I’m pretty sure B1 meets within his definition of fluent, so if he indeed reaches that level in his mind he will have met the criteria in his blog title.
B1 would be HSK level 5 = 2500 words minimum in 90 days. You’ll need the ability not only to understand but also to produce these words in correct sentences. Nearly 30 NEW words per day! What’s more, Benny told us to reach the even higher C1 level (10,000 words), and he also wants to learn how to write and read more than 500 characters properly.
Finally he will have to redefine “fluency” if he wants to call this mission a success. The whole thing is a crazy method to attract even more people to his website and to buy his stuff.
@Hape: “The whole thing is a crazy method to attract even more people to his website and to buy his stuff.”
Yes, that’s it - in a nutshell. Benny is selling a method which claims to make people “fluent” in no more than three months - so somehow or other he has to “prove” that it is possible…
We all know the kind of tricks he has gotten up to in the past. But I have a feeling that he may have pushed out his boat a little bit too far this time. Seeing that Mandarin is tonal, he will find it harder than usual to fake fluency by scripting and learning.
(I’m not saying that he always fakes by scripting and learning, of course. But it’s one of his techniques.)
I have said it many times in other threads: to me comprehension is the big challenge with Chinese due to its compacted nature and huge number of homophones or near homophones. To set a goal of being able to follow discussions of a group of native speakers in a social setting such as a party or a bar and being able to understand virtually everything, not having the locals have to slow down or avoid slang expressions, now that is an impossible goal (in Chinese) even for a gifted and determined European language learner. I am not the worst language learner myself but I am still socially handycapped in certain settings, and that after three and a half years of hard study most of that in the target country.
I think without knowing that language beforehand, Benny might think that what was possible for Italian or Portugese is maybe also be possible for Chinese. I am sure he will realise after a while that Chinese is very different. I respect Benny for setting ambitious goals but what I find so off-putting is that he makes it sound as if other learners like me are too stupid because it takes us years of hard dedication and transpiration to get where he supposedly get in twelve weeks.
There are a couple of other of his statements that I strongly disagree with: For example he said he only wants to set himself modest reading goals such as reading restaurant menus or newspaper headlines. In my experience those are rather difficult things to read because the characters for certain food items and cooking procedures are very complex and rare. I still have problems with French menus because those words are so rare in normal speech. The same with newspaper headlines, they are highly compacted and meaning-dense and much more dificult to grasp for a beginner than longer text passages.
“I still have problems with French menus because those words are so rare in normal speech. The same with newspaper headlines, they are highly compacted and meaning-dense and much more dificult to grasp for a beginner than longer text passages.”
- I agree totally with this. I think you could also throw “movie titles” into the same category. I often find that the title of a movie (or even a book) might only be five words, but two of those words might be unknown. Therefore, comprehension is only 60% and I don’t have any idea what the movie is about! (until I watch it).
No metter if he know 1000 words or 10000 , the most important thing is use this new words and learn how the language work and your costruction.
To me Benny dug his own grave when he said that he will be able to achieve the C1 level and can learn any language fluently in 3 months in particularly Mandarin.
I don’t see the point of memorising a script and then record a video.
I thought his methods were to speak all the time with natives.
Memorising sentences reminds me the old days in school.
I think the important point in all of this, is that an experienced and committed language learner, learning on his or her own, who puts in a lot of time, will learn a lot in three months, much more than the average learner in a classroom. This has little to do with any language hacking techniques, and a lot to do with how much can be achieved if we apply ourselves with intensity, and believe in our ability to succeed.
By the way, since I am blocked from commenting on Benny’s youtube channel, I wonder if someone could post this comment to his video just to see the reaction. If my name is attached to it, Benny will take it down immediately.
I think memorizing a text is a great idea to improve your language ability, but of course only if you like to do it. I myself have memorized multiple passages from the great book “Master and Margarita” by M. Bulgakov, and it helped me a lot to learn certain expressions and words. Because I like the story so much, I wasn’t actually “memorizing” it actively, I just read it a lot of times and repeated it aloud.
The key is to do things that we like to do. That means the learner taking charge of his or her learning and not allowing a teacher to impose tasks.
I knew a guy from Morocco would had learned half a dozen languages to fluency and one of the things he would do was to find short texts and memorise them. He seemed to enjoy doing that and had the memory for doing that with texts. I think I would do it but I know I wouldn’t enjoy it.
I think memorising a series of short dialogs is best when you are in the target language region. The allows you to go out and immediately use them which will solidify them. At home, a word focus is best since a particular word is more likely than a particular phrase to be encountered in text.
I find that when I start a language I focus on words, since this is the basic unit of the language. Now after 5 months of Czech, when I know a lot of the words I meet, I am saving more and more phrases. Saving them helps me to see how the words work together. I do not enjoy memorizing anything but I am sure it works for people who like doing that. I would certainly not memorize things to say to people. When I understand most of what people are saying to me, I will gradually find the words and phrases to say back to them.
I guess to be specific, memorising very prosaic exchanges like “at the post office” or whatever. Nothing too deep. And then only when you are in the target region while, of course, doing a lot of “word work” in the background.
Funny Ed, I have never found the “at the post office” scripts to be useful. First of all I don’t spend a lot of time at the post office, train station, with custom officials etc. but when I do, the conversation is very different from the scripted dialogue, at least what the native speaker has to say.
I really recommend saving the phrases you want from content at LingQ , grabbing the google translate version in your own language, fixing it up if you want, then going through them in flash cards, say 100 at a time, recording them with your own langage, the TTS and then your own attempt at pronouncing them in the target language. I find listening to recordings of all of this very helpful to my memory.
The TTS is usually quite faint, but in any case closer to native than I am, and my own pronunciation is no worse then I will do in real life. Then I can go back to listen to the lesson again.
Yeah Vonk, language learning is a long process of getting used to a language and a culture. There are no shortcuts and no “hacks”. It takes time for the language to gestate in the brain. Mostly the brain needs exposure, lots and lots of exposure, wherever and however that exposure is acquired.
After 2 weeks in any language, all the more so in Chinese, you are still a neophyte grappling with the strangeness of it all. I would not record myself at 2 weeks, but I might want to at 6 months, then again after 1 year and so on.
However, we are all stimulated in different ways. Benny needs to go to the country and have everybody watch him in order to apply himself to language learning. Others prefer to work away on their own, wherever they are, savouring different aspects of the language and culture as they progress.
At some point we all want to talk and share the language with others, but that point is different for different people.
I guess I am thinking back to when I was in Japan and feeling very frustrated with the results of just doing the textbook exercises (Japanese for Busy People). So one day I just started memorising the dialogs, forgetting everything else, and then something clicked. But I will definitely try that TTS phrase technique.
Steve, I’ve always disagreed with you when you say ‘there are no shortcuts or hacks’. There clearly are, and you use them every day. It’s just that you don’t see them as hacks.
Looking up words in the dictionary, using translations, grammar explanations - these are all shortcuts/hacks. These are things which go beyond the actual ‘natural’ method (how children learn languages).
Without these things, I know that none of us would be even close to where we are at with our languages. Would you know 10+ languages right now, Steve? That seems like a shortcut to me. 