Cranks wrote:

http://www.jlpt.jp/e/samples/forlearners.html

I tried the N3 sample questions since I thought that was about my level. I only got one wrong even though I had to rush through the "grammar" part as I didn't have the time to read all the texts fully. So it was easier than I thought and I could probably pass the N3 test. I'll try N2 when I have a little more time but I don't think I could pass it yet, at least not without studying specifically for the test.

LucidFaia wrote:

Depends on what you mean by "learning Japanese." I think a lot of the ones crying "impossible" are RTK-minded people who think that learning thousands of kanji is a necessary step to learning Japanese. It isn't. You can be illiterate but still understand a language.

That's both obvious and NOT one the questions being posed.

OP wrote:

if it were possible to get to a high-level (let's say able to pass JLPT 1) within 3-6 months, how would such a study system look like?

This guy learned a whole lot of Mandarin in 3 months. Not to C2 level, but to a fluent conversational level: http://www.fluentin3months.com/compare/

On the contrary I found the video fascinating. I've always heard of Benny and browsed his site a couple times in the past but never saw his videos. Of course he seems like an extremely extroverted guy from the get go so this isn't surprising, but I'm astonished he went ahead and had an interview with John Pasden three and a half months after beginning Mandarin. Incredibly ballsy to me. Pretty inspiring, actually.

seulggie wrote:

On the contrary I found the video fascinating. I've always heard of Benny and browsed his site a couple times in the past but never saw his videos. Of course he seems like an extremely extroverted guy from the get go so this isn't surprising, but I'm astonished he went ahead and had an interview with John Pasden three and a half months after beginning Mandarin. Incredibly ballsy to me. Pretty inspiring, actually.

i also think it was pretty impressive. He speaks better Mandarin after 3 months, with less long pauses for thought and generally faster speechrate than i do with japanese after 3 years, so he's probably doing something right. Sure, he's not going to be able to read books or watch tv programs, and probably has a quite limited vocab, but still. He can communicate. And that's the whole point of it for him.

It's a trade off, i guess. Perhaps you can have a higher vocab level, and better accent in 3 months, but almost certainly at the cost of speaking fluency.

seulggie wrote:

Incredibly ballsy to me. Pretty inspiring, actually.

It'd be more ballsy if he recorded a real chat with an actual native speaker about a topic other than language learning...
Remember, he went and lived in Taiwan for 3 months and studied full time. Giving a conservative estimate of 5 hours a day, that totals about 450 hours (5*30*3), with an emphasis on speaking. It's only impressive to the layman who knows zero mandarin and can't tell how poorly he's speaking. If he was lucky to average an hour a day, I'd say it's not bad for 3 months, but I think he spent significantly more time than that.

as I said for 3 months it's ok. Better than the typical anglophne expat english teacher's japanese after 3 months, but those people have jobs and/or other commitments or interests. Benny went to Taiwan to learn mandarin full time. 500 hours? 900 hours? who knows.

Yeah he doesn't have to pause much to think, but then his grammar isn't great, and it's not like chinese grammar is as alien to english speakers as Japanese is at first. A lot of the time ordering within a sentence is the same as english or close enough. Internalizing basic sentence ordering and learning to use a few words like 'but,' 'so,' 'when' and so on really isn't an achievement (it'd be in any beginner textbook). I'd be more interested in hearing his reply to a question like "Have you seen any good movies recently? Describe its plot for me." or "Describe your best friend's personality." or something. Basically anything that requires a little more thought and expression instead of just basic information about a topic he's bound to have discussed ad nauseam.  Or his ability to understand someone else's reply to such a question.

nadiatims wrote:

as I said for 3 months it's ok. Better than the typical anglophne expat english teacher's japanese after 3 months, but those people have jobs and/or other commitments or interests. Benny went to Taiwan to learn mandarin full time. 500 hours? 900 hours? who knows.

Yeah he doesn't have to pause much to think, but then his grammar isn't great, and it's not like chinese grammar is as alien to english speakers as Japanese is at first. A lot of the time ordering within a sentence is the same as english or close enough. Internalizing basic sentence ordering and learning to use a few words like 'but,' 'so,' 'when' and so on really isn't an achievement (it'd be in any beginner textbook). I'd be more interested in hearing his reply to a question like "Have you seen any good movies recently? Describe its plot for me." or "Describe your best friend's personality." or something. Basically anything that requires a little more thought and expression instead of just basic information about a topic he's bound to have discussed ad nauseam.  Or his ability to understand someone else's reply to such a question.

hmm, yeah, that's true, chinese sentence order did seem much easier than japanese, and i am pretty much comparing the english to japanese because i don't know chinese. So yeah, i have no clue how many mistakes he makes either.

I guess it probably is a topic he knows well enough, but i also think that whatever type of topic anyone chose he would prepare the vocabulary to cover. It didn't seem shiny enough to be rehearsed, though.

He's probably going to post more videos from china though, so i'm sure there'll be more. He probably does have enough to travel around happily though i imagine...

i wouldn't mind his job

oh, btw, i forgot to add this in earlier. Some of those "fostering fluency in 2nd language learning" (http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=9680) studies did seem to suggest that a wider vocabulary leads to a loss of speaking fluency in some respects (in the short term, presumably). They suggested that it's because of cycling through more words and phrases to find what you want to say.

So, having a small vocabulary isn't actually bad for speaking fluency. Perhaps making sure you do use new vocabulary and phrases as soon as you learn them can also lessen this effect, i dunno?

Last edited by IceCream (2012 April 25, 11:11 am)

Oh, the subtitles are hilarious! Talk about beautifying subtitles...

I've been here 8 months now. I'm in my third quarter at MTC. My first quarter was mostly spent sleeping in and going out with friends, though I did study well for class, along with some material on the side. The second quarter I was more 認真 about it, and began earnestly studying other textbooks outside of class. I was able to skip two levels of class at MTC, and I'll likely be able to skip another after this term. If you're familiar with the PAVC series used everywhere in Taiwan, I started near the beginning of Book 2, skipped Book 4 and Far East Book 3 (which MTC places after PAVC 4), and am taking a radio plays class this term. Next term I will most likely be taking 思想與社會, which is an advanced book focusing on academic Chinese in which you're expected to be able to converse and write intelligently on things like Confucianism's influence on modern Chinese society, or health problems brought about by modernization.

My conversational ability after three months was better than his, no doubt about it. My pronunciation and tones were miles beyond his, which makes it MUCH easier for people to understand what I'm saying. After a month of class, I remember going out with my classmates and spending the entire night speaking in Chinese about things like drug use in the US vs Japan. Sure, we had to use a lot of circumlocution ("crack" is like a white drug rock that you put in a thing, light it on fire, and breathe the smoke...etc.), but this is, IMO, a better indicator of language ability than talking about language learning for a few minutes. You're learning a language – of course you're going to be able to talk about language learning after three months of doing so.

I won't try to guess at his motivations for saying the things he said (I've done that plenty elsewhere). I agree in theory that a motivated student can cover more ground than someone who is studying at a school and only does the minimum requirement. But IMO the latter person is wasting their time. Moreover, that "in theory" doesn't pan out in real life very often. Yes, I've learned a lot more on my own than I have in class. But it's really easy to slack off, too. The class at least sets a minimum pace for how much I have to study, and then I can pile on the extra stuff on the side.

Anyway, you can't compare him to "most foreigners living here". Most foreigners here don't come for the express purpose of learning Chinese. Those who do are often not especially motivated (aside from those at ICLP). He came here to show how much he could learn in 3 months of full-time study. If I remember correctly, he spent only 2 hours per day in English, and the rest was all Chinese (all the time?). His results, for that amount of time invested, are underwhelming.

Don't even get me started on how Taiwanese people are taught English. It's about as backwards as you can get, and as a result I have to spend a lot of time undoing the damage caused by this "system" when I tutor people. My students have actually told me that they see letters in their head when they hear English, and that if what they hear doesn't cause the letters to form a word, they don't understand it. I'm frequently asked to spell a word I've used, and only then do they understand what I'm saying. That's often because they've learned and cemented wrong pronunciations, so they don't understand the correct pronunciation. But they're masters of memorizing huge amounts of vocabulary, as long as it's on paper, and you don't ask them to use it in a sentence. None of this is the student's fault, of course, and I'm very patient in correcting it.

But that's neither here nor there. The important point is, don't get suckered by Benny. If you had nothing but free time to study and practice, and access to tutors for a few hours per day for 3 months, and were diligent about it, I'd be disappointed if you didn't make better progress than he did.

I can't comment on the quality of his Chinese, but even if everything Bflatline says is correct (and it does sound like they know what they're talking about),  I still think the video's pretty impressive. His language may be ugly but he's able to express himself at a reasonable pace in a manner that seems both relaxed and enthusiastic. Isn't that a huge achievement after just 3 months?

I think the comment about being too much of an academic was referring to the different way in which he views language.  To Bflatline it was a mistake to say 我自言自語, but I think Benny would view that as a success because he managed to talk around the hole in his knowledge and express what he wanted to. Obviously he'll need to learn that later, and the correct word/phrase would definitely have been preferable,  but he did manage to say what he wanted to say, so that's a win.

I have to say that I agree with him on this. I happen to know a Chinese woman who's been living in England since before I was born. Her grammar is awful and sometimes her word choices are decidedly odd, but she's almost always able to express herself without difficulty, and the cheerful, confident way in which she speaks makes her far more pleasant to speak to than a lot of the English people I know.

I'm sure Benny's Chinese isn't nearly as good as her English, but the fact that there are lots of mistakes in that video actually reassure me that what he writes on his site is genuine. He really does start speaking straight away, he doesn't wait till he's good enough before doing X, and this approach does result in him being able to communicate better than his knowledge of the language would normally allow.

P.s. lol What's this about him having all day to study while other people have to work? He's a freelance translator not a drifter. Orz

Last edited by Splatted (2012 April 25, 1:51 pm)

Maybe he just got tired of answering constant redundant questions about how he did it from people that didn't feel like reading the blog to find out. With a book you can just say, "hey there's a book".