Hi, you may want to watch this video on Tim Ferriss speaking on learning anything. He discusses his own experience with learning Japanese and how he got around the Japanese language that took him only 11 months to become literate in Japanese.

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_ferriss_sma...thing.html

Yeah right. Don't get me started on this guy. He's a friend of a friend, so I hate to bash him, but he's long on self-promotion and short on actual results. He's proof that you can make any claim you want and people will believe you, because they want to believe.

Remind me to tell you sometime how I became literate in 10 days, using principles from my book, The 4-Minute Workweek.

Did he pass JLPT N1 or any other well-recognized literacy test?

"tim ferriss" only returned three results using the search function. I'm a little surprised.

But yeah... "literacy" and "fluency" become easily obtainable within any given time frame when the definitions of each word are defined to self-serve the user's framework.

It's easy to define yourself into being literate. Impressing ignorant learners is not the same as being able to communicate with the natives of the given language on their terms, without sounding like a 5 year old.


I'd like to see how well he could handle N2 level material.

I'm trying quite hard to find anything at all of him actually speaking Japanese - has anyone seen one yet?

Anyway, I think hes definitely huge on hype, marketing and self promotion but I'm far from convinced about almost anything else I've seen from him. I think too often he simply manipulates the definitions of what he is trying to achieve to make it appear he has achieved way more than he actually has.

It's true we don't see any true skill or anything, but how he tackles the Japanese language is quite interesting. I especially love his analysis on the idea of a due date, if I understood the video correctly of course.

For me I work much more efficiently if I have a DUE date, and this is for anything. School projects, work, prep for a tennis match, and of course Japanese. When I first started studying Japanese I really didn't take everything so seriously, just learning basic grammar and words here and there. But now that I actually have a due date for a AP I'm taking in school for college which is in about 8 months, my learning speed went up drastically. In a week I learned the amount i've been doing for a couple months when I first started. It's been about 2-3 months now and I'm at N4 so far, well N3-N4 in everything except listening. Listening has always been my weak point, heck even in English classes. But when it comes to cramming grammar and vocab, I'm fine with that. So if I were to take the test now, I would fail, but that is due to listening. My AP also has some speaking in there, so I suppose I better start some Lang8. 8 months to go, the test is about N3-N4 level anyway so I'm sure I'll do fine.

NightSky Wrote:I'm trying quite hard to find anything at all of him actually speaking Japanese - has anyone seen one yet?

Anyway, I think hes definitely huge on hype, marketing and self promotion but I'm far from convinced about almost anything else I've seen from him. I think too often he simply manipulates the definitions of what he is trying to achieve to make it appear he has achieved way more than he actually has.

Have a look at this video of him in Japan learning Yabusame.

http://vimeo.com/8611471

^unable to load/watch video on this connection; is he communicating in Japanese which would be considered "fluent"?

Edit:

Xanpakuto Wrote:For me I work much more efficiently if I have a DUE date, and this is for anything.

To steal a line from aYa's website:

Quote:Imagine you’re a biologist and you’ve been crossing frogs with snails and cloning sheep since you were in cradle – it’s your life, you know hell of a lot about it, it makes you happy and you can’t imagine your life without it. One day you discover there’s a wonderful new theory on how sheep can be grown into lions. Unfortunately it’s in the clitty-titty language, and you don’t know it. So you decide to learn the wonderful clitty-titty in a day or hang yourself.

My god I've never felt so instigated to criticize someone in my life.

If he was sharing his various pursuits simply to inspire others, I would applaud his efforts. Instead, he seems to participate in a practice that I find extremely insulting and degrading; make extrordinary claims in all sorts of things - misleading if not completely fabricated measures of accomplishment - and fail to provide extraordinary evidence. He seems to believe talking about himself is sufficient, and just so happens to overtly advertise his book on self-improvement at the same time. He has encouraged wish-thinking, whether he knows it or not, and he is clearly an intelligent man, so I question the validity of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" here. I think he was consciously aware of these things. It's insulting because he seems to expect people to buy it. It's indignifying because apparently he was successful.

Quote:In 2008, Timothy Ferris was named the “Greatest Self-Promoter” in the world by Wired Magazine. He received a record 3583 votes compared to the nearest runner up, the late Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, who received just 1138 votes. Interestingly, Ferriss also beat Steven Colbert, Sir Richard Branson and Jesus to the coveted top spot.

Is this supposed to be a good thing?

uisukii Wrote:^unable to load/watch video on this connection; is he communicating in Japanese which would be considered "fluent"?

He's able to say よろしくおねがいいたします ok in the beginning. after that he makes several minor mistakes with introductions. from that point on you only hear him say something once about dropping the bow... and everything else is just はい、はい. He nods and says はい when his teachers are talking to him but I'm pretty sure he has a translator and they edit out that person talking.

I'm calling bullshit on this guy. sorry.

he is legit able to hit targets with a huge bow while standing on a galloping horse without holding the reins. that's almost as cool in my opinion.

that yabusame video is hilariously cheesy.

Tim Ferris is an ultimate salesman which may be more a reflection on others' willingness to believe unsubstantiated claims, but nothing he does/says seems that remarkable.

Having said that, the pareto principle and a few other things he mention are worth knowing about.
There doesn't seem to be a video anywhere online demonstrating his "dozen" languages. And I wonder if a 4 hour work week is really possible for anyone who isn't a (multi?) millionaire author.

tripleaxe Wrote:

NightSky Wrote:I'm trying quite hard to find anything at all of him actually speaking Japanese - has anyone seen one yet?

Anyway, I think hes definitely huge on hype, marketing and self promotion but I'm far from convinced about almost anything else I've seen from him. I think too often he simply manipulates the definitions of what he is trying to achieve to make it appear he has achieved way more than he actually has.

Have a look at this video of him in Japan learning Yabusame.

http://vimeo.com/8611471

I flicked through that but couldn't find him speaking Japanese anywhere on it. I wasn't interested enough to watch the whole thing through.

this is somewhat related to... the thread title

nadiatims Wrote:the pareto principle and a few other things he mention are worth knowing about.

Interesting. I wonder how this impacts time spent on Japanese learning in regards to quality of time spend or diminishing after so much time in a day.
It does seem to apply to corpus, where when we use something like CB's word frequency analyzers we often come to find that 20% of the words make up about 80% of a given text.

I stumbled upon this at the end of the wiki page on Pareto principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(...t_culture) The 1% rule of internet culture. It seems to apply to this forum as well, though I'm not sure if I'm a creator or a contributor because I make posts but I don't make software or decks.

Xanpakuto Wrote:My AP also has some speaking in there, so I suppose I better start some Lang8.

I'll edit this post like a Lang-8 post:

You can say: My AP also has some writing in there, so I suppose I'd better start some lang-8.
Or perhaps you meant to say: My AP also has some speaking in there, so I suppose I'd better start some Skype/meetups.

Please clarify, as I'm not sure what you're trying to say.

My apologies ^^

"My AP also has some speaking in there, so I suppose I better start some Lang8."

Since the AP test has a speaking portion, I'm going to look for language partners on Lang8 to practice speaking with ;p

Well actually there's a writing portion as well, so I suppose I'll practice that as well on lang8.

Animosophy Wrote:If he was sharing his various pursuits simply to inspire others, I would applaud his efforts. Instead, he seems to participate in a practice that I find extremely insulting and degrading; make extrordinary claims in all sorts of things - misleading if not completely fabricated measures of accomplishment - and fail to provide extraordinary evidence. He seems to believe talking about himself is sufficient, and just so happens to overtly advertise his book on self-improvement at the same time. He has encouraged wish-thinking, whether he knows it or not, and he is clearly an intelligent man, so I question the validity of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" here. I think he was consciously aware of these things. It's insulting because he seems to expect people to buy it. It's indignifying because apparently he was successful.

Animosophy, that was such an awesome smackdown that it almost quenched by burning desire to write a scathing blog post on this guy. (Note: "Almost".)

So I watched the entire thing. It seems his claim is that, after 11 months of study (half of it spent in Japan), he knew Japanese well enough to do some translation back in the states. (I have no idea what "Level 6 Japanese" is.) That sounds reasonable. I've heard of people with N3-level Japanese who use Rikaisama and other aids to do assisted translation. It has nothing to do with "overcoming fear", and everything to do with working your ass off - and knowing how to fake enough to paper over your gaps.

Also, my girlfriend, who tangos and has done Lindy Hop and blues dancing for many years, is rather disdainful of his dancing abilities. Ballroom tango isn't Argentine tango, which is a demanding and nuanced dance that takes many years of assiduous practice.

Yeah it seems he can kind of do everything badly, but since most people can't do any of it at all he can fake his way through into convincing people he is high level at everything. Fair play to him I suppose.

Sometimes I think it'd be cool if someone gave a TED talk about all the stuff that went down in this forum with regards to the techniques developed for both learning Japanese and learning language in general.

Whatever else about Ferriss, his belief that we should work less and start pursuing our own interests in life more gets my approval.
There is nothing more pathetic and self-deluding than the slave morality (Nietzche term) of people who believe working hard to please your capitalist bosses is a virtue.
Roll on four hours a week working time. Workers unite!

Nukemarine Wrote:Sometimes I think it'd be cool if someone gave a TED talk about all the stuff that went down in this forum with regards to the techniques developed for both learning Japanese and learning language in general.

Seems like if anyone was to give that speech it should be you. If you search 'koohii' now, your beginner's guide thread is actually the 2nd result. It makes sense because it seems like that's basically where we send everyone who's new to the site.

I'm just not sure if its a message the public would be all that receptive to, however. Basically it amounts to saying "go do 8000+ flashcards and a bunch of other stuff, and you'll probably see your level improve by then-- maybe not fluent, but nonetheless improved." Meanwhile, the rest of the world wants to hear "Linguists HATE him! Discover the trick one canny student used to become fluent in 3 months while only putting in 15 minutes of study a day!" Cue poster child story and snakeoil product presentation, etc, etc.

[s0apgun]

My vote for a TED talk goes to Nestor/Dark Japanese. Although I'm not sure if that would be possible considering he might have turned himself into a completely virtual entity capable of collecting language learning techniques from all corners of the web 24 hours a day.

Interesting video- thanks. I'm guessing his definition of fluency is being able to have basic conversations in the language- though he did say he could "read" the Asahi newspaper when he left Japan.

I do believe that he can (or could back in the day) speak semi decent japanese and manage newspaper articles given the circumstances (full-time immersion at a youngish age), but there is a big difference between doing a couple of freelance translation odd jobs and actually being good enough for full-time professional translation.

He gives the impression of hacking language learning and reaching mastery quickly but where is the proof? What he really gives is tips for learning a trivial amount in a non-remarkable amount of time using fairly standard methods and resources.

This guy's basically just a narcissist. He's spent a lot of time learning how to seem charismatic to as many people as possible, and he stretches the truth about his accomplishments to impress others.

Now, granted, it seems like he really has had a fairly interesting life in terms of pure experiences. But the over-the-top way he presents it all, and the narcissism that motivates his accomplishments, is what makes him so obnoxious.

That's not that bad by itself. But the more he stretches the truth to get attention, money, and women, the more he's slipping into con-artist territory.

It's too bad that people can't see through this type of person more easily.