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Clugston challenges polyglots to debate | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| futurianus Senior Member Korea, South starlightonclou Joined 5007 days ago 125 posts - 234 votes  Speaks: Korean* | Message 57 of 132 30 September 2013 at 4:48am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Three years ago when I was browsing through various websites to launch my sedantic language learning project, I saw a couple videos by him, but I must confess that I have not seen adequately to properly evaluate him.
I am also in China now, so I cannot access youtube videos and thus have not seen the video in discussion yet. Thus I will conveniently limit myself to a somewhat dried discussion of general principles relavant to the issue based on the comments written here. Focus will not be on the individuals learning a foreign language, as it will make it likely be prejudiced on the side of the language learners, but on the exchange between the amateurs and experts. In this dicussion, I see an issue that I had tried to deal with in Why are the experts not participating? and Future of Language Learning: Cooperation, the latter of which I had deleted last year due to several reasons. I always thought and still do think that I am not an expert on languages, linguistics, relevant fields in neuroscience and education, but just a laity and amateur. It is my position to respect the experts in any field who has a professional or academic degree, especially if they have their final formal degrees in their respectie fields. As an amateur who feels the need to receive quality information from the experts on language acquisition, I had felt a certain lack in this forum due to their absence and tried to figure out why this is the case. I do think that it was decisively fortunate and profitable for this forum to have had the substantial contributions from ProfArguilles, a professional expert in language acquisition and polyliteracy with full academic credentials and career background. We may have to wait for the greater convergence of experience and knowledge, for the forum contributions of the experts from relevant fields, for professional experts like ProfArguilles in neuroscience, philology, linguistics, education and psychology to come and give us their insights and knowledge about language acquisition. The limitation with amateurs like me is that we have acquired a measure of experience and knowledge about the field, but have not been systematically trained in its knowledge base and tools of research and do not know where we might be lacking--have blind spots and do not know that we do not know, or do not know that we are limited or wrong in our understanding of certain areas. There are exceptions, but very rare. Therefore as an amateur, I feel that I must develop an awareness of this and respect for the professional experts in respective fields. As to the credentials for professional experts, there is a grading system via the degree system of our universities. Putting aside professional degrees that can lead to licensing in certain fields at master's level and professional interpreters which do not require higher formal degrees, let's look at academic degrees. It is my opinion that a true authoritative expert must hold a Ph.D. degree in his respective field. One could even look at a Ph.D. degree only as a starting point, a base for building up his expertise. Someone who holds a master's degree(Clugston's case, am I right?) is in a somewhat ambiguos middle stage. He has attained a credential that backs up an expertise recognized by society and laity as authoritative and can somewhat professionally function in his field, but is not recognized as so by the Ph.D. holders. It gives him confidence in his knowledge and skill and could make him strongly opionated, which in turn could make him liable to be blind to that fact that his professional knowledge and research skill base could be still limited and lacking. I remember hearing doctoral students who smugly ridiculed the master's students as stubbonly opionated and mutually sharing of their ignorances. The level of expertise is all relative. It all depends on from which level you are looking at things in which direction, lower or higher. It would be better for someone who holds a Ph.D. and have at least several years of professional experience and research in linguistics or other related fields to engage in a dialog with language learning community. It would be, however, better than nothing for someone who holds a master's degree in linguistics to critically engage with the amateurs, even though in the manner that might be offensive to many. I would think that it is always better to respect those who have been professionally trained in their field when they are talking about their respective field, especially if the audience do not have such level of academic training. There would be plenty of valuable information to gain, if we give him the platform and open our mind to listen to what he has to say, even though it might come in the form that is difficult to digest. We have nothing to lose, but a greater chance to gain informed information to our benefit. Knowledge and experience must be informed and complemented by each other. Through globalization, there is a remarkable increase in the experience base and through explosion of internet, this base is actively becoming available to all. Knowledge must not hold on to its traditional theories based upon past pool of experience base, but must make the effort to reconstruct itself based on the newly increased and transformed base for its analysis and evaluation. Experience must engage with knowledge to correct and mature itself. Experience is fresh and full of creative energy that refuses to be constricted by what it feels to be the rusty net of old knowledge, resisting its attempt at pressuring it down, putting a rope around horse's muzzle, so to speak. I see a certain dynamic of the interaction between the positions and feelings of two respective groupings in a miscrospic way in this situation. The expert side might be voicing something that could be the feeling and viewpoint representative of a bigger community. How do we bridge the gap and bring a convergence of the two? Looking at this case, it seems that it is not going to be easy, but experience and knowledge, the laity and experts must grow together. But in the end, it is the reformed experts who will always win and be our savior. Edited by futurianus on 30 September 2013 at 5:52am 7 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 58 of 132 30 September 2013 at 6:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Like many people here, I am totally turned off by Clugston's tone or style despite a few valid points. OK, polyglots may not be academic linguists but for most people a linguist is a person who speaks many languages. I wouldn't fight over it.
Most of us are language hobbyists. I have often said so myself. There is a whole world of serious academic study of language acquisition that we tend to ignore. But is that a big problem? As some readers know, I am a stickler for definitions and have been known for flying off the handle when it comes to the use of the word fluency when we mean proficiency. But the main point I always try to make is that I want to make a debate more meaningful by clarifying the language. What I find quite striking and sometimes laughable about all of Clugston's ranting is a) very little demonstration of actual prowess in any foreign languages and b) few hints or pointers for us amateur language learners. I'm really not interested in hearing about the failings of the other polyglots. I can make up my mind. I'm more interested in what original contribution the author of the video can make in a debate. In this regard, I see a lot of bluster, smoke and little fire. I really laugh when I see people attempting to make points using languages that they don't master very well. The idea seems to be most people will be suitably impressed because they do not know the languages in question. But this is risky business because some of us know the languages at hand. Let me give a specific example. In a video with the interesting title The secrets of how your mind lies to you in learning languages all we learn basically is that the presence of an L1 interferes with our learning of L2. Nothing new. But what I found interesting was all the examples from various languages. I won't comment on Chinook that I do not know at all, but I would dispute the claims for all the other languages including English, Spanish and especially French where, in addition to some very dodgy pronunciation, Clugston is totally wrong about the example J'échange mon vin contre une bière vs J'échange mon vin pour une bière. Edited by s_allard on 30 September 2013 at 5:46pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Sterogyl Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4365 days ago 152 posts - 263 votes Studies: German*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, Norwegian | Message 59 of 132 30 September 2013 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Could you explain that? Where is the mistake? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| I'm With Stupid Senior Member Vietnam Joined 4171 days ago 165 posts - 349 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Vietnamese | Message 60 of 132 30 September 2013 at 9:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The issue with this is that the world is full of people using their academic credentials to offer weight to arguments made outside of their area of expertise. You quite often get a list of "doctors" who are creationists or climate change deniers, for example, and when you look into it a bit more closely, you find that their PhD is in an area that gives them no more expertise on the subject than anyone who passed high school science. For an expert to be useful on this website, they would have to be an expert in either teaching languages or second language acquisition. Since Clugston hasn't actually revealed what his precise area of expertise is, all we can go off are his arguments. And so far, there has been nothing particularly insightful there. Incidentally, on your other point, from what I can tell, it's no unique to this website. I don't think Stephen Hawking spends his time chatting on physics forums.
You say we have nothing to lose, but given that one of the most difficult parts of learning language is motivation, I don't think it's positive for anyone learning a language to hear that anything short of fluency is "retarded." The reality is that every stage of learning a language offers you something useful. You might be able to look at a menu and tell what's chicken and what's beef, but not be able to understand how they're cooked. That's still better than not being able to tell the chicken from the beef. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4356 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 61 of 132 30 September 2013 at 10:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I wonder what he really means by "debate". I honestly wonder.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 63 of 132 30 September 2013 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I understand your desire to get an "academic" perspective. When I'm in a similar mood, I read academic papers about language acquisition. And over the last couple of years, I've reluctantly decided that most such papers fall into a few categories: 1. Papers written by language teachers working with unmotivated students. These papers are often useless to the typical HTLAL reader. 2. Papers written by ESL or other teachers trying to help students integrate into a new country. These are much better than (1), because the teachers assume that failure is not acceptable. A lot of Krashen's work, for example, falls into this category. 3. Papers which study adult language acquisition in order to prove/disprove theories about the Universal Grammar or a Language Acquisition Device in the brain. These papers are surprisingly useless, because they they set very weird standards for "speaking" a language: "Sure, she's used her L2 professionally for 20 years, but she still has a slight accent and she makes a few rare mistakes. Clearly she's an example of 'failed' language acquisition." Essentially no polyglot uses this definition of "speaking" a language, because languages are enormously useful long before you reach flawlessly native perfection. 4. Papers written by language teachers for whom failure is not an option, and whose students face drastic professional consequences if they don't reach C1. The best work in this area comes from places like the US Foreign Service Institute. (Here's a short example.) These papers often express some frustration with the state of academic second language acquisition research. And then, every once in a great while, I'll stumble over a paper that "gets it", that understands that adults can and do learn new languages, and that not everybody needs to be flawlessly native in all their languages. For example, Schumann's Societal Responses to Adult Difficulties in L2 Acquisition is a very interesting read. The author assumes that, yes, some adults actually do learn foreign languages, but it takes a lot of time and resources, and most people will only bother if they absolutely must, and perfection is usually not the goal. Also, academic linguists love a good polyglot as much as anybody else. For example, MIT's Kenneth Hale was a renowned linguist and a hard core polyglot even by HTLAL standards. He claimed to "speak" two languages, English and Warlpiri, and to merely "talk in" several others. But his colleagues would often claim that he spoke 50 languages, and it's undeniable that he could internalize a phrase-book with terrifying speed. In fact, "Ken Hale stories" are something of a tradition in parts of academia. One story I remember reading is that Hale could read a paper about an obscure language, and months later, he could quote the example phrases back to the original author without needing to refresh his memory. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| futurianus Senior Member Korea, South starlightonclou Joined 5007 days ago 125 posts - 234 votes Speaks: Korean* | Message 64 of 132 30 September 2013 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I am surprised and intrigued to hear that with this level of heated controversy, he has managed thus long to fend off giving confirmation for what he had claimed he had expertise in.
Yes, definitely. Even just saying 'hi' or 'thank you' in local language will work wonders and open their heart. I am again surprised to hear that he has said that anything short of fluency is "retarded." The reason I am saying this is because I had presumed that he had spent several years in Thailand and has learned Thai language and culture, a language and culture which is quite different than his. I would think that such a person who has gone through the process, even without any academic training in linguistics, would think otherwise and basically agree with what you have just said.
Congratulations on having become a moderator! Emk, I agree with you that it is indeed "good manners" and proper thing to do "to give him a chance to defend himself", regardless of what a 'conflict' it might generate. Even to the alleged mass murderers and rapists we give them the right to defend themselves in the court. Did he threat to trap those youtube polyglots inside the ring, headlock and pin them down on the floor and beat the hell out of them? Probably there will be some nasty comments back and forth, but at least he would have received a chance to defend himself and in the process we would have received some definite feedback, which may or may not satisfy many, but at least we will know what his response is. As the mood here might be threatening to him, making him reluctant to make his appearance, it might be a good idea to a announce to him that we will try out best to be fair to him. He may not believe that or for other reasons may not come here, but he will at least know and appreciate that this forum had given him a chance to explain himself.
I had encountered a very fascinatingly gifted young man before, who was very well trained in linguistics. His mastery of several languages was unusually sturdy and precise, and in many ways had much better grasp of the languages than the natives. He was very accustomed to using IPA characters to analyze and represent many difficult and unusual sounds and used them to decode different languages with confidence and skill which had impressed me greatly. He gave me a glimpse into what a professional linguist can do were he to develop interest in mastering other languages. I never felt comfortable with IPA as it seemed too complicated for me and I did not feel a need to use them to produce works that other linguists would use. I, however, had used my own personally made characters and signs to decode the phonetic values of some languages. I remember doing so extensively when I was learning Russian. It was at a time when I could not use internet and utilize relevant audio materials. I will hear what the native will say and transcribe the phonetic values. Though I could not master IPA, I do respect those who use them effortlessly and do feel that it could be a very good tool in the hands of those who know how to use them well. I checked into the fieldwork guideline section of Stanford Linguistics Department. Advice for undertaking fieldwork I found the linguistic fieldwork to be quite interesting and informative. I can see some relevant methodologies and useful tools related to quickly and systematically decoding and learning a new language. Core phonetic, vocabulary and syntactical analysis seem to form the basis of the work. Now I think I can understand better why Clugston has brought up this matter. I think there is a great relevance here to the core theme of this forum and would like to hear his more detailed explanations about them and how he might have used them to learn Thai or other languages. If there are forum members who had actually done fieldwork before, it would be helpful if you would share your experiences and any insights into how that fieldwork skill can be transposed into learning a new language. I put some portions of the content into quotation for a quick reference.
Edited by futurianus on 01 October 2013 at 7:52am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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