I’m a bit fuzzy on where Clugston asks for money to teach people how to learn languages. He seemed to just be saying that if you went to university, you’d have to pay thousands of dollars. I looked at his profile and there seemed to be nothing about offering his language learning services for money.
As for his attacks on Steve and the “youtube polyglots” for not being able to learn undocumented languages, I don’t understand what the point is. Besides, as an experienced language learner, if Steve were dropped into some community for a year and allowed to spend all his time learning the local undocumented language, he’d probably do ok. What you need to learn a language well is meaningful input over a period of time, and then the opportunity to use the language in a meaningful way. If there were no books or MP3s, presumably Steve would just talk to the people around him, and listen carefully, and keep experimenting until he was able to communicate.
What Steve wouldn’t be able to do is to make his knowledge of the language useful for others by writing dictionaries, grammars, etc. But the average language learner has no ambition to learn undocumented languages and then document them. This is an academic task. And even if a field linguist figures out the case system of an undocumented language, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he himself is going to speak with the proper cases all the time.
He seems to dislike Moses for learning little bits of lots of different languages that he’s unlikely to use very much. But, again, so what? Moses is presumably just doing what he wants to do. And he does speak some of his languages well.
Most of what he’s done is hold up linguistics textbooks (in this video and previous ones) and say that the youtube polyglots don’t know what’s in those books. As someone with a degree in linguistics, I probably know much of what is in those books, and I still don’t see what the point is. You don’t need to be an academic linguist to learn languages - even undocumented ones. Besides, one is unlikely to use the techniques of a field linguist if one is learning a language like French which has dictionaries, grammars, and lots of audio and written content.
He also seems to have a problem with people on YT (like Steve) trying to sell a product. I suppose if the product were worthless, and the seller knew it was worthless, then it would be worthwhile to call them out on it. But there’s nothing wrong with pushing your product if you believe in it.
He bashes Steve, but praises Krashen. There’s practically no difference between what Steve says and Krashen says. Granted Krashen has academic degrees and does his own research to demonstrate the validity of his ideas, whereas Steve says what he thinks based on his own experience, but so what?
Anyway, I thought Clugston had some good points to make back when Steve was making videos bashing linguistics as an academic field, but I don’t know why he has such a harsh reaction to language learners sharing their experiences on youtube. Aside from Krashen, Steve has been the most useful source of language learning advice that I’ve come across.
