Anming (Oriental Pearl) – Detailed Biography

Anming is a popular American polyglot YouTuber.

She has over 1.4M subscribers on her YouTube channel Oriental Pearl.

Introduction

Alyssa Studebaker was born on May 24, 1994 and hails from Ferndale, Detroit, Michigan, United States.

She has a predominant German ancestry and a minor Ukrainian ancestry. Her last name is German.

Anming is her Chinese name. “An” in Chinese means peace and the common character for “Ming” means bright.

Her step dad, Arie, is Jewish and is fluent in Japanese.

As a teen, Anming struggled with learning Spanish, even after studying it for around five years in high school.

She attended Spanish classes in school but wasn’t able to converse in Spanish as she didn’t learn the language from a native Spanish speaker.

Student of the year & studying abroad

Anming studied for a BBA in Advertising, from 2008 to 2012, from Northwood University in Michigan.

She was the student of the year and also received the Turner Award.

Anming worked as a Marketing Specialist at CoreTech System Co., Ltd., from 2013 to 2014 in the US and Taiwan.

She joined Fudan University in Shanghai, China, in 2017, to study for a master’s degree in international relations and affairs, fully in Mandarin Chinese. She was the only American in her class.

Anming joined Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, in 2019, through a student exchange program for Asian Pacific Studies where she was taught entirely in Japanese.

She completed her master’s degree, with a speciality in American, Chinese and Japanese politics, in June 2021 from Fudan University.

Then, Anming worked as an English teacher in Japan before starting to work as a Public Relations Coordinator at Marriott International in Tokyo in 2021. This job sponsors her visa.

Love of China

While studying at Northwood University, the university had many exchange students from China and she wanted to befriend them.

At the time, Anming had a Chinese boyfriend, Raymond, from outside the school. As his parents didn’t speak English, she decided to learn Chinese.

She loved Chinese so much that after graduating, in 2012, she went to Xi’an, China for a month and worked as an elementary volunteer teacher. As she liked the country, she decided to stay there.

But later Anming moved to Taiwan to work at a Taiwanese company. As she didn’t like the job, she quit it after two months and then moved to Harbin, China.

Her Chinese ex-boyfriend hailed from Harbin but as he wanted to stay in the US, she broke up with him and moved to Harbin.

Anming chose to live in Harbin as there were very few foreigners there which would allow her to be in the Chinese environment with very little English.

After living a year in Harbin, she started disliking the city due to the poor standard of living. She found the city to be too harsh, cold and gloomy and the air quality wasn’t good.

Also, the electricity wasn’t stable due to the power cuts and power surges.

So, Anming moved back to the US but within ten months, she returned to China and started teaching English at The SMIC Private School in Shanghai to afford Chinese language classes.

Initially, her parents and grandfather didn’t support her decision to move from the US to China. She graduated as a top student in her school and they felt that she was wasting her life teaching English in China.

Anming taught English for three years and then, she joined Fudan University in Shanghai.

She lived in China for six years in total, in Harbin, Beijing and Shanghai. In those six years, she also travelled most of Asia and lived briefly in the US, Taiwan and Japan.

Chinese & SpongeBob

Initially, when Anming started learning Chinese, after being influenced by Chinese culture, her family didn’t support her.

But she didn’t give up learning Chinese as at the time, she wanted to learn a foreign language.

Anming self-studied a little bit while in the Northwood University to get into the group of exchange students from China and befriend them. She also used a Chinese character app.

Even though she had a Chinese boyfriend at the time, she didn’t receive much help from him.

Initially, Anming used flash cards, listened to audio lessons and her pronunciation wasn’t good but this helped her get by when she moved to China.

Then, she self-studied for the first six months in Harbin and talked with people before joining a Chinese language school.

Anming started learning the language six hours a day. At the time, she used to watch SpongeBob SquarePants in Chinese and write down vocabulary notes.

She started attending the Chinese language school in 2012 and it set the foundation and helped her correct her Chinese as she taught herself wrong during self-study.

Also, the atmosphere of competition in the classroom helped Anming learn the language better.

She took the intensive, five-person Chinese class for 20 hours a week, from Monday to Friday and having a teacher by her side greatly helped her.

In addition to this, Anming used to also study daily for six hours at her house and memorize a lot of new words.

She used to also speak and practice with the Chinese people and the Christian community. Also, she had a tutor, after school, one-on-one two hours a day.

As social media sites like YouTube and Facebook were blocked in China, Anming used to immerse herself in learning Chinese without any distractions.

She felt learning Chinese was hard at the beginning as it doesn’t have alphabets.

Anming was able to speak good Chinese after living a year in Harbin and the six-month intensive language course.

She used to learn Chinese hardcore, for around three months and then used to take a break of three months and study the language casually before continuing to study hardcore. She repeated this process for three years.

She also used ChineseClass101.

Anming took the HSK three years after starting to learn Chinese and passed HSK 6 in 2015 and appeared on Chinese TV in 2016.

Japanese & love of Kanji

After passing HSK 6, she started learning Japanese. She was interested in learning Japanese because she found similarities between Japan and China.

Anming took some Japanese classes in China and started learning Japanese through language stacking, where she started learning Japanese through Chinese.

She also self-studied with flashcards, audio lessons and language exchange, meeting Japanese people living in Beijing and Shanghai.

At the time, Anming also continued learning Chinese words and reading Chinese books.

She felt Japanese was easier to learn at the beginning as it has alphabets and the pronunciation is easier but felt it hard at the advanced level.

Anming travelled to Japan for the first time in 2015 during the Chinese New Year holiday. At the time, she had no idea of Japan’s language, culture and customs but liked the country.

She studied Japanese at Japan Tokyo International School, in Shinjuku, for short-term, for a month and then later, after moving to Japan, studied at this school for six months before switching to another language school.

Anming also had three tutors for Japanese and she used to also interact with the Church community in Japan.

Attending Japanese language schools greatly helped her in learning the language. It took her four years to get good at Japanese.

Anming also used the entire Pimsleur Japanese series, JapanesePod101, Japanese books, HelloTalk and online dictionary.

She was able to easily learn Japanese from Chinese thanks to the Kanji.

Anming loves Kanji and East Asian culture.

She is a polyglot and knows English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese and Vietnamese.

As a child she was shy and introverted but became an extrovert after learning several languages.

YouTube & inspiration

Anming started her YouTube channel Oriental Pearl on 25 April 2019.

Initially, she started her channel just to share her experiences with her family. But later as her channel started attracting a lot of people, other than her family, she started producing content for the wide audience.

People in China and Japan used to be taken aback by Anming’s language abilities and she started capturing this in her videos.

While studying in Shanghai, she liked the Oriental Pearl Tower. She named her channel after the Oriental Pearl Tower as she wanted to focus her channel on China.

But later as Anming started travelling to other countries like Japan, she diversified the content of her YouTube channel.

She got inspired to start on YouTube by Benjamin Rich’s style of interviewing people in his YouTube videos. Benjamin was the man behind the bald and bankrupt channel.

At the time, Asian Boss was also her favourite YouTube channel.

Currently, Anming has over 1.4M subscribers on her YouTube channel and films with a GoPro.

Making Japan her home

Anming lived in Japan for a year, loved the country and then returned to China.

She applied to study from Fudan University, in 2016, but as she didn’t get any response, she got fed up and moved to Japan in 2017.

Anming enrolled into a Japanese language school to study Japanese from intermediate to advanced level and also secured a job in Japan.

At the time, she learnt that she had been accepted into Fudan University in China. As she was living in Japan, she delayed enrolment into the university by a year.

After studying Japanese for a year in a Japanese language school in Tokyo and teaching English on the side, in 2017, Anming moved back to China to join Fudan University.

She returned to Japan, in 2019, to study from Waseda University as a graduate student exchange.

Later, she started working in Japan and made the country her home.

Personal life

Anming met Tommy on the HelloTalk app, in late 2020.

He was her language exchange partner. Tommy was trying to study Chinese whereas she was practising Japanese.

After meeting him in person, in Shinjuku, Anming was impressed by his confidence.

Later, they fell in love and married on 21 May 2022 in Japan.

Tommy, a Japanese salaryman, hails from Saitama.

Anming is a catholic and has been a member of the Catholic Church.

She lives in Tokyo and is tall at 5’6.

Anming loves Indian curries and Dongbei, Northeast Chinese food.

So, how are you inspired by the success story of Anming?

Share with me in the comment section below.