Splatted Wrote:

vileru Wrote:I'd also like to comment on those praising the smoothness of Benny's speech. Most of you probably have a much larger vocabulary and grammar knowledge than him. If you just focused on speaking without interruptions, instead of trying to focus on producing grammatically correct sentences and phrases, I'm sure most of you could easily replicate his results. Benny speaks so effortlessly not so much because of his learning and practice, but because of his character. If you want to speak with the kind of comfort and abandon that Benny embodies, lowering your inhibitions will help more than any amount of studying.

That's pretty much what Benny says...

In that case, it only serves to prove the criticisms that his grammar and pronunciation are lacking. Of course, this strategy works quite well if communicating is your only goal. You'll be understood despite your ungrammatical and unnatural expressions. However, I think most of us aim to communicate like native speakers. And to pursue this goal, sufficient exposure to the language and adequate understanding of its grammar are essential.

Let's get to the bottom of the issue, though. The clash between Benny and his critics isn't really about how skilled he is at speaking Chinese, but rather between their value systems. From Benny's perspective, communication takes precedence and language skill is measured by one's ability to communicate. To his detractors, proficiency takes precedence and language skill is measured by how well can mimic native speakers. Obviously, these values are based on their contrasting goals. Benny wants to talk to people. On the other hand, his critics generally want to master the language, often with the intent of permanent residency and employment. The learning methods favored by each reflect their particular value systems. And I'm sure most here would agree that the methods of both groups are effective for their respective goals.

I am not going to read this whole thread but I will reply to OP in the following way:

The Heisig method is not particularly special, it's just mnemonics. While I imagine some people find recalling kanji via stories easier than pure visual recall, I think the fast results of people you see on this forum largely reflect motivation rather than anything else. It's just as possible to go through a list of 2000 kanji in a month by just brute forcing with about the same time and (maybe less) effort if you have reasonably good pattern memory. You don't see many people mention having done this here, but this is a site that was built to focus on the Heisig method after all, so this forum is somewhat of a biased sample.

1000+ hours to remember 2000 kanji using normal techniques? I can't believe that anyone focused could be so slow, unless they're being very inefficient (eg. learning 3 kanji and then spending an hour or two revising previously learnt ones every day for 2 years). The cure for these inefficiencies is Anki or a similar system plus taking a faster paced approach, not Heisig.

If you somehow encoded all the information required to describe how to write 2000 kanji in a neuroinformational-theoretic sense, if such a thing existed (bear with me), I'm sure it wouldn't be more than about 5% of the information describing the Japanese language including pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and speech/writing patterns. So you're loooking at a 20x investment or something of that magnitude to become at proficient at Japanese, compared to kanji. This is why I say no to your question, but I propose that "20-40" months is realistic for attaining a high level of reading proficiency and compares well to what you see in determined westerners (notice that I don't mention listening or output ability).

tl;dr: Heisig is alright but Anki is the real revolution. Kanji is a very small part of Japanese. No you cannot become proficient in Japanese in 3-6 months unless you are a statistical outlier in terms of language acquisition ability.

The OP is a year old, people were discussing some guys claim about learning Chinese in 3 months.

Chinese, Japanese, whatever, the process is the same.

On the 3 months to fluency site, my Avast virus checker popped up with a notification that a malicious url had been blocked (http://eukarnold.in[string of numbers].) I have no idea what this means or this is useful info for others. (Nothing showed up in Google). Can I assume it's safe for me to visit the site knowing Avast will block this kind of thing?

I've been "following" Benny's stuff at some point, and there's a ton of comments I'd like to say about him (well, essentially against him). But most of my opinion has already been expressed by nadiatims and bflatnine anyway (that is : his pronunciation is awful, the tones are just off, the vocabulary/grammar is basic, and most important he's talking about the topic he knows the best, I'm sure he would have been totally unable to follow up a discussion about a movie, even a simple one). Given the study time (and NOT compared to the lazy expats who're not even trying or the students who seem content with their weekly 4 hours), his results are just underwhelming. And his "method" wouldn't work past the 3 months mark because it looks painful, messy, and he's goddamn illiterate (!).

But what we should really be waiting for is when he's gonna start his Japanese mission. Not only will he not benefit from his Chinese knowledge (i.e. characters AND their readings, because contrary to what someone seemed to think in this thread, Chinese and Japanese ON-yomi are awfully close and easy to remember once you get the hang of this little conversion game); this time everyone in this forum will understand that yeah, he does get results, but he hardly goes beyond the beginner's nice and safe limited language bubble.

The average European or American (the continent) can learn any Romance or Germanic language in 4 months (I know, because I have, through a very basic study of pronunciation and grammar followed by reading and writing my way to fluency), and pretty much any Indo-European language in 6 months. And by "learn" I mean the ability to understand the spoken word and read any text (except maybe James Joyce's Ulysses) at normal pace and with full understanding, and writing (with the help of a spell checker) that can easily fool a native speaker. As far as speaking, fluency would be a bit unrealistic. I think the ability to speak varies from person to person much more than the other aspects of learning a language.

With Japanese, Mandarin, etc. I'd have to go with 9 months at a minimum. Half to get to a point where you can read and write the most frequently used words (which would allow you to understand most of what you read), and the second half spent reading and writing to learn the rest, same as with any language. At the halfway point, you're basically where an American who's learning French is at when he starts.

I guess that if you have had prior exposure to Japanese, then you can possibly do it in 6 months. And all this presupposes prior language studying experience. If you've never studied a foreign language before, then that's another three months added on (for languages that are sufficiently foreign: for learning French, I doubt it makes any difference - to learn French, all you'd need to do is pick up a dozen French books and about 50 movies, sit down and read the books with a dictionary in hand, then watch the movies, and you're done - if you have the willpower to do it in four months, then you can no matter who you are)