Whenever locals find out that tourists and foreigners have made efforts to learn their regional dialect and language, they are always delighted. However, this is easier said than done and requires consistent practice to master speaking in a completely different language. A Caucasian man named Arieh Smith, who goes by Xiaoma (@xiaomanyc) on TikTok, left people from Nigeria stunned after speaking in Yoruba, one of the three prominent languages spoken in the country. The man was shopping for a few clothing items in a store. He asked the shopkeeper in English, “Where are these clothes from?” The woman answered, “Nigeria.” As soon as Xiaoma heard this, he immediately switched to speaking in Yoruba, leaving the vendors baffled.
Representative Image Source: Pexels| Cottonbro Studio
In Yoruba, he asked, “Do you speak Yoruba?” As soon as the woman heard him, she turned towards him with a jaw-dropping reaction and stared at him. Impressed by his fluency and chuckling to herself, she responded in the local language, “Yes, I do.” Soon, another black man at the store heard him speaking and was equally stunned in smiles listening to him. He immediately went over to Xiaoma to shake hands with him. “Yeah, I do speak some Yoruba,” he repeated. The whole conversation continued in Yoruba. “Good, good,” the woman exclaimed, extremely delighted on hearing him.
Representative Image Source: Pexels| Antoni Shkraba
The other man even pulled out his phone and excitedly asked if he could record Xiaoma speaking. The Caucasian obliged gladly and even shared a traditional Yoruba greeting as he spoke. The woman continued to engage in a light-hearted conversation with him. He revealed that he was an American. The black man was overjoyed at hearing Xiaoma and said in English, “I’ve never seen anything like this. You make me so proud.” As the trio continued to speak, Xiaoma even shopped and tried on clothes and bargained with the woman, all in Yoruba.
On his website, the man revealed that his extensive knowledge of the language comes from his passion for learning new languages. He shared how his journey of learning new languages began and mentioned that he wasn’t always a language expert. He was quite a “language idiot.” He started by learning Chinese. “Growing up in NYC, I only spoke English. But my dad would take me to Chinatown when I was little and man, it was the coolest thing! The lights, smells, tastes — it was just wild. I dreamed about someday being able to speak this amazing, intricate, seemingly exotic language, but I never actually thought it was possible to really get fluent,” he recalled.
Image Source: TikTok|@learnenglishwithaaron
Image Source: TikTok| @lorenzo97
Several people were amazed at the man’s confidence as he spoke and the locals’ warmth and acceptance towards him. @nellykush said, “It’s amazing how language brings people together.” @ttenjanuary added, “This is why you should speak a little of the language wherever you go, see how easy it is to make people happy!” @thattregangirl commented on the black man’s reaction saying, “I love how the man said he was proud. That’s the kind of energy we need, good on you sir!” @kevcutty remarked, “A little connection and effort and boom, friends.”
You can follow Xiaoma (@xiaomanyc) on TikTok for more wholesome content on language and lifestyle.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.