Gave me a smile too! I'm working with mexicans trying to learn french and I'm trying to learn spanish. We often switch to english for convenience (They are all either "Spanish-french"(2) or "Spanish-english"(6).) We say that to each other EVERY DAY. They tell me to stop talking english and go french or I tell them to stop talking english and go spanish. It's a lot of fun!
@@tinyybiceps Not being worried about making mistake is very important. To learn, you gotta talk! Make all the mistake in the world, as long as you're trying to improve. If I may ask how many languages do you speak, and|or would like to speak?
@@todalio9238 I need to learn Spanish!! I work as a regional business development sales manager for construction, and I drive all over the city in my state of Texas, and most of the guys on the sites are Mexican! I want to learn so bad, (I was even raised almost my whole life by a Mexican, my ex step dad, and barely know any Spanish!) when I meet these guys, I try to listen and speak some Spanish words to them, and they help me, but i just don’t know the fastest way to learn or remember the words! Any advice?
@@PolntBlank Yes. Haitians are considered genetically African. As a race in the United States, they are considered part of the African American demographic .
I love the lady at the outdoor market. "Do you speak English?" *_"No, you are practicing Creole today"_* like "nah, you made this decision now stick with it, bucko" 😂
I'm Filipino American and grew up with a lot of Haitians. I was always invited to their family dinners and cookouts. They take you in like that. Lovely people.
I would say Filipinos are just the same. Perhaps it is because both our nations share hard comings and very similar immigrant mentality in North America. This is from a Haitian Canadian with his Filipino Canadian wife.
It's not that he WANTS to eat so much, it's just that's the easiest way to find common ground, sharing culture through language and food :) Also food is delicious.
Yeah, that was touching. I feel like Haitians have a very strong sense of community. There was a time in my life when things got tough and I had to live in an old broken down RV in a trailer park for a couple years. I often didn’t have enough to eat. The trailer next to me was occupied by a Haitian man and his mother. The mother would check on me Every Single Night and bring me food if I hadn’t eaten, and it’s not like she was doing great financially. She was the biggest blessing during the hardest time of my life.
I've heard a story before somewhere, and the guy said something very similar in his broken English after doing an act of kindness: "Today you, tomorrow me". Same message.
You mean creole? If you’re not going to respect the name of the language don’t f*cking talk about it. You must sound real stupid when you ask people “Do you speak Haitian?”
I like how when you speak the language, it's like the code into a secret society. So all the people just standing nearby looking like customers look at the workers and you realize they're actually there as part of the community. If that makes sense. You get the feeling they are careful not to frighten Americans by speaking any other language, but as soon as Ari lets them know he's one of them, they all relax and look relieved.
When you started speaking Patois I started laughing, but then I was like “How am I surprised he speaking Patois too? Of course he does.” My father is Jamaican, so it caught me off guard! Bless up!☺️
Loved that part. Also kind of impressive by Xiaoma that he realised she said sleeping. Honestly shows that he does more than JUST learning prepared sentences
@@Fluxje A lot of it also comes down to recognizing latin roots, like in this case "dorm-" relates to "sleep/rest" in a lot of languages. Language is awesome!
@@buildintotrains exactly. Plus it sounds almost the same in French and in Creole so I’m not surprised at all Xiaoma would pick up on that considering the latin roots as you said.
i’ve never actually heard anyone speak haitian creole before, it’s so cool how similar to french it is! i mean ofc i knew that it came from french, but i didn’t realize how many words i’d be able to understand. the grammar is definitely different, but a lot of it just sounds like accented french (it’s definitely easier for me to understand spoken out loud than seeing it written, which is kinda odd because it’s the other way round with standard french, but since the pronunciation is much closer to french than the writing it does make sense)
I would also add that although he did phenomenally, he mixed a lot of french words and french pronunciation in with it. For example he said "besoin" where in Creole it's "bezwen"
@@Graad if i would consider it french he had some accent for me, he spoke some words more like spanish, like "bien" or "parce-que" but french is not my main language. but since its not french maybe its how in creole those things are spoken. but i would say i understood 65-70% of it. but my french on the other hand is also a bit rusty, havent really used it in over 15 years.
@@grasgruen84 Yeah he has an accent but not a strong one. I am from the french speaking side in Belgium and I could understand easily many of the french words he spoke. :)
I have like low level conversational french two years highschool two years college only person that speaks it in my very small city so I go to vrchat to practice and I agree with you French for some reason is much harder for me to understand spoken than it is written.
As someone who speaks French and English, it was crazy how much I understand of what he was saying. I knew Creole had French words and was similar to French, but I didn't know it was THAT CLOSE
Haitian creole and Louisiana creole, as well as their respective varieties of French are beautiful and easier for me to pronounce than their euro or pacific counterparts.
Omg this is my neighborhood! Born and raised and still live here lol it was so nice to see you literally go to the same places I go to and pass by everyday. Thanks for representing our beautiful culture! 🇭🇹
I actually live a few blocks away from the bakery. Right next to the bakery is a nice Haitian owned cafe called Aunt et Uncles. If you’re back in the area I recommend it
Sorry to disappoint everyone but Aunts et Uncles is NOT Haitian. I literally just confirmed it with them. I knew if they were Haitian I would’ve known this by now lol
Haitians are the most beautiful and warm-hearted people. I love them to bits. They have a beautiful history and culture too. Such noble people. Sending them lots of love from Africa. Without a doubt one of my favourite people.
I fell in love with the Haitian people in the 1970's when I first heard Coupé Cloué and Tabu Combo music. I admire these people hard work and ambitions. I even made a Haitian boy.
As a Jamaican myself I can tell you that you made a friend for life. We are some of the most loyal people in the world and will go to the ends of the earth for those who treat right, but don't make us unduly mad because we also unleash some fire real quick. That woman at the end has probably told everyone she knows about you so if you go into our community just know there's a chance you'll be made out immediately, even if we don't say anything.. Love your channel man, especially since it inspired me to take up language learning (Japanese at the moment). By the way I don't know if you did Japanese yet, I'm going to check right now, but if you didn't I'd love to see you do it. It's a hard but rewarding language.
@@11kungfu11 Tell me you're a racist without telling me you're a racist. What you're referring to is the (rightful) Haitian Revolution. Haiti is the only country in the world that had a successful slave revolt. As a result France has repeatedly tried to punish it to this day. These are the facts. Also, jackass, my comment was about Jamaicans. I don't know how the fuck you jumped to Haitian stuff. We are both VERY different countries. Now I have three questions for you. Are you against slave revolts? Are you supporting France's still-ongoing decision to punish Haiti for the successful slave revolt? Why?
@@BelchingBeaver69 is there something wrong with feeling a bond to your culture? and is there a reason you’re so bitter? i didn’t see anything but positivity in this comment :/ i hope you can start to look at things in a more positive light. the world will really open for you.
@@gracewildsmith1183 not sure why you sensed bitterness. I simply stated a fact; whatever negative emotions you inferred from that were probably just projection.
The people who gave you the water and what the man said about it really hit me. There are good people left in the world, you and the people you are connecting with are doing a lot of good
At 4:15 what she refers to as "Haitian spice mix" are actually seasoning blocks that are commonly used to make traditional foods in Haiti, Dominican Republic, and presumably other Caribbean countries. It's not a Haitian product but what she means is that it is an important part of Haitian household cuisine
I loved that she asked if he was practicing Creole today? (in Creole) when he asked if she spoke English to clarify his understanding of what she said. She didn't let him revert back to English and kept him in her native tongue. She was awesome that was cool to work him like a good teacher would.
You’re right that other Caribbean countries use this. In Puerto Rico, we have cubitos de jamón o pollo or others (little cube of ham or chicken). Cubes of spices that can be directly added to dishes like soups or pan fries.
Brother.... That first little clip means so much. The guy literally was already out of the store, and walked all the way back in just to ask the employees for you. Thats absolute love
I just want to say thank you, half my family is from Iran and seeing you being so passionate about foreign cultures and langages lit a fire in me. I'm now trying to pick up some basics to understand what my grandma is yelling !
I am Haitian and to see you speak my language better then me is very humbling. Keep doing what you do man you inspire me and others to learn new languages
Between my high school French and working with a Haitian dish room crew at a restaurant, I actually understood this video without the subtitles! It was so exciting.
Your videos show the softer side of humanity in NY. We’re used to seeing NY in chaos on the news. The NY’ers from other cultures always seem so kind and so happy! It’s great to show these amazing people in their small communities!
If you went to NY or watched non-biased media based in NY you would see it’s actually a lot more of this than the war zone some biased media places make it out to be. Every major city has its bad parts just like every tiny town does too, it’s all about opening your eyes to media bias and seeing the actual world around you and not the one you’re presented on the news etc.
You break down the boundaries to show we're all living the same life together. One love indeed. I think your work here is much more important than the gleeful surprise people show when you speak their language.
Haitians are some of THE most generous, hospitable, kind, and chill people in the world. I would absolutely LOVE to visit Haiti someday, live with a local family for a while, and just live the way they do. The poverty is horrendous, obviously, and I'd love to be an extra set of hands for anyone who's working on a project there. Sometimes I think that the fewer material items you have, the happier and more generous you are. I've never been happier in my life than I was when I was living in my car. I thought I would be happier after working so many well-paying jobs with great benefits. And even though I loved the children I was providing therapy to, I was missing out on making close connections with real people. I'm gonna hit the road again, work odd jobs, and just be with down-to-earth people.
Stupid XiaoMa, always making me feel better when I'm feeling shitty and trying to be mad at people. All jokes aside, loving all the new vids, my dude, and you're doing fantabulous!
im a long time haitian viewer of your channel and never would i have expected this🇭🇹! Also most of my family is from Queens which has a large amount of haitians living there
Hey man! Been watching your vids recently and seen your tremendous progress. I used to live in the shadows of NYC..NJ. I now live in South Florida. You need to do a segment here my friend! MIAMI! From Homestead to South Beach, Little Haiti, Little Havana… were high up there with amount of different diversities and countries from all over the world. South American dialects, different Caribbean Islands, Europe, Asia, Africa,..ha..Miami’s English accent is a form of its own lol! 😂. Anyways.. keep up the gift man! Just by being your good and honest self finds the good and honest folk. Many have their guard up being an immigrant, …you sir have the power to break those walls down and give comfort. You bring out a Joy in folks. Great work! ..South Florida needs to happen broseph.
That's because Haïtian creole (along with creole from Guadeloupe, Martinique & Guyane) was made by mixing African languages & french. Creole h1s become its own language, it's not a broken French (which is what French people think)
In Miami, we also have a large community of Haitians speaking Haitian Creole, here is the third most spoken language after Spanish and English, and they sometimes have signs in that language, specially in public transit.
Im from Chicago but back in 2015 thru 2018 I moved to Florida because my dad was sick. So since I am a bartender at Olive Garden you can transfer back and forth to any location in the USA. When i worked at that location in central Florida ALL the kitchen staff was Haitian. They are wonderful ppl and really know how to make work fun, they wld have me laughing so hard!! When my father recovered and I moved back up north I met alot of great ppl down in Fl but I wld say I miss the men and woman in the kitchen the most.The woman that worked Sunday mornings wld make Haitian food for breakfast (brunch) and it was amazingly good!!! Now im back to my home store and all the kitchen staff is Mexican and they make excellent food too. I love the authentic tacos, they are much better than Americanized tacos and quesadillas in Mexico arent anything like here in America
Enjoy the foods and the music. They have a very diverse culture. Haitians are very friendly and loving people. A great majority of them are multilingual.
My French teacher in highschool was from Haiti, he was supposed to teach us French but he taught use Haitian creole which was. Really cool, the differences are so major but you don't notice until you start learning French after learning creole for years
Haitian Créole! Please come to Louisiana’s Festival Acadian. We speak Louisiana Cajun and Créole French. We speak different Cajun French per Parish!!! It is a linguist’s heaven. You’d like it. The food is also amazing because it’s Louisiana and that is a huge part of our culture.
Im from the northeast and have always thought of Louisiana as a fascinating yet little understood state. Just the history of Louisiana itself is so rich. Maybe someday i will have the chance to explore it.
I want to shop at that store where they hooked him up and taught him all about Haitian food. Those are some world class people who know service, clearly.
Kreyol is a language I love, as a dominican, there's always this situation where people from both countries get stuck between the xenophobia and the historical stigma and just by greeting Haitians in their language you can see how their faces brighten up, that's what made fall in love with languages.
I love when you learn and speak languages a lot of the general American populace don’t think of or even know. Fuijanese, quechua, Native American languages I can’t remember right now, etc. Creole is more known than them but I personally don’t think about it often. You do a great job at what you do xiaoma!
@@todalio9238 that's because it's a bastardised version of French. Mauritius and the Seychelles speak Creole too as well as many other former French colonies.
@@todalio9238 When I say bastardised I mean to say that Creole is an amalgamation of both the native language and French at the time of introduction (be it 1500s or 1900s) and does vary linguistically depending on the historical context. And yes, the French from the mainland tend to be snooty and overly exaggerative which is what caused alot of the changing in words.
Haitian Kreyol is a mix of West African languages mixed with French. Slaves who spoke a variety of African languages used French words to communicate with each other during rebellion from the French empire.
I'm from Mauritius, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. We speak Mauritian Creole and it is surprising how similar our language is to the Haitian's Creole, even though we are a few thousand miles apart and historically both countries didn't really had any direct ties Ou p fair bon travail Xiaoman, contigner.
Love your videos. I'm learning Chinese at the moment and you're an inspiration. How about a funny "out-takes" compilation video with the times that you've been misunderstood, or said things wrong. You can't speak all these languages and not get things wrong occasionally. Come on! Prove you're human! :)
My learning for the day (and in the UK it's half an hour in) is how much of Haitian is closely related to French. Ps; I've specifically learned to say hello in Chinese to troll you if you ever come over to Manchester 🤣🤣 I would learn more, but with two toddlers and struggling to learn languages, you'd have to wait a good damn while for a conversation 🤣🤣🤣😔
Bruh it is literally just french with an accent to it and a few different words it amazes me how close it is as a decent french speaker I understand almost all of this
Misye! Tout moun konnen Xiaoma! That's awesome. Note: you don't have to say "mwen" every time. You can just use the "m" sound. I.e. Mwen renmen manje. = M'renmen manje.
I am from Seychelles, we speak Creole there too but different to the Haitian Creole. However, I can understand the Haitian Creole because it is pretty close to our own Creole. So, with your Haitian knowledge. You could visit the Seychelles and still communicate🤣🤣
This might've been your best one. I liked how the tea lady pushed you to keep practicing your creole and the other gentlemen who was giving you the drink for free.
I'm watching from Berkshire Uk. Brilliant video. It's amazing how friendly and generous people are when you take time out to interact with them and try their local cuisine.
Im half German and my dad was Army so we traveled a lot over Europe and I continued as an adult moreso in Asia and one thing that I learned early is that if you show the attempt to learn the language, culture and etc they show an enormous amount of respect. Genuinely love traveling trying to embrace new cultures.
Man this is so cool. I speak French and grew up around Haitians. Ive always found Haitians and their history to be fascinating. Youve inspired me to learn!
As an Italian, I have studied some basic French in middle school (6th to 8th grade) and wow this sounds a lot like French. Many many words I'm hearing in this video are actually French
Créole used to refer to a person of european descent that was born in the tropical regions. Since Haïti used to be French. The language over, there named créole, comes mainly from French and has a bit of taino and some words from west africans language. But, it is mostly French. Therefore, if you speak to them in French, they'll understand. But if you try to speak wolof, they won't understand.
@@Ptitnain2 Nah bro Haitian Creole grammar is very different from French. If they never learned French, they won’t understand it. The same applies vice versa.
Man I love watching your videos because you inspired me to do better , the fact you came into my neighborhood and start actually speaking my language you got a big thumbs up in my book 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽
As someone who grew up with a lot of Louisiana creole around but didn't really learn 'not great with French, I'm surprised by how much I understood. A lot of small phrases used around the house like, very good, eat, what, thank you very much, sit, shut the door, fish, a few I shouldn't say, lol
Feeling very humbled right now for a multitude of reasons. You're the best education on You Tube AND you restore my faith in humanity at the same time.
I'm French Canadian and just realized Creole is just broken French 🤣 I understood everything they said, but you basically speak creole with an American French accent.
Creoles are mostly french mixed with the native language from the area. They come from the colonization times, so they are probably what Quebecois would sound like without the language laws.
The "broken" is actually very derogatory my friend. It's its own language, derived from french and retains many elements from the African languages of the people. He's also a non native speaker so he could very well be making errors by reverting to standard french nouns and pronunciación even though there may be other ways to say it in puré kreyol.
@@romainbaker6266 Jamaican English is broken English, that doesn't make it broken in and of itself. Broken is a word that has several meanings, in this case, the bonds between words are severed, and if provides a more free flowing and unique subset
@@10thletter40 Jamaican English is a dialect of British English just as Canadian or American English are. Jamaican Creole which i think you're referring to is a creole language. Nothing is broken about it. Nobody calls French, Portuguese, Italian or Romanian broken Latin. You need to take into consideration the colonial context and that saying something is "broken" automatically diminishes it relative to the standard variety of the language that it exists with. I'm sure you can imagine the deeply racist history and connotations associated with creole languages in the Caribbean in particular as the primary speakers were definitely not white. All I'm saying is speakers of creole languages have been fighting for too long and too hard for their respective languages to be protected and respected for someone to try and justify why broken is an appropriate term.
I teach people how to drive semi truck most of my students are Haitian and i learned creole working here, to be able to teach better for them and it been rewarded with love and just good vibes always.
Am also trying to learn haitian creole (not nearly as fluent as this dude) for work, a majority of my coworkers are haitian and even with just the few sayings i can say its really cool to interact and learn and it goes a long way with the people who see youre trying. Stuff like this is awesome
Ugh! I don't even eat meat & all that food looked so good! But did I hear Xiaoma correctly when he said he's not getting alot of sleep when he was buying that tea because of his new baby?👶🏻👶🏻 Did anyone else know he has a new little one?🤷🏽♀️
As someone who speaks a decent amount myself, your Haitian Creole does sound good. You should keep it up, as it’s a relatively simply language and could open up a whole world of new connections for you. I must say I am surprised at how much you learned in such a short amount of time though. Wish my brain was that cooperative. Also almost cried when that lady bought you groceries and then the little speech that dude gave you about needing someone. And then giving her the $50. Ugh so wholesome. Also my Haitian friends speak so many languages. Most know English, creole, French and Spanish. Its crazy to me because a lot self-taught because they couldn’t afford school and yet they did an amazing job. Meanwhile I can only speak English and a “decent” amount of creole lol.
Woooow .. . So glad for that video 🤣 our foods are really tasty guys, I used to cook for an American friend , he can't even wait for the food to be cooked, he eats the seasoned meat raw, he loves the Haitian foods so much.....
At 9:12 while eating his patties he walks past a place called 'Aunty' something, and a woman outside says very clearly "y'all don't have any idea" and I truly, truly wish I knew what she was talking about
@@nordholz124 wai, en fai mo pa kav tro koz kreole pou sa raison exactement. Mo american avek parents mauricien, alor mo fek koz kreole en tigit. Mai mo konne ena en liv lor Kindle pou appran koz kreole moricien. Kit foi li kav servi sa. Sa bizen en challenge 😁 mo'nn trouvé ki ena en restaurant endan New York ki ete moricien. Si li appran kreole mauricien, kit foi li kav sayé so kreole la ba haha
