I'm going to show up tomorrow and find a thread title with my name in it...

was that hostile?

racism has political ramifications that engender a stigma.

calling someone a racist leaves a stigma of racism on a person, which is different from calling someone's preference of AJATT stupid, to use an arbitrary example.
(I am not calling AJATT stupid... but people have so it seems a good example)
a label of that person's 'stupidity' does not necessarily follow from pro-AJATT attitude to person.
the 'racist argument' person is stigmatized by the word racism.

this isn't a logical issue... it is a political reality. you can't just go around calling people racists and then say it was all theoretical don't get offended.

Last edited by dtcamero (2013 October 18, 3:23 pm)

RawToast wrote:

This thread just keeps on descending; so let's stop here with the bickering.

If it continues I will lock this thread until Benny posts another video/article.

Its getting extremely off topic in here. Keep discussion somewhat relevant please or I'm calling RawToast to clean up.

s0apgun wrote:

RawToast wrote:

This thread just keeps on descending; so let's stop here with the bickering.

If it continues I will lock this thread until Benny posts another video/article.

Its getting extremely off topic in here. Keep discussion somewhat relevant please or I'm calling RawToast to clean up.

Go for it. Numerous users have asked for the off topic arguments to cease and they have not. For a topic about Benny Lewis, very little is being said about him.

@dtcamero
To be perfectly clear, I don't care what you say as long as it's on topic and you can argue it. If this thread were about racism, how it applies, how it can be used, and what constitutes a slur, then you could go at it until your fingers bled for all I'd care. However, if I see a topic about some guy doing a learning challenge, I want to read what people think about some guy doing a learning challenge; I don't care if you don't like him, I don't care if you think he embodies a stereotype, I don't care if you want to attack him, just don't do it here. Unless you can relate it to the topic, it's just noise.

I'll end my point on about racism-- I mean, 'discrimination against a specific people or their culture'-- by asking you to reread the formatted sentence I provided previously and thinking about how it works with more popular images for racism and then how it works when applied to any form of discrimination.
Hint: It's all the same thing. When slurs are 'created' (an image is used to show a specific group in a negative light, i.e. Latinos working in bean-fields, African slaves are sourced from the Niger area, white men are all whip cracking slave drivers, etc.) and become seen as such, it is in your best interest to avoid using them. Words are neutral until we apply imagery to them through context, but if discriminatory imagery becomes common to the word, you'd best use it with that image in mind.

By the way, suggesting that one follows radical political beliefs without any real proof is also a petty way of attacking. If you must use my political standing to attack me, please refrain calling me red and instead attack me for being one of those wishy-washy moderates who hates politics, especially since the parties have no cake.

So, now that I've shown myself to be as much of a hypocrite as every other human, I'll take the easy point from you by declaring it myself: I'm a hypocrite for saying that the thread should stay on topic and then wasn't on topic.
Hopefully, that can be the end of things.
Yeah, right.

Slightly on topic, the recent guest post has about as much criticism on the blog as it does here. In fact, many of the comments are opposing the idea that you can ignore the standard politeness form and still effectively understand and communicate in Japanese.
Personally, I think it's easiest to learn about casual/dictionary stuff and the standard です/ます stuff early on. It's really not that difficult to learn the basics, but it pays off.
Of course, I'm interested in seeing if Benny sticks with this approach or if he decides to switch back later on.

I originally wrote a long passage saying just why I think that the dtcamero argument is stupid. I deleted it; it didn't serve my purposes anymore.

Basically, it said that dtcamero is being hostile for no substantial reason other than the fact that they're 'offended' (why does everyone have to be offended by everything under the sun?) by Benny's supposedly stereotypical behavior. Benny doesn't fulfill the Irish stereotype, especially not the negative one, which would have him wasting all his money on booze and being a general burden to society (a stereotype popular in the US when many poor Irish immigrants (or emigrants, depending on your perspective) started arriving in New York with no where to live or work consistently). Benny doesn't fulfill the image of a leprechaun either, since he isn't overtly greedy or stingy (hey, I don't know the man in real life, so I can't say he isn't greedy on the inside).

Then I also pointed out that discrimination is only considered unacceptable in society if you proclaim that the discrimination is justified (Examples being the detainment of American citizens of Japanese decent during WWII and the current discrimination against Muslims "because they all hate the US and Islam is a religion of war"). Discrimination is a natural human mechanism, but we are expected by society to ignore this generally misguided feeling in favor of rational thought. That rational thought is what I'd like to see used for arguing for or against anything, but you know, humans...

I also pointed out some of my personal beliefs on politics, religion, and discrimination, but they're not all that important at the moment.

Now I have written a slightly shorter post saying most of the important stuff.

I never really attempted Benny's accent, but I imagine it's quite difficult to copy. I'd definitely need to practice my vocals more before I'd have a chance.
Maybe I should try spreading 'topochauvinist' around; it's a neat word.

I can barely wait for the next update; I'm really excited to see how he's progressed over the last two weeks. I hope his illness didn't last too long (I'm dealing with something myself while trying to work on two papers and Japanese...); being sick really takes its toll after a while.

Benny uploaded another Japanese video, although it's not exactly an update or anything.

In the corresponding article, he said:

Benny wrote:

Next week, I’ll share my thoughts on how the first month has gone and where I am in my Japanese level!

So we shouldn't have to wait too much longer to get a fresh update.

AkiKazachan wrote:

Ah, it's threads like these that remind me why I left this forum in the first place... just so much arguing and hostility. And it's such a shame because I really haven't been able to find another place like this to talk about Japanese language study

I really don't understand this sentiment though.  If there's a controversial thread going on at all, there's usually only one at at time, and then five or six other popular threads with no hostility at all.  Can't you avoid one of the seven popular threads going on at the moment when you realize that it's full of arguing that annoys you?

Also, I'm occasionally involved in an argument on this forum, but I've almost never felt pissed off or anything.  Just friendly arguing.  Of course, this is partly my personality, since I kind of like arguing.

The only two threads that I really thought went way too far and hurt the forum were the AJATT thread that resulted in Nestor and others leaving, and the one that resulted in IceCream leaving (And frankly, with the Nestor thread, I thought that the people complaining about the arguing were the people who caused all the trouble, not the people who were actually arguing). 

All the others have been fairly harmless.  It's like how even a healthy family argues.

Last edited by Tzadeck (2013 October 21, 12:45 am)

I appreciate the Fluent In 3 Months approach. It’s unique and it’s like throwing a person into the lion’s den almost immediately.

I view the concept kind of like this. A person is placed into an environment where others speak the native language already, and the person who's being forced into that environment only really has one option: to learn the language by listening to it and speaking it in order to communicate.

Of course it’d be basic and coarse at first, sure, but the more time spent listening and speaking the language would ultimately allow the person’s ability to listen and to communicate to sophisticate, at which point the listening portion and the speaking portion would most likely reach a point of normalization where they blend together fairly well.

I personally view one of the ideas behind this approach as being a sink or swim type of concept. For example, what does a person do when they're trying to learn how to swim? Usually they go into a pool where an instructor says to do this and that. The language immersion is the pool, and the speaking portion with a native speaker/instructor is the process of learning how to swim.

I'd imagine that it's actually a very realistic approach for someone who's a polyglot, mostly due to there not being a lot of time in a day and being that in normal schools it requires at least four years of study to become proficient in a desired language. So realistically, in someone's busy day, taking up even a single language in a lifetime could be a difficult task, let alone deciding to take on several languages one after another.

uisukii wrote:

There is a lot to be said about the sink or swim approach, and to put any negatives aside, I've got to say that it is brazen and motivating to see someone take such a "hands-on" approach. Though... a bit of stretching and getting used to the movements outside of the water before diving in the pool is almost the standard approach for swimming trainers these days- and their main goal is to get you swimming good and fast.

Can't wait to the three months is over. It would be pretty awesome (though highly unrealistic) to have any of the more well-spoken forum members living in Japan to have a "meet-up" with him when he goes over next year.

I agree with you that the approach is brazen and motivating, although the content of my previous post might have made his approach seem a lot more extreme than it actually is, and I was only partially going for the extreme sink or swim concept with my swimming comparison.

From what I've read on the Fluent in 3 Months site about Benny's approach to learning Japanese, it seems to be a lot more tame than just being thrust into the deep end of the Japanese language where everyone is communicating at "rapid", native level normality, and seems to be a lot more similar to the "standard" method of learning a language.

He's been studying books, grammar, has private lessons with instructors and natives, encouraging them to speak at a slower pace and even going so far as to have learned Hiragana and Katakana and asking the Japanese people who he communicates with to write out what they're saying or to write out select words that are in the sentences being spoken in Hiragana and Katakana so that he can look them up in a dictionary when he doesn't understand something.

In that regard, his approach isn't too dissimilar from watching and enjoying a Japanese show, hearing a word or two, and then looking the vocab up in the dictionary. Only his method has the added bonus of being able to communicate firsthand with someone and being able to speak while being helped/guided with things that may not be understood.

But being that he has several other languages under his belt from this approach and probably from other methods of learning, I'd say that his ability to grasp a new language might be better than the average person who's just diving into learning a new language for the first time, so he might personally excel more from his method than the average person would.

Last edited by adam_invers (2013 October 22, 1:48 am)

uisukii wrote:

It would be pretty awesome (though highly unrealistic) to have any of the more well-spoken forum members living in Japan to have a "meet-up" with him when he goes over next year.

It seems pretty realistic, but I don't know if I love this idea or hate it.

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.

A mechanic who's been in the field for a while and has worked on his share of cars probably has an easier time fixing cars than someone who just entered some type of mechanics trade school without prior experience and is just starting to learn how to fix cars.

I'm just saying that the guy's a polyglot who I think developed this method, so if he constructed it himself and has a good deal of experience using it, then it's probably a bit more customized to his learning habits in how it works well for him... and I'm basing that bit of information on my educated guess about how he's likely to excel in his own learning method better than someone who doesn't have any prior experience to learning a language and without prior experience to this particular learning method.

That says nothing about how well the method would work for a person new to learning languages, however, as this method is a method aimed at encouraging and helping people to learn languages and is aimed at showing a person that they don't need to fear speaking a language due to lack of confidence. And I've read about how speaking a language in front of other people can be a bit of a challenge. This method takes that concern and dismisses it from the onset, thusly eliminating a hurdle that would need to be faced down the road right from the get-go.

But still, not every method works best for everyone. One way that works for someone may not necessarily work for someone else. There isn't really a universal method for learning a language that is equally as effective for everyone. You have people who excel at learning this way, and you have others who excel at learning that way. Sometimes people like this, sometimes they hate that. Learning a language can be a bit of a pick and choose action when it comes to learning methods.

It's kind of like how some people use Heisig to learn Kanji and some people dislike that method, and choose rote memorization instead. And why some people will use Remembering the Kanji 2 while others say it's a waste of time to use that book and should just go straight into learning vocabulary or use the Kanji Movie Method (because it's quicker).

Last edited by adam_invers (2013 October 22, 4:54 am)