An American language learner left Irish locals tongue-tied when he visited Dublin and spoke as Gaeilge - with some so confused they thought he was speaking Portuguese.
Arieh Smith practised for about three weeks before travelling here and found many he interacted with could say way more than they first thought.
The 32-year-old polyglot from New York, who has studied between 30 and 40 different languages including Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Spanish, also said he found Irish on the more difficult side to learn.
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Arieh, who has more than 5.5 million subscribers on his Youtube channel called Xiaomanyc, makes videos based on travel and learning new tongues.
One of his videos where he shocks native Mandarin Chinese by speaking the language fluently while in New York has racked up more than 81 million views.
Arieh said the majority who could converse with him through Irish were young people when he visited Dublin in January.
Speaking about his experience, he told The Irish Mirror: “There were some people who didn't understand that I was even speaking in Irish.
“Like I busted out a few words or a few sentences and they were very confused. They were like, ‘What are you Portuguese or something?’
“But there were definitely quite a few people who recognised what I was doing.
“And then there were a smaller number of people, but still some people nevertheless, who were able to speak it fluently with me, and most of those were young people.
“They were definitely willing and excited to engage with me in a conversation in Irish. Which was pretty cool.”
He added: “A lot of people were at first totally confused. Their eyes just kind of bugged out, they're like, ‘What's going on? ‘Are you some kind of foreigner whose language I haven't heard before?
“But then you speak a little more, and they're like, you're speaking Gaeilge? That's cool.
“I found that a lot of people were really, really delighted that I was speaking Irish.
“Even people who didn't necessarily have the greatest command tried speaking with me and I found that a lot of people would say ‘Oh, I don't speak Irish’ but then when you push them a little bit more, they actually can converse with you in Irish.”
Arieh, who practised with online tutors before coming to Ireland, visited Dublin’s Moore Street and the Liberty Market on Meath Street before finishing off his night at Club Chonradh na Gaeilge - an Irish language-speaking pub on Harcourt Street.
He posted a video to his Youtube channel showing real interactions he had with Irish locals on the streets and the clip now has more than 2.1 million views.
Speaking about how hard he found Irish, Arieh said: “I've studied probably over 30 or 40 languages at this point. I feel like I have a pretty good basis to rank the difficulty level, and I found Irish to be above average in terms of difficulty.
“So, definitely on the hard end and harder than languages like Hindi. I found the grammar particularly challenging. The pronunciation was a little bit difficult.
“But I found the grammar very, very unlike previous languages that I had studied. I never studied any Celtic languages before …it was a very, very unusual language to study, and verbs conjugated in very tricky ways.”
Since returning to the US, Arieh has watched the comedy short film “Yu Ming is Ainm Dom” about a Chinese man who learns Irish and is left baffled when nobody understands when he arrives in Ireland.
The New Yorker said: “It was so funny seeing that video because it resonated with my experience so closely, like the shocked and confused look on the face of the Irish man interacting with the Chinese guy speaking Irish … it’s brilliant.”
Arieh said learning the language a person’s ancestors spoke can be a “very moving and engaging experience”.
He explained: “I'm not ethnically Irish, but for me learning the language of my own grandparents and great grandparents, which is Yiddish was a really exciting, really moving journey for me.
“I didn't grow up speaking Yiddish and my parents didn't grow up speaking it, but at the same time, I know, it's my ancestral language.
“So for your Irish readers, I think it’s similar. I would definitely encourage them if they're interested to try and even learn a little bit.
“I think a lot of people will find that it's culturally a very, very moving and engaging experience, to resurrect something that maybe was part of your past, but you don't actively use in your present life again.”
Arieh said he often studies two to four languages at any given time but said once he revisits them after a couple of months or even a year it all comes flooding back.
He explained: “I find that you do forget the particulars of a language after you study it when you don’t use it for maybe a year or a few months.
“But if you go back and try to revisit it, you find that those memory cells are buried very, very deeply in your brain, and you can recover them pretty quickly.
“And I think that's actually an interesting thing in Ireland with a lot of people.
“I found even older people who hadn’t studied the language in decades and hadn’t used it much since they left school knew a lot more than they thought and some were even able to converse with me.”
Up until Arieh was 18, the only language he spoke was English. He then took a Mandarin Chinese class and later moved to Beijing for a year.
Speaking about his success on Youtube, Arieh said: “I was really inspired to make videos on the internet about my experience learning Mandarin Chinese and about teaching languages.
“I did that for a while on the side, as a fun hobby. But then a couple of years ago I decided to quit my full-time job and try doing these videos full-time.
“It took a couple of years to actually be able to make a living with it.
“But eventually it clicked and here I am now with learning languages as my full-time job.
"And so for me to finally have a job where I can indulge my passion for languages. It's very exciting.”
He said his best tip for somebody wanting to learn a new language was just to speak it.
Arieh said: “I think pound for pound, probably the most effective way is speaking.
“A lot of people get very anxious when speaking languages, but I find it's not really worth being nervous about because even if you don't speak perfectly, people are very excited to try and converse with you in their language.
“My main advice would be to just encourage people to try and to use language in real life as much as possible.”
Arieh said he will continue learning Irish and hopes to return to Ireland and spend some time in Connemara.
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