bflatnine wrote:

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.

Bflatnine; it's clear from your blogs that you've been studying Chinese since early 2007. You arrived in Taiwan late 2011, so that's 4.5 years of study + passive listening to Chinese music and movies.

I'm not belittling your achievements, but to compare your speaking ability with someone who just started learning from scratch 90 days ago is not really fair.

Anyway I showed that video to my finance, and she could understand everything he was saying (though she noted his grammar and expressions were weird, she could guess what he meant). If what he's done is so easy / unremarkable, then there should be plenty of full-time beginner mandarin students here in Taiwan who can speak like him after their first semester. Maybe there are, but I've never met one..

In the video Benny makes quite a lot of grammatical mistakes, and often comes up with strange or unnatural sounding expressions when he's having difficulty expressing a particular point. This is natural though for second language learners.

His tones are somewhat all over the place, but I get the feeling that (especially since his method is so conversation focused) he could improve on this quite easily and naturally with time. As an aside, John's pronunciation is really good and natural sounding (I've been following his Sinosplice blog for many years now, check it out especially the older articles if you're interested in Chinese).

I think Benny definitely needs more time to polish what he has into something that you could really call passable, even with the admittedly vague standard of "conversationally" fluent. Certainly longer than three or four months, given how different a language Chinese is to English, and how much longer it takes on average to reach the same level compared to European languages. At the moment, his level in speaking in terms of vocabulary and breadth of expressions might be comparable to a decent first or second year university student.

I like his ability to inspire others to get motivated to learn languages and I applaud him for that, but I think we need to be reasonable (and realistic) about just how much time and effort it takes.

Zgarbas wrote:

I'm always fascinated by how whenever someone stands out as a language learner the language learning communities' first instinct is to criticize/underappreciate/outright insult that said person for not being a language-learning superman. Why is that? Is it because they get the spotlight? Because they make money out of it? E-Penis?

(genuine curiosity)

It's because they're lying. They invariably exagerrate their abilities, and then react violently against the critics who expose them. And it doesn't help that they also tend to profiteer off their fan base. 

I'm sure there are plenty of learners on here who've felt cheated after visiting language guru websites (in the case of this forum, AJATT is suspect number one). Sure, such sites are motivating and offer useful info, but they also shatter hopes and offer broken promises. While offering their unique version of repackaged know-how that almost any language veteran possesses (i.e. cheap marketing ploys), they give the impression that all you have to do to master a language is hardcore immersion for a short time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather than asking why language gurus are criticized and insulted, we should be asking why such individuals are tolerated, and even idolized, despite their numerous shortcomings.

cults offer helpful services to the types of people who need them, and are making a bit of cash out of something they've put effort into and enjoy doing. Let's not have another guru war, eh?

You know, sometimes criticism is actually valid.

I don't particularly care that he is selling a product. It's a free world after all. I previously gave a conservative estimate of 450 hours in total (assuming he studied 5 hours a day). According to wikipedia, typical study hours to pass JLPT 4級 are 150 hours. for what it's worth, I passed JLPT 3級 after 4 months (admittedly in Japan). I didn't study 5 hours a day. And my study methods at that time were pretty crappy. I didn't know about heisig, or immersion. I didn't have any sweet "language hacking skills."

Last edited by nadiatims (2012 April 26, 9:33 am)

aphasiac wrote:

bflatnine wrote:

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.

Bflatnine; it's clear from your blogs that you've been studying Chinese since early 2007. You arrived in Taiwan late 2011, so that's 4.5 years of study + passive listening to Chinese music and movies.

The reason people quickly become critical when they hear claims of incredible linguistic achievements in unbelievable time is that there's almost always some kind of attenuating circumstances or undisclosed conditions. I know nothing about bflatline's situation, but reading his post, I was lead to believe that he was discussing drug use after a month of studying Chinese. I was going to question it, but lo and behold, aphasiac comes and says that that was after 4.5 years plus of study. That's a huge difference! It seems bflatline considers that studying at home doesn't count and you only start counting from the moment you use it or move the country. Benny is claiming he only started studying when he got there. How does that even remotely compare?

It's so common for people to make claims without being able to appropriately evaluate what they are stating. People are usually right to question incredible claims.

bflatnine wrote:

I'll grant you that all of this screwing around helped me to connect the dots more quickly than the average learner here, but I'll also say that the length of time spent learning a language means absolutely nothing. What counts is what your actual ability in the language is, and mine when I got here was absolute crap.

I wouldn't downplay the effect of time on the brain's ability to subsequently pick up new information from the language. The amount of time spent familiarizing yourself with its sounds, for instance, has a huge effect and makes acquisition of new vocabulary a lot easier. Over time, you also build a significant passive knowledge of the language that can be activated a lot faster than it could ever be acquired from stratch.

my problem with these "gurus" is that most of us know that there are no shortcuts to language learning and also, a lot of us are convinced that it's not really a talent but a skill to be developed over time. so when people come up with these ways to speed up the process, well, yeah, we're gonna get defensive.

my biggest problem with AJATT is that not adhering to AJATT is considered adhering to AJATT. hey man! you can't have it both ways! lol

but yeah i'm pretty much over it, i'm at the level where language is more of a personal goal so i don't really feel the need to share it or tell people about it or whatever. i just come here for fun or if i have questions. so when billy bob takahashi-san comes with a new revolutionary strategy, meh, mine works fine.

IceCream wrote:

But that doesn't mean, for a lot of people, that they could speak at a JLPT3 level either, even if they pass it. JLPT level doesn't really have anything to do with how well you can communicate in Japanese...

everyone can speak at a JLPT3 level because JLPT3 doesn't test speaking.

(just like how everyone can do math at a shakespearean english level.)

for that matter, it's kinda ridiculous that we keep measuring skill in terms of absolute time (the time that we spend living on earth) instead of in terms of studying hours.

In the videos he has posted, I haven't heard anything that wouldn't be found in a beginner textbook. He's just learned basic word order and a few connecting words and then overuses them. Apparently this took him 3 months full time. Maybe he knows a lot more but his videos don't demonstrate it.

For someone who intended to study full time for 3 months before a trip, I'd just recommend people focus on their listening comprehension and learning as much vocabulary as they can from materials they can enjoy. That could be youtube videos, anime, drama, phrasebooks or whatever. In commute time I'd say listen to chinesepod or something.

Learn?  No.

Speak with fluency using a limited vocabulary?  Yeah, sure.  But speaking is the easy part.

The oldest trick in the book is simply to monopolize the conversation and turn it toward what you're able to talk about.  (People use this dodge in interviews and essay exams as well, when they don't have a ready answer to a question.)  The real proof of ability is in giving concise, reasonable answers to questions on a range of topics.  Simple as that.

Last edited by JapaneseRuleOf7 (2012 April 27, 6:01 am)

making mistakes isn't the only way to learn though. Certainly you shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes; they are indeed inevitable, and you should take those as lessons. But In general learning from failure is over-rated. It's much faster to learn by copying those who are already successfully able to do something.

When Benny goes out on day one, and makes a hundred mistakes is he even really learning from them? People will very quickly give up and become tolerant of his mistakes as well as simplifying their own speech massively (communication would be impossible otherwise).

nadiatims wrote:

When Benny goes out on day one, and makes a hundred mistakes is he even really learning from them?

His whole philosophy is based around using the language rather than studying it. Going out speaking 100 sentences will help him speak fluently quickly; the fact that he is making grammar mistakes is irrelevant (to him).

nadiatims wrote:

People will very quickly give up and become tolerant of his mistakes as well as simplifying their own speech massively (communication would be impossible otherwise).

His point is that is doesn't matter, as long as you can communicate on some basic level.

Watch his Ted talk, it's fairly short and interesting.

nadiatims wrote:

He deletes comments because he doesn't want people pointing out that his results are unremarkable and his methods bad. This would be bad for his persona and bank account.

It could be true that he deleting comments from unhappy customers, or people pointing out constructively why his method sucks. That would be pretty shady.

On the other hand, non-constructive criticisms ("your pronunciation sucks" etc, much like those that have been posted in this thread), don't help as they reinforce the negative view that you shouldn't speak until you can do so perfectly without making mistakes (which of course is impossible). I would support him in deleting those.

Last edited by aphasiac (2012 April 29, 12:28 am)

ok, so i read the post on the chinese forums. Yeah, he says some pretty rude things.

However, most of that post is full of people being overly rude or dismissive towards him, and he didn't start off in any way aggressively, and kept his patience for a good while.

The "crawling on their ass backwards" comment was refferring to those people who end up learning for years on end and still not be able to feel comfortable holding a conversation. Like me, for example. And yes, it does feel like i've been crawling on my ass backward if speech is my primary goal in learning Japanese. Like, seriously, if that's your primary goal, you should not use a heavy-duty input method unless you're willing for it to take YEARS for you to speak comfortably, and even then you'll need output practise.

It's not acceptable, really, for most people, i agree with him. His aim is to speak and feel comfortable in conversation as quickly as possible, and that is the whole point of language learning for tons of people. His aim is also to inspire others to do the same.

The only points i really think he's waaaay too arrogant on is that
a.) he seems to think that speaking is the only thing that's really worth doing in learning a language, and everything else is written off as academic. (i'd hardly class watching a movie or a variety show as "academic", and i think it'd be well within most people's definition of competance in a language).
and b.) that he thinks it's his method of learning that leads to strong results and that everyone elses method a waste of time, whereas really all that's happened is that him and everyone else ended up learning a different subset of skills from each other. Someone who spends 3 months only on writing in a 2nd language is likely to come out better at writing than someone who spent 3 months focusing on listening to the language instead, but obviously isn't going to compete at listening...

EDIT: also, it seems his target audience isn't those who are going on holiday in a few months, but expats who are moving to a foreign country. It's trying to encourage them to build the conversational skills needed to live in the country and make friends and generally be social in the first few months, before they end up living in an English bubble. Since communicating is going to be hugely helpful in avoiding ending up like that, it's arguably more important than a well balanced learning method if you're in that group, imo.

Last edited by IceCream (2012 April 29, 8:00 am)

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...