I Thought Bad English Was Keeping Me Off YouTube. I Was Afraid of the Wrong Thing.

Have you ever opened YouTube, watched somebody’s channel doing extraordinarily well, and quietly concluded that the reason is something you do not have? Their English is better. They are comfortable on camera. You are not, so this is not for you.

I know that feeling in detail, because I stood outside that door for years holding exactly those two fears: that nobody would want to listen to my English, and that I would have to put my face on the internet.

The first years, and what I told myself about them

I started making videos in 2017. I came to it early, with all the optimism of somebody from a small town who has decided that this is the thing that will change his life.

For the first stretch – nearly five years of it – I worked in the dark. I built channels and deleted them. I rebuilt and failed again. Money went out and nothing came back, so I borrowed and reinvested and failed more expensively. By the end of that period I owed an amount that I could not see a way out of. It was not a number on a page. It was the thing sitting on my chest every morning before I was properly awake.

And I had an explanation ready for all of it. Your English is bad. You will not go on camera. YouTube is not for people like you.

I believed that for a long time. Long enough that it shaped what I tried and what I refused to try. It turned out to be wrong in a way I find slightly embarrassing to admit.

What actually changed in 2022

By 2022 I had run out of alternatives, which is a good state to be in when you need to try something genuinely different. This time I went at it from another direction: faceless formats, software doing the parts of production that used to take days, and – the part that mattered most – choosing a niche aimed at an audience abroad.

Then I noticed something that stopped me cold.

In the niche I had chosen, English was barely used at all. Not “your English is good enough”. Not present. No narration, no text on screen, nothing that required me to write a sentence anybody would read. The fear I had built five years of avoidance around was a fear of something the work did not even involve.

Things started moving from that point. Over the following four years I cleared the debt. Not overnight, and not because one video went unexpectedly wide. It happened because I finally understood what kind of asset I was building, and stopped treating each upload as a lottery ticket.

A video I pulled apart recently

Let me give you something concrete rather than a story about my own feelings.

I recently spent an afternoon analysing a travel video for a teaching session. It is not mine – it belongs to a channel I have no connection to – which is part of why it is useful. It is a walking tour of a small alpine village. No narration. No text on screen. Just the streets, the sound of footsteps, and quiet music underneath.

The view count is not what kept me there for an afternoon. What kept me there was the shape of how it grew.

In its first month it gathered only a small fraction of the views it now has. Which means the overwhelming majority of its value arrived after everyone had stopped paying attention to it. It crossed each milestone slowly and steadily, over roughly a year and a half, and as far as I can tell it is still collecting views every day.

That is a completely different object from a video that spikes and dies. A viral video is a firework. This is closer to a tree: you plant it, very little visibly happens, and then it produces fruit year after year. The word people use for it is evergreen, and it is the only reason any of this ever became sustainable for me.

The best evidence is in the comments

If anyone still doubts that you can reach an international audience without a word of English, I would point them at the comment section under that video.

There are more than ten languages tangled together down there. Arabic, Russian, Korean, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Indonesian, German, Thai. Nobody coordinated it. People from everywhere left a line of feeling in whichever language they think in.

Consider what that means. A video that says nothing reached people across the entire world, because what it reached them through was not language. It was feeling. People put on videos like that to escape a long day, to calm down, to imagine a trip they may never take, to fall asleep more easily. Those needs never go out of fashion and none of them require translation.

There is a form. There is no magic.

Sitting with that video, the craft turned out to be fairly legible. Open with the strongest image you have, inside the first fifteen seconds, so nobody has to wait to find out whether this is worth their time. Hold each shot for five to ten seconds. Cut straight, without transitions. Keep the camera at the eye level of somebody walking. Put nothing on the screen. Let the music stay underneath rather than on top. Finish by returning to the shot you opened with, so it closes a loop.

Now the part I want you to actually hear. That form is necessary and it is nowhere near sufficient.

Beautiful footage and correct composition are the price of entry, not the outcome. What happens after you publish depends on the algorithm, on your title, on your thumbnail, on the subject you chose, and above all on whether you are still doing this in eight months. I am not going to stand here and tell you that following a checklist produces a large audience. Anybody who tells you that is selling you something.

This is work where you plant a lot of seeds and wait a long time. Some never come up. The ones that do keep producing for years. The real lesson from that alpine video is not “do this and go viral”. It is: do not give up in week two, because most of the value arrives long after week two.

If you are standing where I stood

I wrote this for the person still carrying the two fears I carried.

You are not losing because of your English. In formats like this one, English is not used. And you do not have to step in front of a camera if you are not ready to – that is a production choice, not a requirement.

What you actually need is a clear understanding of what kind of asset you are building, and ideally somebody a few steps ahead who can point at the places where people usually trip. I found those places by walking into all of them personally, over about five years, and paying for the privilege.

I should be honest about the limits of what I can offer you. Results differ enormously between people and between subjects. Platforms change their rules. Nothing about this is guaranteed, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise – I spent too long on the wrong side of that promise to make it to anybody else.

But if you want to understand how faceless channels for English-speaking audiences actually work, that is what we do at mmoyoutube.com. The door is open whenever you decide you are ready to walk through it.

– Phuc