Just curious, does anyone know who this Martin fellow is that Steve’s been doing these chats with? Is there some place to see videos of him speaking other languages?
Martin D Weiss. Not aware of any vids other than English ones. Claims fluency for; English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, as well as “other languages”.
I’m guessing some of these languages he is very good at, based on his business and language background and growing up in Brazil.
Would be interested to hear his Japanese or Chinese, which would be better proof of the general effectiveness of his “methods” (as it wouldn’t be influenced by his childhood).
A key test of these types of polyglots, and their methods, is how they go when they get to some Asian languages (as an example). Show me someone who is C1+ in an Indo-Eur + Romance + something completely different (particularly if it is a tonal language) - and I am interested in what they have to say about language learning. Particularly so, if they are adult learners.
Speaking/communicating from the start, speaking before reading as a “principle”, and best methods for vocab acquisition - are probably his main differences with Steve.
Basically - he seems to be Berlitz Total Immersion, with a bit more thinking behind and practical experience.
Yeah, I was intrigued by his comments that he could do his instructional method in Japanese or Cantonese. I kind of wish Steve had played the role of the student for 5 minutes or something even though he could understand.
And yes, for someone growing up bilingual in English and Portuguese, adding the other Romance languages plus German is certainly doable for someone with motivation. It’s not nothing, but it’s also not climbing Mount Everest. Chinese and Japanese are a different deal. Particularly with Chinese - speaking from the get-go just seems like a bad idea to me. If it were me, I’d probably want 100 hours of listening before I even opened my mouth.
So I’d be really curious to hear him speak Chinese or Japanese. Steve is the only Western person I can remember meeting or hearing about who can speak both Chinese and Japanese at a high level. So if Martin can do that too, it’s certainly something to take note of.
For some weird reason, I had in my mind that his “method” would be something like, this:
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I can suggest we speak in Japanese or Cantonese in another video.