He talks a lot about encouragement so maybe this is his way of going about it. Maybe he purposely sets the bar low so he makes everyone feel like they could do better, and thus they become encouraged. Maybe this was the plan all along....
whoa.

youasuki wrote:

egoplant wrote:

Or maybe he's just learning a language and recording his progress. Please stop with the dumb conspiracies.

Disagreeeee.

How come?

Let's be honest it is impressive that he did this after a week. And this video is motivating to me to go practice speaking japanese more and not be embarrassed when i make mistakes. He's accomplished his goals for at least one learner here. So thanks Benny.

youasuki wrote:

@egoplant First, kudos to him. He's bold. But I'm just pointing out that I smell (not total) dishonesty from him. Of course beginners make mistakes, but I've seen hundreds of beginners and the mistakes he makes smell fishy.

What mistakes were fishy?

yeah he was was reading from a  script and you can even tell in the video. However, the Japanese native speaker didn't seem to have a script as you can tell from when benny completely misunderstands and other times when he needs him to write things down. Just asking him to write things down came off more fluent than I was speaking at one week.

I don't know for a fact but I'd bet the script is written in hiragana. Another plus at one week.

Hate? Criticism isn't hate. If this is "hate" then you'd think publishers and HR responsible for handling resumes were hate-mongering tyrants.

Even if those criticizing were indeed jealous, it doesn't alter the content of their arguments.

As a side note: I don't think it is entirely fair to use the same set of judgment variable for a self-proclaimed polyglot which relies on their popularity to remain in their position, and that or a "normal person". A "normal person", for example, generally doesn't have the experience of years of language acquisition in multiple languages. It's like comparing a professional athlete training for a sport outside their experience with a normal person training for the same sport. If you expect the experienced athlete and the average person to skill themselves in the said other sport/skill set, you're fooling yourself.

For the run of the mill person not experienced in learning multi-languages over a short period of time, then I would say that the progress Benny has shown is, well, it's not much but I think it would be a little over the top to expect any more. For an experienced polyglot with the emblazoned modus operandi: speak from day one, well... I'm looking forward to his final video. 


Benny is a big boy: he can censor and ignore any criticisms without people trying to characterize those whom express them.

Simply that for someone that's runs a seemingly popular blog offering language hacking tips from a self proclaimed polyglot (and who's advice runs contrary to many successful language learners) his results appear to be underwhelming. That's all people are saying.

For someone who ought to have a reasonable ear for languages, his accent does seem a little crappy but I'll leave my ultimate judgement until I see his
results after 3 months.

Last edited by nadiatims (2013 October 06, 8:09 am)

Hello guys! I'm new to this forum and a newbie in Japanese learning, so I can't contribute much to evaluate Benny's progress, but this discussion drove me to his website, where I found two articles that drew my attention:

www.fluentin3months.com/become-brazilian-in-3-months/
www.fluentin3months.com/sound-like-a-carioca/

In the first article he says: "That’s the mission! By mid-December, I want several Brazilians to have believed that not only am I speaking Portuguese as good as a native, but that I actually am a native."

Well, I am Brazilian and judging from his videos in Brazil I can say there's absolutely no way this guy actually passed off as a native Portuguese speaker.

He does says somewhere on the article that his goal was merely not letting people know he was a foreigner for a couple of minutes during a casual conversation, but looking at this videos in Portuguese I seriously doubt he achieved that. Specially in Rio because cariocas have a very characteristic accent, that even other Brazilians sound fake when trying to imitate.

His best sample of Portuguese speaking is on this video here, that was obviously rehearsed and scripted: http://youtu.be/FY1b513hIto?t=1m19s.

I know this doesn't have nothing to do with the things that have been discussed on this topic and I know his Japanese project  seems to be very different from his Brazilian Portuguese project, but I thought this was worth mentioning.

I'm not saying the guy is a downright liar or anything like that (actually I didn't even know his work before, so I have no background to form an opinion) and it's also possible that the people he talked to him lied saying his Portuguese was perfect just to please him (believe it or not, things like that may happen around here).

He seems to be able to communicate in my mother language well enough, but he's definitely got accent, which is not a bad thing at all, in my opinion, but his claim of being able to pass off as a real carioca sounded a little fishy for me.

Last edited by Mehtare (2013 October 07, 12:37 pm)

I've been lurking here for some time but I've got to reply now that someone talked about Portuguese. I'm also Brazillian and I have to agree that Benny definitely doesn't sound anything like a carioca would sound.

I teach Portuguese for foreigners here and I think that he actually sounds like my students from French speaking countries in terms of accent. I personally think it's a really cute accent and he does seem to be able to hold some basic conversation in Portuguese but yes, judging by the videos he posted on his youtube account, he does not sound like a carioca at all. Also, you can definitely tell he's a foreigner speaking Portuguese.

Last edited by yukimine (2013 October 07, 4:02 pm)

ryuudou wrote:

Not even worth a thread.

May the people who whinge, criticise, or otherwise express their dislikes for Benny’s videos think about that. Imagine that there was no Benny with his youtube posts showing his progress with his chosen method of language study. Would you really think this would be a better situation? Maybe I’m projecting now but I would think that in general you would prefer to be better informed rather than less informed (regardless of your opinion on the actual matters - well, just having the opinion seems to be a good thing).

So what’s the point of all this criticisms?

Aspiring wrote:

I don't know if people here are haters, but it is possible that people are offended. I'll be honest, I was a bit offended by his videos.

Offended???

Offended by what exactly?

That's a very strange thing to say.

He's offended for the very same reasons Zgarbas pointed out in the beginning of this thread where Benny discredited the JLPT. A lot of people work very hard at studying Japanese and for our efforts to be mocked by his marketing angles is somewhat offending.

s0apgun wrote:

He's offended for the very same reasons Zgarbas pointed out in the beginning of this thread where Benny discredited the JLPT. A lot of people work very hard at studying Japanese and for our efforts to be mocked by his marketing angles is somewhat offending.

now I know where you're coming from here, but, as someone who is studying hard to take the jlpt n1 this december... I dont think we (at least I don't) work hard because it's a great test worth our efforts. we take it because it is the test. the only credible test.

if there were a credible alternative out there I think a lot of people would take that instead. but this is it, so this is what we do.

of course it feels lousy to have someone tell you that this thing you're working hard on is worthless, no matter if it's good or not. it's not worthless... but it's not good either. at least in my opinion.

his criticism of the lack of a production component is entirely valid in my view. you could just sit in a room for 4 years studying by yourself and pass the jlpt without being able to place an order at a restaurant.
the grammar section is full of archaisms that one never comes across in actual written japanese.
all the questions basically come down to the splitting of semantic hairs between 2 similar terms.
and I could go on...

but that being said... if you want to get a job in japan, or to prove you have professional language ability on a resume, you must pass the jlpt. so we struggle forward on the long march toward this silly test.