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Benny Lewis | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| simonov Senior Member Portugal Joined 5591 days ago 222 posts - 438 votes  Speaks: English | Message 153 of 164 01 June 2012 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well done! I've personally got the feeling this thread is way past its sell-by date as far as its usefulness is concerned. RIP (requiescat in pace) would be a nice epitaph. What I do find really amusing is the fact that people object to Benny's promoting his book. Steve Kaufmann promotes his site, the various podcast sites promote themselves, every single person I know makes money out of something: teaching, selling furniture, functioning as advertisers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, roadsweepers, they all get money for their work, some more, some less. So why should Benny not get anything for his. Besides, the information/advice on his site is both valid, and free! And if some people think they know soooo much better than Benny, well, why don't they just ignore what he has to say and keep away. Edited by simonov on 01 June 2012 at 2:16pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JujuLeCaribou Diglot Newbie Thailand myonlinefrencht Joined 4705 days ago 28 posts - 44 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Portuguese, Thai, German, Dutch | Message 154 of 164 01 June 2012 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
So why do you keep posting comments ? Edited by JujuLeCaribou on 01 June 2012 at 2:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| m32amir Heptaglot Groupie Canada youtube.com/user/m32Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5652 days ago 53 posts - 184 votes Speaks: Kazakh, Russian*, English, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Turkish, Mandarin | Message 155 of 164 01 June 2012 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's I wrote in this thread:
That's a response from a man with solid personal boundaries. What I wanted to say is Benny developed an ability to cope with haters. That's something that we all can learn. How is that offensive Mr. Iversen? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| futurianus Senior Member Korea, South starlightonclou Joined 5011 days ago 125 posts - 234 votes Speaks: Korean* | Message 156 of 164 01 June 2012 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As a late comer to and not very active participant in the online language community, I lack a detailed understanding as to what is going on here and thus am somewhat cautious to join in this thread, but I would like to delineate some relevant aspects which I think are important for foreign language acquisition.
ON BENNY LEWIS AND TRANSLINGUALISM Stress of Language Learning and Tension within Online Language Communities: --Learning new languages is a long and difficult process that accompanies much stress and some of it would more than likely be reflected in online language learning communities. --Sometimes we need to raise up the bar higher as to what this whole enterprise of foreign language learning is about. But at the same time, we should also try to reduce the level of stress and help others more efficiently organize their time and energy to achieve their particular language learning goals. Benny is a double edged sword in that he has successfully and dramatically put the challenge right in the face of many with his recent effort to learn Chinese in three months, shaking away many excuses and presenting seemingly tougher standard to catch up with, and also has shown the pathway that others could more easily follow. Other alleged personal peculiarities are of secondary and tertiary importance. Travel and Language Learning: --A perusal of Benny's site seems to indicate that his main thrust is that of combining travel and language learning. --I do think that this is one of the most dynamic and powerful way to assimilate a language and culture within a short period of time. --This has been my primary approach to dabbling with languages for quite a while, especially during the time in my life when I had a much more mobile global nomadic lifestyle than now, and I can vouch for its effectiveness. --I was quite interested in a member of the forum, Leo Smith, as he too seemed to have discovered the powerfulness of this approach and had committed himself to pursuing it, thereby transforming even his very lifestyle. I hope that he will share his experiences and insights he gained from them in the forum or his own blog, or even write a book about it. I was impressed by his passion that was strong enough to even subsume the location of his residence, job and finance for language learning, and broad enough to explore the languages outside of European languages. His insight and input in regards to this would be valuable. --Looking at Benny's languages, I do think that he is now venturing outside of European languages and wants to travel through non-Western hemisphere, such as China. --In our ever globalizing and digitally networked age, it is becoming ever so easy to be connected to other regions and people groups, physically and digitally, and there are only so many interesting and important regions and countries in our planet, that there will be more and more people who will become world travelers. Will there be more and more world language learners too, travelers of deeper, wider and more fascinating interior realm of our planet? --What would Benny's goal be after learning Chinese and traveling through China? Japanese? Korean? Thai? Vietnamese? Any other regions other than East and Southeast Asia, such as South Asia, Central Asia or Middle East? Three Months for Spanish: It took me three months of traveling through Latin American countries to learn Spanish from a zero level to a level where I could finally make conversations about different topics, though haltingly and with mistakes in both diction and pronunciation, listen to a broadcast news in Spanish and understand about 70-95% of the content. Generally speaking, I would think that it will take about two years for a person who is not proficient in one of the European languages, including English, to learn Spanish to such a level, six months for a monolingual English speaker, and three months for an English speaker who had learned Latin or French, even shorter for an Italian or Portuguese speaker, in similar immersion situation and equipped with an intense desire to learn Spanish and time to do so. I did not know French at that time, but I was familiar with Latin, which helped me a lot with both grammar and vocabulary of Spanish. On top of talking in Spanish with the natives, I spent as much time as possible reading Spanish magazines and news articles, watching Spanish TV programs, especially news and parliamentary discussions, and many movies with subtitles in both ways, in Spanish and English to reach that level, which I would evaluate as pre-intermediate or intermediate. If Benny knew French before, I would think that he indeed could reach a working conversational level in Spanish within three months. Writing Systems and Language Learning Progress: --With non-European languages which use Romanized alphabetic writing system, I could rather quickly breakthrough the beginner's stage into pre-intermediate stage. For example, with Vietnamese, Bahasa Indonesia and Tagalog, which all use Romanized alphabet system, it took me about a month to get past beginner's stage, mainly because much of the native contents such as newspapers, magazines and books were immediately opened up and available for me so that I could digest the words from those contents to build up the foundational vocabulary quickly; and I went all out for them as soon as possible right after I went through the very basics or even from the very start with a dictionary. With Thai, even after two months of making a great effort to learn, I could not go beyond the very basic conversational level, as I could not become comfortable with its different and unfamiliar writing system. With Arabic, I had faced more serious problem even after about four months of time, the problem of unlocking the unfamiliar codes in the consonant based writing system and gain access to the contents of the written materials in Arabic, which made it very difficult to breakthrough that barrier and begin to build up my vocabulary, garnered from Arabic texts. --When we tackle on languages from different families or with different writing systems, our learning methods and strategies must be re-adapted and re-tuned specific to those languages. We also must expect different time frameworks for reaching a pre-intermediate or intermediate level for different languages. These frameworks will also depend on the learner's linguistic background. Three Dimensionality of Translingual(See Definition here) Learning: --When our language learning pursuits become more globalized and learn languages from other families, it, in some way, becomes a three-dimensional learning experience, in contrast to two-dimensional experience of learning languages within the same family or basis. Three-dimensional ----in that there is an added dimension of difficulty and challenge to our learning methodologies and approaches which worked fine when we were learning languages that had same or similar bases as those languages with which we were already familiar with; ----and in that the multiplicity of languages from the same family somehow becomes unified in your awareness, and you begin to see their true nature and interconnections much more sharply as if they have become colorful after having been in black and white for a long time, that is, you begin to see them from another point of view, in connection with larger world of human languages, and they become one of two dimensional planes which make up a three dimensional solid object. Now, it behooves the path-breakers of foreign language learners, such as Benny, to dare to go where no man has gone before and bring a more mature understanding of those uncharted paths and places to the rest of the pack. Peace and prosperity to all language enthusiasts..... Edited by futurianus on 01 June 2012 at 4:07pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6921 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 157 of 164 01 June 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I had never seen the linkq forums before and found them to be a refreshing break from this site which tends to be overly political correct. At linkq, people are freer to express their opinions without being punished or muted (regardless of whether or not I agree with what they are saying.) Sometimes looking at things from a different angle gives you a different perspective and you see that things are not always as black and white as they may appear to be. For example, the different point of view which is expressed in the linkq forums is that some people believe that Benny's book is a scam and that his motivations are solely commercial (very high price, basically just a pamphlet with common sense, he himself has never learned a language using his own methods, claim that he studied Chinese before starting the "mission", that he just pretends to understand speakers in the videos, etc.). The theory is that if someone is selling a product claiming to teach others how to learn a languages (rather than just an ordinary language learner), then that person's credibility and skills are a relevant topic of discussion. The people on linkq make a lot of interesting points that I will not repeat here, but I thought may be of interest.
Edited by translator2 on 01 June 2012 at 5:45pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5635 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 158 of 164 01 June 2012 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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And this is the point at which I unsubscribe from this thread a while.
Thanks to the moderators for keeping it pleasant most of the time, but I would suggest that we close it because certain people are clearly quite determined to drag it down. Entertaining them is keeping the unproductive discussions alive, and I'm sure we all have better things to do. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tmp011007 Diglot Senior Member Congo Joined 6071 days ago 199 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 159 of 164 01 June 2012 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I guess my post was the "blatantly offensive". however, I do not understand why Amir's one was deleted as well
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| simonov Senior Member Portugal Joined 5591 days ago 222 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English | Message 160 of 164 01 June 2012 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
1. Steve Kaufmann's site is called "LingQ" (with a g, not a k) 2. And what on earth has my post got to do with anything you're going on about? I wasn't being "politically correct" if that's what you meant, just practical matter-of-fact. And Iversen wasn't being politically correct when he talked about keeping the discussion "civil". What's so wrong with that? 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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