Hi,
I just came across this on the net:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/200...s-a-favor/

Thoughts?

On a side note: does anyone know this book?:
http://www.amazon.com/Quick-Dirty-Guide-...1581600968

one hour

lol

that's all I can say

Waste of time and money IMO. If there were quick and easy ways to learn Japanese, don't you think they'd be a little more popular and everybody would be using them? Be realistic and don't cheat yourself.

Yes, i know the book, and it isn't worth it. This ex-marine just gives general advice on how he has aquired some language skills in turkish for instance. Before he was assigend on a mission, he was watching cartoons, read children books and the like, took a notebook with him everywhere, and wrote down new words. He became basically functional in some of the languages he needed, but only to that degree he really needed it to successfuly complete his missions.

There is nothing in there, you could not also find in any guide - or website for that matter, that is titled "target language all the way." Which would translate to AJATT for some on here.

I found the other link quite interesting. It's only the heading that is talking about 1 hour, whereas the rest of the article is talking about 3 to 9 months. I found the part interesting, where that guy breaks down the language. I say, it might be an easy task for him, but for the average learner? Nobody would start to approach a language in that way, without background knowledge how to speed up the language aquiring process.

So, the article is quite interesting, but books that say "Become fluent if you learn 1 hour a day," also to be found on Amazon, are bogus at best. And better left on the shelf.

I'm pretty sure there was already a topic on this earlier. Despite the provocative title what he actually means is "learn how difficult a language will be in an hour" or something like that.

I am generally instantly suspicious of anything that claims "Learn X in Y days" where X is something that realistically takes a lot longer than Y days. Sounds like a scam to me.


As for the blog post, the title is misleading but what he has to say is interesting. I am not quite sure how useful it is really, even if you get the basics of grammar and construction down you still need a ton of vocab. If you want to learn a new language just for the sake of being able to add it to your repertoire I guess his advice is useful, but if you want to learn a language because you like it...well you're just going to slog through it and learn the language not compare its construction to others.

That said, some of the stuff he says about his own language knowledge is hard to believe given how he claims to have learned them. For the most part, he seems to equate his "deconstruction" technique with learning a language.

"Going through the characters of a language’s writing system is really only practical for languages that have at least one phonetic writing system of 50 or fewer sounds—Spanish, Russian, and Japanese would all be fine."

Something tells me he might have skipped the Kanji in his "deconstruction" of the Japanese writing system.

The 4HWW blog kinda loses its claim when it says "learn in an hour, but not master." That's a bit misleading, but then again, Tim Ferriss is a marketing guy. How do you think he sold so many copies of his book?

If you buy Ferris's book on speed-reading, it only takes 10 minutes instead of an hour! It comes bundled with some Florida swampland.

Famous article by Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, I'm sure it's been covered here before, worth a read:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Jeromin Wrote:Famous article by Peter Norvig, Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, I'm sure it's been covered here before, worth a read:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

The guy's right. Why rush? I'm going to implement his teachings right away: burn my RTK, delete all Anki decks, and go back to good old rote learning...

nest0r Wrote:If you buy Ferris's book on speed-reading, it only takes 10 minutes instead of an hour! It comes bundled with some Florida swampland.

This is my favourite Tim Ferris article:

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08...m-ferriss/

Learn a language in an hour?

Sign me up

Just spent about 90 minutes doing reviews...man do I feel dumb now

Raschaverak Wrote:The guy's right. Why rush? I'm going to implement his teachings right away: burn my RTK, delete all Anki decks, and go back to good old rote learning...

Did you read the article, or did you just read the title?

SRS is covered in this quote:

Quote:Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more technically, "the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve." (p. 366) and "the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors." (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.

I think his actual point is, you can deconstruct a language's basic macro structure in 1 hour. That is how the subject, verbs, objects, direct objects, basic tenses work etc in one hour. An exageration but probably not completely untrue if you happen to have access to a good grammar explanation or a good teacher. It will in no way mean mastery though. Not by a long shot, but you will be able to construct short original sentences which will faciliate basic communication albeit with almost zero vocabulary.

I think one good point that Tim Ferris makes though (I can't remember if it's in this article or one a read ages ago), is the importance of material over method. That is what you learn is more important than how you learn it, and I kind of aggree with him on this point. A lot of people are really idealistic and method obsessed when it comes to language learning, and forget that at the end of the day it's the knowledge you have that's important, not how you gained it. To have a high command of a language, you need to have:
a high vocabulary
a good understanding of grammar
be able to read
correctly hear and reproduce the sounds of the language

All to often people will blindly follow methods that sound good in theory but be blind to whether it's actually teaching you something important. I see this all the time at the Japanese schools I teach at, unfocused activities emphasising communication and speaking, while completely ignoring whether students actually understand fundamentals.