Polyglot Videos.

I know I’ve posted about polyglots a lot, but Matthew Erickson’s NY Times piece (Oct. 6, 2026; archived) takes an unusual (and unusually thoughtful) approach, and won my heart right off the bat by referencing one of my favorite novels: A few months ago, I finally read Helen DeWitt’s 2000 novel, “The Last Samurai,” in which the autodidact child protagonist, Ludo, teaches himself a vast spread of languages before turning 11: ancient Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, French, Arabic, Old Norse and Inuit, among others. Around the same time, my algorithm started pushing clips from Yuji Beleza, a 28-year-old Japanese Irish content creator with 7.6 million followers on Instagram and 11.1 million on TikTok. In his videos, Beleza wanders the streets of a city, susses out who might be a visitor or an expat and hits them with a variation of “Where are you from? I think I can speak your language.” Each subject, at first wary of this filmed intrusion, inevitably warms to Beleza as he eagerly starts a basic…