Joshua (Language Simp)

Joshua is a popular polyglot YouTuber.

He has more than 1.4M subscribers on his YouTube channel, Language Simp.

Introduction-

Joshua was born in 1998 in the United States; he grew up in the U.S. and hails from Anchorage, Alaska.

He has a predominant German ethnicity.

Growing up, Joshua was not good at languages; he got expelled in his fifth grade for cheating on a Punjabi grammar test.

Up until 19, he was unilingual as he knew only English.

Education & career-

Joshua studied for a degree in biomedical engineering with a concentration in neuroengineering.

Then, he started working as an engineer; later, he quit this job to work as a full-time YouTuber.

Love for languages-

In 2019, while in engineering school, Joshua was a little lost as he didn’t want to become an engineer; at the time, he watched the Inglourious Basterds movie.

In this movie, he heard different languages like English, French, German, and Italian; he fell in love with French as it sounded to him gorgeous, sophisticated and luxurious.

Also, Joshua was surprised to see non-French natives speak fluent French and flawlessly switch between languages.

Hitherto, he didn’t know that people could learn other languages to fluency as he observed that even though Spanish is taught in American schools no one learns it to fluency.

So, Joshua was enthralled to know that he could learn other languages to fluency and decided to learn French; from 1 January 2019, he started learning French and never looked back.

French is his first foreign language.

He fell in love with learning French and was inspired by watching polyglots like Steve Kaufmann (he is Joshua’s idol) and others and knowing that it’s possible to become a polyglot.

YouTube & TikTok; quitting his job for YouTube-

Joshua has wanted to become a YouTuber since 8.

His love for YouTube started when he started watching women’s makeup tutorials channels like Rclbeauty101, later he shifted to watching Call of Duty gameplay channels like SeaNanners Gaming Channel and finally settled on language channels like Steve Kaufmann – lingosteve.

Since 2010, Joshua has been publishing YouTube videos.

When TikTok became popular, he started publishing language sketches there.

Joshua’s videos started becoming viral with tens of millions of views and he gained a million followers on TikTok.

Later, when he got an engineering job, he stopped working on TikTok but later, decided to give YouTube a try.

So, Joshua started Language Simp YouTube channel on 5 January 2021; he published his first video, “Perks of Being Multilingual Compilation,” on 18 March 2021.

Steve Kaufmann not only taught him to learn languages but also inspired him to become a language YouTuber.

As Joshua’s sketches on YouTube started becoming popular, he quit his engineering job to become a full-time YouTuber.

As of March 2024, he has 1.44M subscribers on Language Simp channel.

Joshua earns from a variety of sources like advertisements, membership, and sponsorships; also, he accepts donations on Patreon.

Also, he has two other channels, Языковой Симп and Le Simp des Langues.

Story behind the name-

Thanks to Joshua’s desperation for languages and his affinity for Gen Z humour, he named his channel Language Simp.

He calls himself a “hyperpolyglot giga chad alpha male who speaks over 50 languages fluently.”

Joshua was an avid video game player and grew up playing video games and also watched them on YouTube; and he borrowed the humour from the video game culture and applied it to languages and this clicked.

Learning methodology-

Joshua started learning Russian by reading and using LingQ.

But this seemed very difficult as he has a lazy right eye; reading stressed and hurt his eyes badly.

Instead of quitting, Joshua doubled down on learning Russian; he wore an eye patch on the right eye and started using LingQ and studying mini stories for three hours per day.

And thanks to this, he learned Russian to a decent degree.

Joshua hasn’t revealed much of his language learning methodology as he has paywalled it behind Patreon but has revealed that he uses Google Translate to learn to speak a few light-hearted phrases of a new language from day one, to make the learning process fun.

He memorizes a few phrases and gets himself involved in the language.

Joshua learns languages by himself as he feels that learning languages in a formal method by attending classes is flawed and hinders the learning process and is therefore not required.

As he can’t read text for long due to his lazy eye, he learns language by listening and speaking with people.

Joshua is a polyglot and knows French, English, Spanish, Mexican, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, etc.

His desire is to learn every language in the world and have at least 10 C2 certificates.

While working as an engineer, Joshua used to work with a few Danes, and this got him into studying Danish.

He loves alphabets and recited Arabic and Russian alphabets for many hours continually on livestream.

Some interesting facts about Joshua-

• His favourite languages are Russian and Danish.
• Joshua’s favourite language family is Slavic.
• In addition to loving languages, he also loves cultures and the world in general.
• He collaborated with popular polyglot YouTubers like Steve Kaufmann and Wouter Corduwener.
• Joshua travelled to Canada, France, Belgium and Switzerland.
• He got robbed on his first day in Paris and thanks to knowing French, he was able to fluently curse the robber and articulate with the police officer.

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

Share with me in the comment section below.