Paul Jorgensen (Langfocus)

Paul Jorgensen is a language enthusiast, polyglot, and a popular YouTuber.

He has 1.47M subscribers on his YouTube channel, ‘Langfocus.’

Introduction-

Paul Jorgensen hails from Vancouver, Canada.

While in university, he went abroad for the first time and travelled to Israel and lived there for a year.

While living in Israel, Paul fell in love with the country, its culture and language and so, he learnt Hebrew.

At that time, he also learnt some Arabic.

Paul loved the process of learning Hebrew and Arabic and this sparked his passion for languages.

As he learnt modern Hebrew, he wanted to learn biblical Hebrew.

Education-

Paul majored in the English language with a linguistics focus and minored in religious studies and as a part of the minor studies, he studied biblical Hebrew and biblical Aramaic.

After finishing this degree, he studied for an education degree.

Moving to Japan & starting his YouTube channel-

After finishing his education degree, Paul moved to Japan.

He studied Japanese in advance of moving to Japan.

In Japan, Paul started working as an English instructor at a university and his job involves teaching English as a foreign language.

On 31 August 2014, he started his YouTube channel ‘Langfocus‘ in order to share his hobby of learning languages and inspire his students to the same.

At that time, even though Paul enjoyed his job, he was not satisfied with it as he felt that he was not able to learn more and this was another reason for him to start his YouTube channel as he was confident that he would learn about new languages through the process of working on his channel.

He named his channel as Langfocus as he wanted to focus on the languages on his channel.

On 28 January 2015, Paul published the first video of his channel titled ‘Dilemma! Learn a “Useful” Language, or the Language that GRABS You?’

On 17 May 2015, before starting his ‘Langfocus’ YouTube channel, he started a YouTube channel by the name ‘The GEOfocus Channel’ but as at that time, ‘Langfocus’ was performing better than ‘The GEOfocus Channel’ and as he had limited time, he started solely focusing on ‘Langfocus’.

Since 2021, Paul started working on ‘The GEOfocus Channel’ and has a team helping him for this channel and on this channel, he focuses on various countries, their geographies, histories, economies, etc.

On 28 May 2022, he started his third YouTube channel, ‘Langfocus Highlights’.

First viral video & becoming a successful YouTuber-

On 4 May 2016, Paul published a video titled ‘Basque – A Language of Mystery’.

This was the first viral video of his channel as it got hundreds of thousands of views during that time and thanks to this, he realized the potential of his channel and started seriously working on his channel.

As of November 2023, Paul has 1.47M subscribers on his Langfocus YouTube channel, 67K followers on Instagram, and 41K followers on LangFocus Facebook page.

Paul earns from a variety of sources like advertisements and ‘Super Thanks’ on his YouTube videos, sponsorships, affiliate marketing and he also accepts donations on Patreon.

He also has a website.

Paul films his videos with a Sony digital camera and designs infographics for use in his videos mostly with Adobe Photoshop and infrequently with PicMonkey.

It takes him around 200 hours to produce a single video for his language channel and this time is inclusive of all the processes like editing, consulting with people, etc.

Paul researches the language profiles with the help of digital books, physical language books, academic papers, instructional websites, and question-and-answer websites like Quora, etc.

Polyglot-

At university, Paul studied modern Hebrew, biblical Hebrew, and biblical Aramaic.

During that time, he also studied Old English, or Anglo-Saxon.

Later, Paul studied many languages including but not limited to Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic and Arabic dialects like Palestinian Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, Japanese, Indonesian, French, Tagalog, Esperanto, Italian, etc.

Personal life-

Paul is married and has a son.

Previously, he lived in Osaka and currently lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Osaka and Tokyo are his favourite places in Japan, and he loves travelling.

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

Share with me in the comment section below.