I doubt Benny would receive as much flak if he weren’t (blatantly and forcefully) trying to sell a product. Of course, if he weren’t selling anything, I also doubt he’d make such bold claims and write such controversial posts. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, the saying goes…
@Elric I think you’re summarised it pretty well there, if he were just a guy writing a personal blog it’d be different. You don’t see Luca from thepolyglotdream getting the same flak, but he isn’t trying to sell something (as far as I’ve seen).
Many respected polyglots are friendly, nice, humble individuals and I think at least some of them sell a product and/or their services. Selling something is not the issue I think, it is just Benny’s rude and immature personality which makes him stand out.
I don’t think that someone selling a product it’s an issue, but I do think that their claims should be treated more critically if they are trying to sell a related product. Likewise I’d be more critical of Steve’s claims about how he learns than Imyirtsehem’s (picking someone at random), because Steve is making money off of a language learning system and as far as I know, Imyirtsehem is not.
The LingQ tool and beliefs about learning are fundamentally different “products” and not comparable as such. For example, many who disagree with Steve’s views use LingQ. Others who agree will not use LingQ for whatever reason.
Well, I don’t think LingQ is a product. I see it more as a service. The problem with Benny’s product is that he’s trying to sell himself along with it. He’s clearly hellbent on becoming a celebrity. He clearly wants to make people believe that he has a new groundbreaking method, but all he does is use common sense and freely available tools that nearly everybody else who’s seriously into language learning knows about. That’s one of the reasons he bashes the “academics” (a loose term that encompasses all those who have ever tried and succeeded in learning at least one foreign language), he knows they’re not his target buyers, and he knows they’ll call his bluff, and try to warn unsuspecting “customers”.
I myself stopped reading any of his advice the first time he sent me a “earn money over the internet” message through his mailing list.
Benny’s product IS himself. LingQ is a separate entity Although Steve may be the reason some use it, it is not necessarily that way.
Yay – First Post!
I just want to say a big thanks to Steve for allowing open discussion on Benny. His threads seem to close everywhere, comments are blocked all over the place, and bloggers try really hard to stay neutral. This is sort of a last bastion for truly open debate, and I hope you never diminish it.
I speak Mandarin. I consider my level to be at about B1, although my strong point is definitely conversation. Actually, I started learning in a similar way to Benny, so it’s neat to compare notes.
I understood the video 100% without subtitles. But if his teacher hadn’t chimed in a few times, I wouldn’t have understood his intent in a few places. One example is when he tries to explain he’s using Chinese to make Chinese friends. He makes some vocabulary and grammar mistakes that would have lost me if the teacher hadn’t jumped in.
I never listen to non-native speech, but I understood him pretty well. In my opinion, his pronunciation is pretty good for this stage. Yes, lots of little mistakes, but understandable. I hate how he pronounces 很 though. Dude, it’s not a female chicken. I think he did the right thing by hitting the tones hard in the first 2 weeks. It’s paid off. He talks like that was some fatal error, but if he hadn’t done it, I hate to think what his pronunciation would be like by now. If he continues to study the language like he says he will, at some point he will probably realize that he started the right way.
Like I said, I’m about B1; maybe a strong B1. I consider his level to be A1. I can’t see anyone speaking that level in a European language and claiming to be any higher than that. In his blog, he feels that he was on the verge of B1 when he made that video. No way. That would make me C1, and I’m definitely not there. Probably the worst thing about the video was his struggling to remember words, delaying, and saying “uh” every other word. His vocabulary is very limited, he’s using very few words in this video. There is no way he’d be considered to be above A1.
Benny knows by now that Mandarin takes much longer to master than the average European language for a westerner, I guarantee it. I also guarantee that he will never admit it. Or he will once again claim “it takes more time, but it’s not more difficult”. I get tired of that argument. When language learners talk about the overall difficulty of a language, they are usually talking about time to learn it. Anything else can’t be quantified. I remember reading a long rant in his blog about no languages being more difficult than others, and talking about how wrong the learners of Asian languages are. Then he had a statement in there like “they might take more time, but they aren’t more difficult”. Huh? He made this claim so loud and so often, from the feedback he came to realize people are talking about time. So he foolishly switched – he claimed there is no time difference, and pretended that’s what he meant all along. Big mistake; everyone knows that he’s wrong. But he won’t back down, due to his ego, reputation, product sales, etc.
Despite the fact that he is only at A1, Benny is learning at a very good speed. But as others have said, it’s only average for an experienced language learner, immersed, and putting in as much time as he is into studying.
‘learning at a very good speed…’ but as everyone points out, it’s just the same as any other learner. But that’s not a problem either as Benny doesn’t claim to be a better language learner than anyone else, just have better techniques. Yeah, the ‘hěn’ bit is bizarre. Can’t he hear the difference? A word that is so common, you’d think his teacher would correct him. As it’s a mistake due to reading pinyin… it’s sort of proof that he’s not following his technique of learning by interacting but by ‘book-learning’.
The hesitation was annoying but he was forcing himself to do the video so you have to give him marks for trying. And I think we as English speakers are pretty patient with learners of English so I suspect that Mandarin speakers are perhaps more patient than we are when listening to Benny. They see him as just a learner but we expect more from him. Plus he had a bit of pressure from the camera no doubt, which probably didn’t help.
Yeah, the question is, will he admit that Chinese is more difficult or takes more time? On the other hand he’s never done a European language completely from scratch with this much intensity and with a video demonstration of stage by stage progress. So unfortunately we’ve got nothing to compare this with.
“Chinese is simple compared to Navajo.” - what are you basing this statement on? Don’t forget that some languages will be “harder” than others when studying texts and grammar, but perhaps easier when immersed (due to cultural factors, for example).
I kind of agree that no language is necessarily harder than another. The less familiar the language is, the longer it will take. The more different the writing system is, the longer it will take. It does make it feel more difficult, though.
I was chatting with someone the other day about this idea of some languages being harder than others. My view is that if native speaker children / adolescents take the same amount of time to reach a particular level of fluency in language A as they do in language B, ignoring cultural or other factors that might limit their competence, then there is no saying that one is more difficult than the other.
If you find a language in which it takes native speakers the first 8-10 years of their life to become fluent, then of course it will be VERY hard for foreigners.
Certain things tend to make languages more difficult for adults learners - lots of inflectional morphology for one thing, ie case endings and subject verb agreement and so on. Even if your native language has lots of inflectional morphology, it’ll probably still be difficult to nail down all those different endings as an adult.
But in general, I agree that the linguistic difficulty of learning a language will be largely dependent on how different it is from a language you already speak. The cultural factors are a different story, and they can make an easy language difficult, and a difficult language easy.
I think Benny had a good point about Portuguese being easy to learn because Brazilians are so friendly, chatty and social. That will make a big difference. Benny seems surprised that nobody in Taipei is striking up random conversations with him. I live in Tokyo, which is a bit different, but I think a friend of mine put it best: “In Tokyo, nobody will say anything to you even if you’re standing there with a spear sticking out of you”. In some places, it’s just not normal to speak with strangers. Even in Canada, where I’m from, people (at least in my experience) don’t normally strike up conversations with strangers.
That’s a really interesting question, I’d love to see some published research on “How long for fluency” in native children. I’ve heard from some Slavic speakers that it’s normal for children to still make grammar errors up to about 14-15 years of age, I’ve no idea how true this is.
One shouldn’t forget that the difficulty in Chinese is mostly the lack of sounds. If you learn a 5 syllable English word it will stick out in a conversation. But all those two syllable Chinese words just have to sound quite similar to other words. Then you get the jia / zha, qia / cha similarities on top of that. In some ways reading is easy. Or it is at least a task that can be seen and tackled. Rapid Mandarin speech seems to be a different problem altogether. I think from memory there have been quite a few references in this thread to the difficulty of understanding spoken Mandarin.
My point is that it’s hard to compare comprehension of spoken Mandarin with the grammar of Navajo.
I suspect that Benny was being particularly out-going in Brazil and because he already spoke Spanish it was child’s play for him to interact with locals. I’m dubious as to whether random people were continually coming up to him in the street and engaging him in conversation without some signal from him that he was open to it.
I’m convinced that if he had the same level of Mandarin he would find that Taiwanese are just as open as Brazilians.
Well, according to his latest blog posts he’s moved to online lessons and interacting with locals casually in the city. Have the locals suddenly become more friendly? Or has his Mandarin improved?
good to have you here!
I live in mainland China and get my fair share of media censorship here. People like Benny censoring posters simply for challenging opinions is one reason I wouldn’t enjoy posting on Benny’s blog hadn’t I been banned long ago. I actually had invited Benny to the Shanghai area, where Iive when he visits China later next month but our email exchange really took a sour turn and he ended up swearing at me because as an experienced Chinese learner I had the temerity to challenged some of his statements on his blog.
He is such a rude and immature character, in fact he seemed very insecure of himself, afraid of any hint of criticism leveled at him. I also read his exchanges on other forums (chinese-forums, and a couple of other language learning blogs) and there is a clear pattern emerging of him being unable to handle anything that differs from adoration. At times I actually felt sorry for him.
I can understand why his Mandarin mission is generating so much heat since he is basically telling all experienced Manadarin learners that we are somehow stupid and elitist. Someone on the chinese forums in his exchange with Benny quite rightly said, that no single step in learning Chinese is difficult per se, but the steps are relentless.
I think how difficult it is will depend on how you learn it, where you learn it and what level you want to reach.
I met a guy who had lived in France for a year. He didn’t know any French prior to arriving, but he made a real effort to learn it. Constantly studying, listening, even taking notes during dinner with his host family. Later in the year, he got a job at a bar, and he really insisted that people only spoke French to him. During his whole year in France, he spoke very little English (so he claimed). That being said, he wasn’t (or didn’t appear to be) as confident in French as Steve is (was?) in Chinese after his 9 months in Hong Kong.
Also, Spanish might seem like a really easy language (comprehension etc.). But as David James said, it’s an easy language to speak poorly. Who knows, Navajo might stick easily if you were living in a community of native speakers.
To Benny (if you are by any chance following this thread), here is a quote from David Moser in his article “Why Chinese is So Damn Hard”:
http://tinyurl.com/e7jgj
Someone once said that learning Chinese is “a five-year lesson in humility”. I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.
My advice, massive input, massive reading, massive listening, lots of writing, and then when you start speaking just let it go.
I am not of the opinion that Chinese is so much more difficult than other languages. It has its difficulties, tones, characters, no vocabulary in common with European languages. It has compensations. The vowels and consonants are not difficult to pronounce, the grammar is very easy and forgiving, and once you have enough characters, the new words build quite easily.
I think that a full time student working very efficiently, and very intensely, as was my case, can achieve the following, at least that was my experience.
3 months A2/B1
6 months B1/B2
9 months B2/C1
From there you have to build on it.
One hour a day of Russian for 5 years did not take me as far. Intensity matters in language learning.
As for learning technique, I do not believe in the “learn by talking to people” approach because it limits your vocabulary and is inefficient. The time to go to the country is once you have achieved at least B1, and can read and understand the spoken language very well. Then you go the country and the spoken language will come along quite quickly, if you keep up your reading and listening activities, and notice how the locals are speaking and learn the words and phrases that they use.
One thing that I do agree with Benny about is the idea that the number of hours we spend matters. I don’t mean just hours on the class, I mean hours interacting with the language. In Chinese I had at least 8 hours a day of doing something in Chinese, possible 10. I suspect that I put in 3,000 hours in my 9 months and have spent many more hours since, reading, listening, speaking.
In Russian, I suspect that I spent 300-350 hours a year, so 5 years is still less than 2,000 hours. What is even more important is the fact that I did not build up the same intensity,since it was only an hour a day. The more concentrated your learning, the better. Efficiency improves exponentially. I am convinced that I learned Chinese better in 9 months than if I had taken it easy over 2 years.