Derlei Newbie Brazil Joined 5559 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes
| Message 25 of 56 08 September 2009 at 7:21am | IP Logged |
I think it happend because Ziad Fazah, like most of the people, had been studied too much languages, instead of spoken it. I explain! I have been studying a lot of languages, but after I reach an intermediate level, I start to watch videos in those languages and do not study anymore! I just watch, so that I can understand the languages as the native speakers do!
Edited by Derlei on 08 September 2009 at 7:22am
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lyzazel Tetraglot Newbie United Kingdom interlinearbooks.com Joined 5704 days ago 32 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Lithuanian*, Esperanto, English, Swedish Studies: Portuguese
| Message 26 of 56 08 September 2009 at 4:14pm | IP Logged |
The video is slanderous!
At least that's what one guy whose blog I have found says there. He has met Ziad so apparently he has proof.
I have written more about this on my blog (link).
Whatever the truth, I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
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translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6922 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 27 of 56 08 September 2009 at 5:22pm | IP Logged |
Great blog post.
However, some of the gaps you mentioned in your blog are shown in the first version of the video:
Shorter Video
lyzazel wrote:
The video is slanderous!
At least that's what one guy whose blog I have found says there. He has met Ziad so apparently he has proof.
I have written more about this on my blog (link).
Whatever the truth, I wouldn't be so quick to judge. |
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1 person has voted this message useful
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lyzazel Tetraglot Newbie United Kingdom interlinearbooks.com Joined 5704 days ago 32 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Lithuanian*, Esperanto, English, Swedish Studies: Portuguese
| Message 28 of 56 08 September 2009 at 10:32pm | IP Logged |
Quote:
Great blog post.
However, some of the gaps you mentioned in your blog are shown in the first version of the video:
Shorter Video |
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That just proves the point that the video that is called "complete" has been edited which makes me doubt the overall credibility of it.
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mlewan Newbie France lewan.chez-alice.fr/ Joined 6263 days ago 9 posts - 12 votes
| Message 29 of 56 09 September 2009 at 1:24am | IP Logged |
lyzazel wrote:
That just proves the point that the video that is called "complete" has been edited which makes me doubt the overall credibility of it. |
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Tell me, if I get this wrong, but before you read that blog post, you watched the "complete" video and thought it was "unedited"?
It is hardly a surprise that a television company edits their programs. Everything that is broadcast is edited to some extent. Just the fact that they use more than one camera means that they will have to "edit", i.e. choose one camera or another. In almost everything except live broadcasts there are cuts as well, cuts of things that do not make "good television", like people coughing, change of setup, unwanted pauses and simply boring and uninteresting bits.
"Complete" may here mean "all the bits that were shown on television", but I would not bet on even that.
It is very likely that this video to some extent biases the selection of what is broadcast. He may have spoken German or French fluently with some other guests, but that may not have been considered interesting, and then it would likely be cut out.
The whole program, just like many other programs, is of course made to be entertaining, not as a scientific study of what one person is able to achieve intellectually.
The only thing we can reliably read from it is what people actually say, like "I'm sorry that is not what I said" or Ziad Fazah's own "what, what..." when he tried to understand the Russian question.
And that is quite a lot of evidence against his being able to speak these languages.
In addition, it is interesting with his Finnish. He managed to say a lot of things in Finnish that had nothing to do with the question. Now, if he by pure chance had been spot on, it would surely be stunning to a Finnish speaker. It is possible, but I am guessing here, that he uses that technique a lot in this kind of situations. He would then have learnt some generic statements that fit reasonably well to a large number of questions. A fair number of interlocutors who have the opportunity to exchange just a few trivial lines with him would then be impressed, even though he may be unable to stray much from the subject.
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lyzazel Tetraglot Newbie United Kingdom interlinearbooks.com Joined 5704 days ago 32 posts - 29 votes Speaks: Lithuanian*, Esperanto, English, Swedish Studies: Portuguese
| Message 30 of 56 09 September 2009 at 11:10pm | IP Logged |
Well, I don't know much about TV. In fact, I don't like TV. I just imagine that it wouldn't have been edited if it were life (as you have said yourself). I figure it would be a lot more fair if the test was actually done on live TV.
The fact that the "other" video has some extra content compared to the "complete" video shows that "complete" is not "complete" at all and that reason alone is enough to stop trusting it.
You are probably right about Russian. That is, if Ziad had really claimed to speak Russian and he didn't understand the phrase. That would mean, if not more, that he had forgotten at least some of his languages.
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Walshy Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6945 days ago 335 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German
| Message 31 of 56 10 September 2009 at 7:34am | IP Logged |
He clearly didn't understand a word of some of the languages he claimed fluency in. That's the bottom line for me. He even mistook Russian for Croatian, yet claims fluency in both.
I believed in Fazah originally, but after the events of the past couple of years, I need more than "the video is not continuous" (almost none are) to convince me otherwise.
Edited by Walshy on 10 September 2009 at 7:36am
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J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6033 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch
| Message 32 of 56 12 September 2009 at 8:23pm | IP Logged |
I've studied about 20 languages. Can I say I speak 20 languages?
Has he simply studied 58/59 languages and says that he speaks them all?
Silly mistake, I think.
Good on him for getting good in the ones he is good in though.
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