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Clugston challenges polyglots to debate | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 81 of 132 01 October 2013 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would just like to weigh in and add to @emk's post about @Benny's fees. As was pointed out, the $250/hour is
not for ongoing language lessons but a one-off consultation that is more oriented towards enhancing an Internet business, That rate is in my mind quite reasonable, especially when compared to the rates charged by professionals in many fields. More fundamentally, the issue is whether the price of a service is worth it in terms of the results. As someone who does a fair amount of private tutoring in French, I always chuckle at the reaction of some people to my hourly rates, $60 to $100 an hour depending on the nature of the work involved. By the way, those rates are less than what a mechanic charges at a major automobile garage charges where I live. People who don't have any money find my rates prohibitive, and the story ends there. Other people look at the potential results. If their professional success depends on passing an exam or a job interview in French, a few hours with me or another tutor should be considered an investment. I find that most people tend to overrate their level of proficiency in French and are taken aback when they find themselves in a real situation where they have to perform in front of native speakers. How many people have had the opportunity to work one on one with a professional who will tell them exactly what is wrong with their speaking and how to improve it? Two hours of professional tutoring that seems so expensive can make the difference between getting and not getting that job or contract. Edited by s_allard on 01 October 2013 at 2:57pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4857 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 82 of 132 01 October 2013 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh my God. This senseless topic for 11 pages... I mean, I also take part in such discussions... sometimes... but, well.
Btw. - if it wasn't for an extremely rare language and in an extremely low price, I wouldn't spend any money for language tutors anymore. Edited by prz_ on 01 October 2013 at 4:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 83 of 132 01 October 2013 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Although this is slightly off-topic of the OP, I think there is some relevance in questioning the value of language
tutors. Or, to look at the big picture, why use the services of a consultant or one of the language gurus or polyglots who offer paid advice? The answer is the same whether it's a $500 / hour consultant or a $20 / hour tutor over the Internet: you can't correct yourself. Actors and athletes have coaches, other people have mentors, authors have editors. Most professional people strive to improve, and one of the best ways to improve is to invite and take advantage of constructive criticism. Who doesn't appreciate good advice? I find it hard to believe that somebody would not love to have the helping hand of a an experienced observer who can pinpoint mistakes and weakneses and suggest areas and means of improvement. My own experience as both a tutor and a tutoree (?) is that once you've tasted it there is no looking back. Classes are great, so are books, CDs and the Internet, but there is nothing like working with a trained professional if you want to make real progress. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 85 of 132 01 October 2013 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
When I was teaching in India, a new teacher arrived at the school who said that he had taught himself Hindi. The school arranged for language teachers to come and teach Hindi for about £1 per hour, but he still refused to take part. "Why would I pay someone to teach me something I can teach myself?" A strange attitude for a teacher, and even stranger (or not) is the fact that I never once heard him speak Hindi, even when speaking with Indians. My point is that some people want to do it their own way, regardless of evidence or outcomes. Some people call it "thinking for themselves", but that is often simply a cover for not listening to other people. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7142 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 86 of 132 01 October 2013 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Based on this latest thread, I went and looked at some of Clugston's videos. I had watched some of them some months ago, and had wondered at the time, based on his rambling and repetitive attacks on some of the other YouTube polyglots, whether he was often three sheets to the wind when he decided to make his videos.
I've now listened to a few more of his videos, but frankly, there are so many and they're so repetitive that I think it would be an utter waste of time to do more than a partial sampling. I think that some of his criticisms of others are indeed valid, but that a good many of his main points, even if technically accurate, are largely irrelevant to most people interested in learning languages. Who cares, for instance, if 90 percent of the world's languages are unscripted? Steve Kaufman doesn't claim to teach these, and very few people have any interest in learning them. Field linguists may indeed have developed techniques to learn, analyze, and describe them (and no, these are not "secret technologies" as he states in at least one of his videos), but they are not the only way to learn languages, and certainly not a very feasible way to learn the languages that most people have an interest in learning. His constant harping on the supposed "misuse" of the world "linguist" is simply silly; words, as any linguist is aware, can be used in more than one meaning, and the use of "linguist" for people skilled in languages far antedates the modern science of linguistics when differentiated from philology as he does. And the military, whose language teaching programs he does seem to value, routinely refers to translators/interpreters as "linguists." While I agree that it makes more sense to try to focus on his points rather than his personality, his personality, at least as judged by his videos, is so obnoxious and insulting toward his interlocutors and even his viewers that it's hard to focus on anything else. (For one thing, as a minimal courtesy to those who watch his videos, he could turn off the television or radio or whatever he often has blaring in the background.) Despite the titles of his videos, the ones I watched seldom provided any useful information on the subjects in question, but mostly involved the same attacks on other polyglots (some of whom I find a bit irritating myself). In one on the best sources to learn French, for instance, he suggested the "French in Action" series and waved some other books around in front of the camera. These were "French for Reading", a book called "Programmed French", and another book that I don't recall. On "Programmed French" he offered to send photocopies to people who send payment in advance, a cavalier attitude toward copyright that would probably be looked askance at in the academic circles he so values. For me, the bottom line is that despite listening to probably a dozen of his videos, I never learned anything useful about learning languages or about anything else. It's easy to laugh at his foibles, such as his repeatedly saying "antidotal" when he really means "anecdotal", etc., but he doesn't seem to convey much other than anger and scorn toward those whom he sees as his "rivals". Despite his purported respect for proven methodologies, citations, scientific approaches, high scholarly standards, etc., all the videos I've seen portray little more than barely coherent bluster. He's certainly not demonstrated, at least in his videos, any high-level ability to be "functional" (his preferred term) in languages other than English, and I suspect that most academics, in linguistics or other fields, would also find his mode of discourse pretty off-putting. I have to wonder, though, why with all his scorn for the "cult of the YouTube amateurs", he just doesn't devote himself to academic linguistics and make a name for himself in whatever field he finds most congenial. Judged by comments above, he doesn't seem to have any academic publications to his name, and it isn't clear if he has any actual degrees in linguistics. But I think that if he DOES aspire to an academic career, the crude and noxious videos he's put up on the internet would hardly help him to get a job in a respected linguistics department. Edited by daristani on 04 October 2013 at 7:11pm 20 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5343 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 87 of 132 02 October 2013 at 3:20am | IP Logged | |||||
I know we have discussed this before, but I'll just make a quick point here. A personal tutor can be very helpful and effective for honing in your speaking skills, quickly correcting recurring mistakes and developing fluency, but in my opinion this does not constitute making "real progress". The bulk of the work involved in learning a language - grammar study, internalizing the syntax, the accumulation of a vast store of vocabulary and means of expression, is done far more efficiently through self-study methods, particularly those involving extensive and progressive readings in the target language itself. Sole or primary reliance on a tutor achieves very modest results by comparison as the exposure to the language itself is much more limited both in terms of quantity, complexity and diversity of settings, subject matter and registers. Tutors, if engaged and accomplished, can in my opinion be a terrific aid for perfecting particular aspects of language production, but not so much for actually "learning" it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 88 of 132 02 October 2013 at 5:48am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't want to deviate too much from the OP, but I would like to revisit this issue of real progress and the use of tutors. I should clarify that I mean by real progress the active skills like speaking and writing. Of course one has to do extensive reading and listening, all the drills and all the homework. But the problem that many, if not most people, have is that they hit a wall that I'll call the eternally intermediate wall. You can understand the news on the radio and newspaper nearly perfectly but can you talk or write in a manner that resembles what a native speaker would say? The answer is no. Just a basic conversation talking about mundane topics is challenging. This is where working with a professional tutor comes in. I'm not talking about a language buddy where you exchange languages over Skype. Let me say, of course, that there is nothing wrong with this. I'm talking about someone who is trained in the linguistics of the target language and in language teaching. The first thing is basic house cleaning: getting rid of those pronuciation mistakes that you don't know you are making. Then we work on identifying weaknesses and bringing your grammar up to speed. And finally, and most importantly, the tutor helps you bring all the elements that you have gleaned in your extensive reading into utterances that you actually create. What I find interesting when I do tutoring is that my students most of the time know what I'm showing them. They've seen or heard it before but now they are actually using it in a conversation. It's one thing to read something on a screen, it's another thing to have it come out of your moth. This why it is so exciting to work with a good tutor. I can talk about what I want to talk about. And if I don't know how to say something, I have an immediate answer. And it goes without saying that I'm learning to speak in a native-like manner. I may have been saying things correctly from a grammatical point of view, but the tutor is showing me how he or she as a native speaker would have said the same thing. A tutor does not replace homework. Unless you have lots of money, you'll be seeing your tutor maybe once or twice a week. When I speak of real progress, I think of the tutor as the "kicker" or catalyst who will help me transform all my home or classroom work into a real active skill. One of the byproducts of all this is self-confidence and self-esteem. No longer do you have to dread interacting with native speakers. The tutor shows you how to handle yourself in the situations you can imagine. You want to know how to say "Could you pass me the salt please?" No problem. There may be three different ways of saying that. Or you can work on various ways of starting a conversation. Or maybe you want to work on how to tell a story of even jokes in the language. These are not easily learned from a book. All that I've said here can apply to written language. I think it's wonderful to have someone look at my e-mails and explain to me the subtleties of tone of voice and the use of idiomatic expressions. I would never dare send off an important e-mail in my target language that I haven't checked with my tutor unless I'm totally sure of my text. The point here is that the tutor does not replace all the individual work. The tutor helps to take it to another level. Edited by s_allard on 02 October 2013 at 5:53am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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