TikTok is a star-making vehicle of late — look no further than Hawk Tuah Girl, aka Hailey Welch, for proof of that — and one of the more wholesome personalities making waves on the platform is Brazilian Mary Gomes.
Gomes, from Santa Rosa de Viterbo, São Paulo (and, therefore, a native Portuguese speaker), was born on Feb. 10, 1988, and is 36 years old at the time of writing. Her TikTok account, with the username mari_gomes_, chronicles her journey to learn the English language. She currently has 976,200 followers, and her content has been liked 23.5 million times. That’s especially impressive, considering she only started posting conversational vlogs in April 2024 and considering those numbers are rising daily.
But what makes Gomes’ videos so watchable?
Why is she so popular?
Gomes has garnered such a massive following because of her incredible likeability. She’s enthusiastic, upbeat, smiley, and generally lovely. One user commented, “I wish I was that exited [sic] when I learned English.”
People admire her tenacity in attempting to teach herself a new language and enjoy seeing her making noticeable progress and putting her new knowledge into practice in everyday situations (for example, she posted a video of herself ordering a sandwich in English, having been unable to do so a day earlier, and another video speaking in English one time when she went to get her eyebrows done).
Her videos always get at least tens of thousands of views, with many reaching millions individually. Her pinned video (embedded above) has 17 million views, and one about ponytails has been viewed 14 million times.
Watching Gomes’ videos is a genuinely uplifting experience, and we thoroughly recommend checking out her TikTok account. We wish her well in her continued efforts to perfect the notoriously tricky English language.