http://lifehacker.com/learn-to-speak-a-n...socialflow#

This guy Chris Lonsdale comes along and says some things which everyone here already knows, but don't get said often enough.
That being said he claims to have become fluent in mandarin in 6 months and native level shortly therafter... blech.

I'm just happy he mentions Stephen Krashen

As soon as I read "fluent in [anything less than "I studied X-language until I was ready to drive my car off a bridge while simultaneously punching twin babies"], I generally stop reading.

How is this guy like Benny? He learned 1 language, and he basically preaches a lot of what people here love to talk about, comprehensible input. Benny preaches the complete opposite.

I mean, yea I'm sure he didn't really get to fluency in 6 months, but I agree with a lot of his presentation. I didn't really make much headway in Japanese until I stopped trying to force it so much.

edit: But I will admit that the idea of "get fluent in set time" really does irk me...

Classic.

That presentation is perfect template for convincing people of something they already want to believe.

*Claim you did it.
*Claim you devised some method no one else found in several thousand years (a hack, wow)
*Throw in some vague mention of your expertise.
*Give examples amazing but utterly unrelated things that humans have accomplished.
*Tell people that they can do it quickly.
*Tell people they don't need talent or to work hard.
*Provide a personal success story of somebody somewhere.
*Reference some study that supports your point.
*Create vague lists of things that are obvious and that will click with your audience.
*Show some math that makes it seem easy.
*Tell people they just need to modify their "belief systems."

And in six months, you'll not only speak Chinese, but lose 100 pounds and be a millionaire.

The problem isn't with this bloke or Benny. It's just that this whole "inspirational" ideology is widespread these days. Come to think of it, it's sad that things like TED talks exist. It's the air we breathe that breeds this kind of character.

Another different, but not unrelated problem, is things like learning a language becoming "lifestyle" choices, or branding so that your persona sells well. "Hey, I'm the guy who does tai chi, see? I'm a spiritual person and I lead a balanced lifestyle." "Hey, I'm the guy who studies Japanese, see? I'm a clever kid and I hold the key to some exotic load of bollocks."

That said, you can learn a lot about a language in six months, probably enough to get by and chat around somewhat. That's not quite fluency, though.

Ya I don't have such a problem with it honestly if you could remove all the parts that involve the words 'fluent' and especially 'native level.'
Talking about native level Chinese in less than a decade makes me lose all respect for the guy..Otherwise I would be ok with his dumbed-down version of the input-hypothesis.
The problem is that Americans generally don't do serious foreign language study, so it's easy to pull the wool over their eyes re the investment required.
But ya as said before, promises of quick and easy fluency in X months. Blech.

afterglowefx Wrote:As soon as I read "fluent in [anything less than "I studied X-language until I was ready to drive my car off a bridge while simultaneously punching twin babies"], I generally stop reading.

Very well put. I do exactly the same.

Actually, most such fantastic claims are followed by a sales pitch. They are just fishing for potential customers.

I've seen Pimp****r ads promising fluency in 10 minutes: are there people stupid enough in the world to buy into this?

Also, I noticed lately at several places methods promising you to reach fluency if you only "learn X words in one year", X being -conveniently enough - some arbitrary round number.

Anyone who has learnt a language should know that the road is very very long, and that fluency cannot be measured by a simplistic tally such as "knowing X words in one year".

"Patience et longueur de temps
Font plus que force ni que rage."

In Lonsdale's case, his contention is also entirely unverifiable. Lonsdale is a businessman whose mobile app, Kungfu English, sells for $1,000 a pop (!) in China. If you read his resume (http://www.chrislonsdale.com/index.php?_..._subRoom=4), he's been working in China and Hong Kong since the 80s. This fellow may well speak Mandarin so sweet and fluent that it makes your eyelashes curl. But he's also had over three decades of exposure and practice. Six months, my foot.

Even a river of pure shit can "flow".

Talking seriously, I know more than 10k words in English, I read in English for several hours everyday, I study in English and I have fun in English. Even though I'm doing this for several years, I am far from fluency.

Some people say if you already are bilingual you can learn a third language faster, but even now that I know three languages (Portuguese (native), Esperanto (Why, god, WHY?) and English [Can I count French if I can read mathematics in French?]) it is still *very* hard to learn Japanese...

So, for me, it is obvious that this guy is lying and trying to sell something!

But I forgive Benny, he really doesn't think you can be fluent in 3 months, if you read his blog you will see that what he claims is that you can have fun and enjoy your language very fast. You don't need to wait until you are "done" with the language.

@Jahnke: isn't it ironic that most people who decide to learn Esperanto are language lovers who dabble in multiple languages, when Esperanto was supposed to free people from having to learn foreign languages ;-)

I tried the Esperanto thing briefly in the past, but I must say that I find that language super ugly. Too much regularity offends my sense of wabi-sabi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics

Comme cela, tu me comprends si je parle des variétés Abéliennes et des gâteaux différentiels, mais pas si je te parle des variétés de gâteaux au beurre? ;-)

Well, I didn't watch the video (limited bandwidth), but wouldn't it be possible for someone to be conversationally (aka speaking) fluent in 6 months? I mean, you're not going to be able to discuss any academic papers or anything, but you could definitely get by. However, the page it links to has some interesting points. (I think they may be the same ones in the video, though).

1) Learn thematically relevant vocab.
Makes sense, but I'd argue as a beginner you're better off starting by learning the most frequently used words instead of specialized ones. (or maybe in conjunction?)

2) Practice speaking
Pretty obvious, but also under appreciated, I think

3) Deriving meaning from the interaction (aka, specifically from body language)
Okay, I'm very skeptical about this one. Does anyone have experience with this? I looked up comprehensional input, and it's more to do with understanding with the majority of presented information, but used in conjunction with visual aids or context. I never saw body language specifically used as an example. To me, it just plays into the fantasy that you can learn without putting in work.

4) Learning a language is not about acquiring knowledge, but physiological training.
I have to copy/paste because I find this hilarious.
---
First of all, we have filters in our brains that filter in sounds that we’re familiar with, and that filter out sounds that we’re not familiar with. And if you can’t hear it, you can’t learn it. Therefore, you have to continually listen to the sounds of the language that you’re trying to learn in order to train your brain to let in the new sounds.

In addition, talking requires using your facial muscles. You have 43 muscles in your face. You have to coordinate those muscles in a way that makes sounds that others can understand
----
Am I missing the point here? Of course you have to listen to the language to "get used to the sounds", but if you don't understand what they're talking about, it's kind of pointless (at least I think so). And how do you begin the process of understanding? By "acquiring knowledge"! And this, right after they talk about "comprehensional input", jeez.

5) Mood matters/At first when people speak to you, you'll understand very little.
I'm not going to comment on this.


The following section has this point: #4 Focus on the core. Basically, there's a certain number of words in any language that represents the majority of words in daily life. I guess the problem is defining fluency. Of course, having those words is a good base, but not an endpoint. What do you guys consider "fluent"?

Kuzunoha13 Wrote:Of course, having those words is a good base, but not an endpoint. What do you guys consider "fluent"?

Thanks for your reply.

From the Wikipedia page on language fluency:

"In the sense of proficiency, "fluency" encompasses a number of related but separable skills:

Reading: the ability to easily read and understand texts written in the language;
Writing: the ability to formulate written texts in the language;
Comprehension: the ability to follow and understand speech in the language;
Speaking: the ability to produce speech in the language and be understood by its speakers.
Reading Comprehension : the level of understanding of text/messages."


So to answer your question, "fluency" cannot be considered as a base, but as an endpoint, which is an almost "natural" level mastery of the language.

"Fluency" is best appreciated by people who have mastered a second (natural, Volapuk and Esperanto do not count) language.

Speaking of myself, I learnt English starting some 30 years ago, and as of today, I still do not have 100% fluency:

I cannot read Dickens, for instance, without **a lot** of dictionary lookups. In my native language, French, I can read Diderot and Voltaire, Racine and Balzac with either none or very few dictionary lookups. Moreover, reading in English takes more time than reading in French. Now bear in mind that French and English do have lots of words in common.

I cannot write very well - I have to second guess my written phrases and constantly ask myself if I am not paraphrasing French in English. Plus, despite being vigilant, I still make lots of mistakes.

Aural comprehension is OK, but goes down the drain the minute the English speaker has an accent: Scottish, Australian or British. I have no such problems with the various French accents.

My spoken English still leaves a lot to be desired. I consciously avoid words I am not sure of while speaking and have a tendency to oversimplify my thought. Sometimes I have a blank and must use a French word instead of the proper English equivalent. Plus my accent is apparently very bad. I never quite mastered the native English word stresses.

When you consider this, 30 years of experience in a pair of languages that are not that far separate, you see that anyone claiming fluency in 6 months - or in 10 minutes for a tongue as complex and foreign as Japanese is pure fantasy.

Unless of course, you have your own pet definition of "fluency", which can be achieved in 10 minutes.

Another necessary, but not sufficient condition for fluency is the number of words you know.

It is very easy to check it out. Just pick up any pocket foreign language dictionary and open it at a random page. The pocket Kenkyusha I have here boasts 45,000 words.

Do you know and can you use upwards of 95% of the words on that page? If not, then you do not even have a necessary condition to qualify as "fluent".

45,000 words is a lower boundary. I am currently "reading" (i.e. deciphering) a short story by Akutagawa, and a good one-third of the words I encounter are not even in that dictionary. However, Akutagawa is not a very hard author to read for educated Japanese.

Fluency is a life-long endeavour. Enjoy travelling on the road, be philosophical as to when you ever reach your goal.

louischa Wrote:. . . When you consider this, 30 years of experience in a pair of languages that are not that far separate, you see that anyone claiming fluency in 6 months - or in 10 minutes for a tongue as complex and foreign as Japanese is pure fantasy.

That's the most sensible thing I've read in a while.

Well I don't have 30 years of experience but still consider myself fluent in English. 8 years in school, then like 5 years of browsing the English web. I've been spending like 3-5 hours a day reading reddit on my phone for the last 2 years (it's addictive). Can't remember the last time I didn't understand something English. Don't remember the last time I've met a new word browsing the web.

Yet if I open the lord of the rings there are lots of words I don't know and a native speaker probably does. But honestly I don't care about reading English fantasy novels or stuff written 100s of years ago and I don't think it's an requirement for fluency to be able to read everything. For example I'm reading technical papers in English that most natives would have trouble to understand. Doesn't make them any less fluent.

So I'm lacking the vocabulary that's used in fantasy novels to describe forests and scenery and so on. Doesn't make me any less fluent.

Wow. From your posts I assumed you were a native English speaker, no joke. But I guess 30 years of experience will do that to you. Out of curiosity, could you possibly list some of the words from Dickens that you looked up?

Hrm - I have always heard a distinction made between 'fluency' and 'proficiency' - where fluency is the ability to speak/read/write without stopping to think or translate, while 'proficiency' is doing all that correctly and eloquently. I know people who I would say are fluent in English even though they haven't mastered it.
Claiming to be 'fluent in Chinese' in six months still sounds impossible. Maybe you could fluently order food and fluently do other stuff in limited areas, but that's not the same as being fluent in the language as a whole.

Kuzunoha13 Wrote:Wow. From your posts I assumed you were a native English speaker, no joke. But I guess 30 years of experience will do that to you. Out of curiosity, could you possibly list some of the words from Dickens that you looked up?

I'm a native speaker of English with a fairly impressive vocabulary (if GRE results are anything to go by). For fun I opened a random page of A Tale of Two Cities. On that single page I encountered a word unknown to me ("lee" - lee-dyed, wine-lees; this, I learned, is the sediment left over from wine), and several that a non-native speaker would probably struggle with: cask, hoops (of a cask, barrel), champ, frolicsome, modicum, offal, etc. This is from one one page. Basic fluency is probably conversing at something around high school level (and high schoolers know a lot of words): anything a high schooler is going to struggle with, most non-native speakers probably will too.

louischa Wrote:I cannot read Dickens, for instance, without **a lot** of dictionary lookups.

I only started learning English 15 years ago, and can read Dickens fine without a dictionary.

My study of English did however include reading Joyce. Now that I needed a dictionary for.

louischa Wrote:On that single page I encountered a word unknown to me ("lee" - lee-dyed, wine-lees; this, I learned, is the sediment left over from wine), and several that a non-native speaker would probably struggle with: cask, hoops (of a cask, barrel), champ, frolicsome, modicum, offal, etc.

Hoop? You do know that they have one of those in basketball, right? Frolicsome and modicum are also easy.

Cask and champ are something only people in the UK would know (I'm fluent in American English, not UK). As far as lee, I definitely have no idea what the sediment left over from wine is called in my native language. I'm not sure why the average American would either.

I had no idea what offal means, and I don't know for sure whether the average American does or not. But I did recently have a fairly lengthy conversation with Americans, about foods made out of unusual animal parts, and no one used the word "offal".

The point was, you can never feel the same sense of flow - 流 - in a foreign language as that you have in your native language, and you still feel somehow restricted/impaired, even after innumerable years.

I think there's a general misunderstanding between being functional in a foreign tongue and fluency. Being functional is a partial goal that one can achieve quickly, but natural flow is a long-term proposition.

When a fellow writes somewhere on the Internet - "I became fluent in X months", one may naively think that the chap can say or read whatever he wants in the foreign language, otherwise he would have written "I became functional in X months", which perhaps means that he was able to say "Arigato" to the waiter at the local sushi joint, and that he recognized one word in a pop song on YouRube.

The problem with such exaggerated claims is that they usually are intended to sell a product. Or at the very least, they may cause learners to doubt their own ability when they do not see the same magical results coming, or perhaps to give up the study of the language altogether.

What's the big hurry, anyways? Leave speed to Philistines.

I agree, what you define as "fluent" makes the difference. A 5 year old kid is already not only fluent, but native in their mother tongue, yet they lack a ton of vocab.
A high school kid has had years of education in their mother tongue, is literate, has a good vocabulary and is a very experienced speaker.

What you can do in 6 months is learning the basics and, if you focus on it, achieve some kind of "Pimsleur fluency", where you get certain stuff out fluently. This isn't worth much IMHO, but it's worth something and certainly helping you a big deal in your future studies.

well I'm glad we're having this discussion, because I think there are a lot of arguments on language forums, and they often sound like old people with bad hearing having an argument over two different things. At their core they come down to people using different definitions of the word 'fluency' and yet continuing to talk about it as if it were the same thing...

[I also think it's important to distinguish 'fluency', however you define it, from the 'native level' idea.]

there have been some very high-level definitions of fluency above (30 years, 45k vocab etc) and as another respectable counterpoint, Jarvik7 used to call JLPT1合格 the beginning of fluency.

I personally am more in line with the latter, seeing 'fluency' as very different from a native-level-ish proficiency, where unknown terms are very rare and everything is transparent. For me 'fluency' simply is a state of flowing in the language, not pausing when hung up on a word mid-sentence, not understanding every word maybe but definitely understanding the overall meaning of everything said. This 'fluency' would be a sense of effortlessly flowing in the language, without hiccups or difficulty.
As pointed out that is obviously a personal definition, but since beginning serious language study it has become increasingly aware to me that there are only personal definitions.

'fluency' is IMHO an incredibly badly defined term in the english language...which seems to be the opening that people like Rosetta Stone/Khatz/Benny/Lonsdale exploit to their benefit with these sorts of soundbites.

Yea, that's the point. How can one discuss something without first defining it?

For me, too, "fluency" is the ability to say what one has to say without long pauses to try to come up with words. You don't need to have a huge vocab for that, you need confidence and speaking skills:
When you lack a word, describe/rephrase. Break difficult stuff down into simpler sentences.
Learn things such as 物、事、場所、状態 and so on so when you can't come up with 寝不足 you can say 眠りの足りない状態, or when you don't know 病院 you can say 病気な人が医療を受ける場所 and so on- it requires some practice, but it makes you a fluent speaker.

I doubt you can learn that in only 6 months, but after a year, maybe 1,5, you can survive on the street with that. To achieve that, you only need some abstract nouns, some verbs, some adjectives actively. Don't worry about the rest, learn normally and acquire competency passively, it'll gradually become active over time. No need to force yourself for the sake of being fluent - it'll only end with you sounding awkward and unnatural.

I know a lot of people who passed the N1 and can't speak to save their lives, and when they do, they sound like idiots. They never learned "speaking", and by that I mean above mentioned expression techniques, not "speaking the Japanese language".

andikaze Wrote:I doubt you can learn that in only 6 months, but after a year, maybe 1,5, you can survive on the street with that.

Well, I'm sure it can take less time (or much more) depending on the person's dedication and prior experiences with this language or a similar one.
I didn't really want to play the Benny card again, but have you seen his videos for Egyptian Arabic and Mandarin on Youtube? In one of his videos for Egyptian Arabic he went deep into Egypt and managed to have nice conversations with natives who didn't know a word in English. Was he fluent? Far from it, but 3 months can be enough to survive on the street.

Katsumoto may be a classic example, that in 1,5 became quite fluent in Japanese.

andikaze Wrote:I know a lot of people who passed the N1 and can't speak to save their lives, and when they do, they sound like idiots. They never learned "speaking", and by that I mean above mentioned expression techniques, not "speaking the Japanese language".

True. On the other hand, I also know some people who can't write a word in German, Russian and Japanese, but can speak it truly well. There are so many variables that I think it's impossible to define the word "fluency". These people are fluent in "speaking" and "listening", but maybe newbies in "reading" and less than that in "writing".