Inny Jan Wrote:

adam_invers Wrote:[...] And I've read about how speaking a language in front of other people can be a bit of a challenge.

So, everything you are saying here so far, rather than on your first hand experience, is based on your assumptions, guesses and reading of the internet?

Righty oh...

Do you disagree that some people lack the confidence to speak a foreign language in front of others? If not, then what's the concern?

If I said that I had a first hand experience with lacking the confidence to speak a foreign language in front of others and felt that it was a hurdle, do you naturally assume that I'm lying about that first hand experience? If not, as your post suggests you wouldn't, then why should it be naturally assumed that another person's experience that I read about is a lie? Therein lies the confusion. You're making it seem as though my recanting of a first-hand experience would somehow be more credible than someone else recanting their first-hand experience, as though my first-hand experience would be a more credible source somehow.

adam_invers Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:"so he might personally excel more from his method than the average person would."

There appears to be little evidence of this.

It stands to reason that a polyglot who has learned several languages through their own developed method pretty much have something customized to their own learning process, not to mention a tried and true tested method that has worked for them in the past. Based upon that, it's fair to say that the person would probably be familiar with their method of learning better than someone who is just trying it out for the first time.

It doesn't stand to reason that his methods work anywhere near as well as he claims even for him, and even if he does qualify as a polyglot. The reason many people roll their eyes at benny, is that they are underwhelmed by the results he demonstrates. Now obviously we all have our own somewhat subjective definitions of fluency, but in general it seems to me at least that the more experienced the language learner (ie. the more they know what they're talking about), the less impressed they are with benny's results and therefore the less convinced they are of the value of his ideas. Listen to his mandarin after 3 months video and you'll see that his results are pretty mediocre or, dare I say, bad considering his position as a full-time language learning guy/guru.

nadiatims Wrote:

adam_invers Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:"so he might personally excel more from his method than the average person would."

There appears to be little evidence of this.

It stands to reason that a polyglot who has learned several languages through their own developed method pretty much have something customized to their own learning process, not to mention a tried and true tested method that has worked for them in the past. Based upon that, it's fair to say that the person would probably be familiar with their method of learning better than someone who is just trying it out for the first time.

It doesn't stand to reason that his methods work anywhere near as well as he claims even for him, and even if he does qualify as a polyglot. The reason many people roll their eyes at benny, is that they are underwhelmed by the results he demonstrates. Now obviously we all have our own somewhat subjective definitions of fluency, but in general it seems to me at least that the more experienced the language learner (ie. the more they know what they're talking about), the less impressed they are with benny's results and therefore the less convinced they are of the value of his ideas. Listen to his mandarin after 3 months video and you'll see that his results are pretty mediocre or, dare I say, bad considering his position as a full-time language learning guy/guru.

I don't remember saying that his methods worked anywhere near as well as he claims they do for him. I just pointed out that he probably excelled in the learning method that he created better than the average person who's just beginning a language might, and with the several languages that he's studied, it is reasonable to assume that he also has the ability to map out his own learning process for learning a new language that works well enough for him, which basically means that through his learning method, he's familiar with it enough that he can probably just begin using that method fairly quickly in order to achieve the results that he's achieved.

I don't know what his actual level is with most of his languages, though. I don't think I had a solid stance on that one way or the other. However, I have browsed the site off and on and it seems that he has some language certificates and has reviews by language professionals saying that his language ability in a particular language is at least decent, and he also received recognition from National Geographic, among the other tidbits where he's said to have worked and lived in various countries with the ability to communicate solely in that native language.

So I'm not sure what someone else might consider a polyglot to be, but at the bare minimum I at least think it's someone who can get around a country, several countries, to live and work in these places with confidence, by only speaking in the country's language while being understood (alongside some of the criteria mentioned above).

And for how people might have an issue with the claim of fluency, it's not like the guy is concealing his results from anyone. Everything I've seen on the site involves videos of him speaking the languages he's learned, involves a review of how well he's learned the language at the end of each learning process with some form of results included, and even goes into detail in those reviews about areas that are lacking in said language. Aside from the liberal and seemingly subjective use of the term fluency (which I think he's even acknowledged as being light), his site is fairly transparent.

Edit: After having watched the video that advertises his learning process right before someone can make a purchase of his language learning kit, Benny's video ("The Secret of Learning Another Language Quickly") even specifically states what his goals and abilities pretty much are in a target language. At around 2:02 into the video he says:

"Of course I spoke very bad and forgot words and my grammar not very well... but ultimately I could communicate with people. I could travel with confidence. I could go out on the town and make new friends. And I could immerse myself deeper into the local culture. And that's all I really wanted... was the ability to communicate and to make friends in the local language."

The video goes on to explain how his method is something that he likes and is a method that he feels works for him, even saying how sloppy the process tends to be when diving into it. It seems pretty straight forward. If someone has an issue with his approach to learning languages, all they really need to do is watch that video to get a solid grasp at what he's touting.

New Benny video today.

Benny Wrote:Sorry that this video is so short! Starting next week, I'll get back into weekly updates until the end of the project with maybe just one break (so 6 more videos up until the week my 3 months runs out), but I hope this teaser snapshot shows you more or less how I'm doing right now!

Video here.

Actually not that bad for 6 weeks.

Those damn "ahs" and "ums" are back.

Other than that can't really see much since the video is so short. I guess it's what I'd expect from an average person after the same amount of time.

i d be very worried to use the method he chose... but i am curious to see how it works out for him. looks like the absolute dirty shortcut to being able to small talk your way in a conversation. i tend to do the opposite of what he s doing and refuse any katakana word. i believe it will pay in the long run.

mrbryce Wrote:looks like the absolute dirty shortcut to being able to small talk your way in a conversation

shortcut to where though? japanese is almost entirely comprised of those little distinctions like いしゅかん　and いっしゅうかん that benny can't grasp without a foundation in chinese characters. moreover all the words sound the same to him because doesn't have the kanji to hang all those similar sounds on, so he can't remember any vocabulary.

If you've been sick for a week recently you can probably remember 病気... he's probably used it a lot in his practice skypes. (god those poor people...)
But it's gonna be hard when every word you learned also looked and sounded exactly like it.

even if you took all those ums and aahs out, he's only said about 3 sentences there, the crux of which was assisted every time. christ I did better than that halfway through a 101 class due to having learnt how to read a little.

however I think this is becoming a very good demonstration of someone finally doing all those sexy things we didn't do because we've been told to be good boys and girls and study kanji first.
this guy is a shining city on a hill for wasting your time with inefficient methods in japanese.

you can see it on his face at 1:50. he's exhausted and know's he's out of his depth.

his shining city of "talking first" has no foundation and is sliding down a hill of futility into a sea of irrelevance.

mrbryce Wrote:i tend to do the opposite of what he s doing and refuse any katakana word. i believe it will pay in the long run.

Your Japanese won't sound very Japanese if you do that, though to each their own. However you probably want to get used to hearing/reading カタカナ as it is very common and found throughout most "levels" and interests of the language.

dtcamero Wrote:shortcut to where though? japanese is almost entirely comprised of those little distinctions like いしゅかん　and いっしゅうかん that benny can't grasp without a foundation in chinese characters. moreover all the words sound the same to him because doesn't have the kanji to hang all those similar sounds on, so he can't remember any vocabulary.

You can remember vocabulary without kanji, and tell the difference between い and いっ without kanji. The latter, especially, has very little to do with the writing system.

EDIT: I'm not sure what language you get if you speak without "any katakana word", but it's not modern Japanese.

mrbryce Wrote:i tend to do the opposite of what he s doing and refuse any katakana word.

I'm curious how this would actually work. If you refuse all katakana words, what do you say for テレビ and コンピュータ / パソコン? Do you replace them with Chinese words like 電視 and 電脳?

patriconia Wrote:

mrbryce Wrote:i tend to do the opposite of what he s doing and refuse any katakana word.

I'm curious how this would actually work. If you refuse all katakana words, what do you say for テレビ and コンピュータ / パソコン? Do you replace them with Chinese words like 電視 and 電脳?

I can't speak for mrbryce, but I tend to avoid katakana as well, except in cases where it's the most common usage, such as テレビ or パソコン.

Some Japanese people see a white face and almost unconsciously start substituting in katakana words, like ミルク for 牛乳 and ストレート for まっすぐ. Yesterday at a restaurant, the waiter came up and said ドリンクは？ and I was like, What? Then he said 飲み物は？ and I got it.

If you don't establish that you can speak Japanese fairly well, the conversation may devolve into pidgin English. Then you can be Fluent in Japanglish in 3 months.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

patriconia Wrote:

mrbryce Wrote:i tend to do the opposite of what he s doing and refuse any katakana word.

I'm curious how this would actually work. If you refuse all katakana words, what do you say for テレビ and コンピュータ / パソコン? Do you replace them with Chinese words like 電視 and 電脳?

I can't speak for mrbryce, but I tend to avoid katakana as well, except in cases where it's the most common usage, such as テレビ or パソコン.

Some Japanese people see a white face and almost unconsciously start substituting in katakana words, like ミルク for 牛乳 and ストレート for まっすぐ. Yesterday at a restaurant, the waiter came up and said ドリンクは？ and I was like, What? Then he said 飲み物は？ and I got it.

If you don't establish that you can speak Japanese fairly well, the conversation may devolve into pidgin English. Then you can be Fluent in Japanglish in 3 months.

One time, I went somewhere for the first time and was asked "ファースト?" Couldn't understand what they were trying to say (thought they were saying "fast", which didn't make sense)...they kept repeating it over and over, and I couldn't grasp what they were getting at. Finally, they said "初めてですか?", and then I finally understood that what they meant was "first".

I also try to avoid katakana words when they're superfluous, such as those examples. What I guess I was responding to was the claim of rejecting any katakana words, which is essentially impossible.

JunePin Wrote:I guess it's what I'd expect from an average person after the same amount of time.

Average person, as of this forum, after 6 weeks would be somewhere in the middle of RTK1* still not being able to speak and listen, and that state would last for quite some time (much more than 6 weeks, I would dare to say).

*) Not average person would be done with Heisig, but still no speak, no understand either.

@patriconia Haha that reminds me of my first time in Japan, I was trying to book a bus trip and I went to the bus terminal. However I didn't speak any Japanese other than some basic greetings and what not. However I was in luck, the lady at the counter spoke English. I told her when I wanted to leave. She booked the first part of the trip, then asked me what time I would like to come back the next day. I told her I wanted to come back in the evening around 5pm or so, but I wanted the express bus, not the one that stops all over the place and takes 4-5 hours. She didn't seem to understand express (learned later they call it something else), so I told her I wanted the faster one, the "fast" one. She booked me on the first bus at like six am... Luckily changing it the next day was super easy.

Inny Jan Wrote:

JunePin Wrote:I guess it's what I'd expect from an average person after the same amount of time.

Average person, as of this forum, after 6 weeks would be somewhere in the middle of RTK1* still not being able to speak and listen, and that state would last for quite some time (much more than 6 weeks, I would dare to say).

*) Not average person would be done with Heisig, but still no speak, no understand either.

I meant average as in your average person just learning a language in general. Since he's an experienced polyglot and "language hacker" (whatever that means), I expected him to be a little better. Especially since he was avoiding the ahs and ums in his earlier video. (or it appeared as though he was, maybe that was just in the script someone else wrote for him in that other video... actually now that I think about that it makes sense he probably had no idea what he was saying).

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Some Japanese people see a white face and almost unconsciously start substituting in katakana words, like ミルク for 牛乳 and ストレート for まっすぐ. Yesterday at a restaurant, the waiter came up and said ドリンクは？ and I was like, What? Then he said 飲み物は？ and I got it.

Why do you say it's because you're white? A lot of Japanese people have different ways they talk, and that includes their usage of Katakana. And the fact you didn't get "ドリンクは?" is kind of baffling.

JunePin Wrote:@patriconia Haha that reminds me of my first time in Japan, I was trying to book a bus trip and I went to the bus terminal. However I didn't speak any Japanese other than some basic greetings and what not. However I was in luck, the lady at the counter spoke English. I told her when I wanted to leave. She booked the first part of the trip, then asked me what time I would like to come back the next day. I told her I wanted to come back in the evening around 5pm or so, but I wanted the express bus, not the one that stops all over the place and takes 4-5 hours. She didn't seem to understand express (learned later they call it something else), so I told her I wanted the faster one, the "fast" one. She booked me on the first bus at like six am... Luckily changing it the next day was super easy.

Ironically, asking for the most 速い/早い bus could have led to the same result.

Hilariously enough, the correct word was ノンストップ. Though I suppose if I had known the word 急行 she would have figured it out.

TheVinster Wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Some Japanese people see a white face and almost unconsciously start substituting in katakana words, like ミルク for 牛乳 and ストレート for まっすぐ. Yesterday at a restaurant, the waiter came up and said ドリンクは？ and I was like, What? Then he said 飲み物は？ and I got it.

Why do you say it's because you're white? A lot of Japanese people have different ways they talk, and that includes their usage of Katakana. And the fact you didn't get "ドリンクは?" is kind of baffling.

That's funny. You don't live in Japan, do you?

ドリンクは doesn't seem odd to me at all, also u see ドリンクバー all the time. A huge amount of katakana English is used all the time and is completely standard Japanese. I've heard foreigners in the past express that people start over using katakana words in their presence but how do you know how they speak when you're not around? I'm pretty sure most of the time it's just gaijin paranoia on overdrive. That or people using English because they assume correctly maybe that you won't understand them otherwise.

I think that, much the same way as it was fashionable to pepper your English with as much French as you could 2-300 years ago, Japanese people like to use "English" words in their everyday speech, too. I think that the waiter who came up and said "dorinkuha?" probably was more interested in showing all customers how down with it he was that he could use English words, rather than assuming that the foreigners he was serving couldn't cope with basic Japanese. It's true that there's still a huge perception in Japan that Japanese is soooooo difficult for foreigners to learn, and omg, no foreigners can really cope with Japanese, but that is slowly starting to change, I feel. At any rate, I try to think that most people are being benign, otherwise things would really get to me, but that's more a problem in touristy areas, in my experience.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:

TheVinster Wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:Some Japanese people see a white face and almost unconsciously start substituting in katakana words, like ミルク for 牛乳 and ストレート for まっすぐ. Yesterday at a restaurant, the waiter came up and said ドリンクは？ and I was like, What? Then he said 飲み物は？ and I got it.

Why do you say it's because you're white? A lot of Japanese people have different ways they talk, and that includes their usage of Katakana. And the fact you didn't get "ドリンクは?" is kind of baffling.

That's funny. You don't live in Japan, do you?

Living in Japan doesn't make you some sort of expert. Let's get this straight: I've never lived in Japan. See, when I went to the sushi place when I was Japan and they automatically handed me a menu in Japanese as well as a menu in English, that was them making assumptions about me because I'm white. The waiter saying "ドリンクは？" could have been because you're white, but it could have also been the way that guy talks.

Personally, I really haven't noticed people using katakana words around me more because I'm a foreigner, except when they are being especially over the top about me being a foreigner.

An example of them being over the top about it: I work at a special needs school once a week these days, and I eat lunch with a different class every week. There's always three teachers that eat with each class (since it's special needs, there needs to be teachers around all the time to help the kids), and they always like to make a big deal about how they have me as a special guest, and they use English-y katakana as much as possible. But it kind of makes sense, because many of the kids themselves aren't even really aware about what English is, so the katakana words kind of serve as a stepping stone to help them understand.

I never notice things like waiters using ドリンクは rather than 飲み物は more often with me. Then again, whenever I'm in Tokyo I notice people really don't expect you to know what the ***** is going on, so this kind of thing might happen in Tokyo more often.

ktcgx Wrote:I think that, much the same way as it was fashionable to pepper your English with as much French as you could 2-300 years ago, Japanese people like to use "English" words in their everyday speech, too. I think that the waiter who came up and said "dorinkuha?" probably was more interested in showing all customers how down with it he was that he could use English words, rather than assuming that the foreigners he was serving couldn't cope with basic Japanese.

Fair point about French. And English is somewhat fashionable here, but I doubt any thought at all went into saying something as mundane as dorinkuha even on a subconscious level. English has well and truly permeated into and effected the japanese language for a number of reasons. Kango are also gairaigo but no one makes a fuss about it because it's a less modern phenomenon but remember there are English words in Japanese that have probably been around a hundred years or more, or at least since the American occupation.