice when you get to talk to him!
He is attempting to run the polyglot conference mentioned above, and I hope my little contribution with this video will help get more people interested in it, as well as any other help I’ll provide, and I look forward to finally meeting him in person then!
Check out his Youtube channel here, as well as his blog, Speaking Fluently.
Idahosa* Ness***
Another very regular contributor with guest posts here at Fluent in 3 months, Idahosa is great at singing and rapping, and trains people to reduce their accents in foreign languages, so I invited him to contribute too. Check out his channel here and his site The Mimic Method.
Jana Fadness
Jana has been a regular commenter on this blog and she has her own blog and multilingualYoutube channel. As you can hear in the video, she has a spectacular singing voice. Now Sony Music know how to get in touch with her to sign a contract!
Fasulye
Fasulye is a regular contributor to forums like How to Learn any language, and her Youtube channel of course demonstrates the many languages she knows!
Mike –* Glossika***
Mike’s Youtube channel is really well known for his incredibly convincing Taiwanese accent on Mandarin, and he is also passionate about less commonly spoken languages in the region. You may remember that earlier this year I had a chance to meet him, and we both recorded a video together in Mandarin!
Luca Lampariello
Next, we have another very popular Youtube polyglot, Luca! He has a bunch of mulitlingual interviews on his Youtube channel, with very convincing accents in each of his languages.
Like me, he also has a background in electronic engineering, (although unlike me he has alwaysbeen passionate about language learning) and is studying Conference Interpreting in Paris right now, (*also *something that I had initially considered and was preparing for before my plans had to change).
Since we have so much in common, I was glad to finally get in touch with him, and run my Italian lyrics by him (he helped me make it rhyme!) If you’re in Paris, you can regularly find him at the Polyglot bar.
He also has a very quickly growing blog, The Polyglot Dream.
Mae
Mae has been very active lately in many online language learning discussions, usually being the voice of reason in otherwise chaotic discussions. She also has a blog and Youtube channel and I made sure to run my German by her!
Steve Kaufmann
Steve and I have had our disagreements over the years, but I made sure to get in touch with him because the video wouldn’t have been the same without him. We put any disagreements we’ve had in the past aside and worked together for this collaborative project.
Of course, everyone in this video wants to ultimately promote and encourage language learning, so it was a message we could all agree on. While I of course recommend a speak-from-day-1 approach, this “Skype me maybe” video doesn’t imply that at any time, and you can follow Steve’s alternative advice of talking when you feel ready instead and still appreciate the message in the video.
He even went as far as to suggest improved lyrics for my English part, which I ultimately went with!
Steve of course runs LingQ.com, blogs at The Linguist on languages, and has a popular Youtube channel where he uses various languages, interviews people and shares his thoughts on various topics.
Iversen
Iversen is another very active contributor to the How-to-learn-any-language forum, and has an impressive array of languages, so I was glad to see he was interested in joining us! His Youtube channel shares his language videos and paintings.
Judith* Meyer***
Judith and I have met several times at Esperanto gatherings, and while I was living in Berlin. She’s very active on forums under the handle Sprachprofi, works with big language companies and has a great range of many languages she is passionate about.
She runs Learnlangs, and you can see her Youtube channel here. She also wrote a great book that helped me a lot in my first week to master reading Arabic script.
Timothy Doner
Tim was blasted into fame this year from a New York Times article about his incredible language learning achievements, which would be impressive for anyone even if you didn’t consider that he’s a teenager!
His Youtube channel shows him using his incredibly varied languages very comfortably.
Haikaa Yamamoto
I found out about Haikaa from a pretty impressive multilingual singing video that she had done where she was singing *all *of varied languages herself! So it only seemed logical to invite her to sing in this epic multilingual singing video! You can see more of her work on her channel here.
Félix Wang
Félix and I got to meet while I was passing through Brussels a few months ago. His active Youtube channel has interviews with natives and his own impressive multilingual demonstrations.
Stujay Raj
Stujay and I had a nice chat (recorded and included here), after he had inspired me with his fun suggestions to learn Thai script quicker. Soon after, he guest posted on this blog.
He blogs on Language and Mind Mystery, and you can see his excellent Youtube channel (the only other active Youtube polyglot besides me who does a lot of video editing to give them a more professional look).
Moses McCormick
You should all definitely know Moses by now! In the space of a just few months, the video we recorded together of when I visited him in Columbus Ohio and went “levelling up” in a mall, has gone well past 150,000 views!
I was glad to see that he showcased his epic collection of language learning books in this video! Definitely check out his stuff on his channel.
—————————————————————-
