s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish
| Message 129 of 200 22 April 2011 at 8:35pm | IP Logged |
There's an outfit http://www.fluencyfast.com/ that claims that it can teach the basics of a language in four days. Their site has quite a bit of video of people actually speaking after a couple of days. Of course, we have to be modest in our expectations. Honestly, nobody is going to become a B1 in four days. I think the company tends to exaggerate the actual results, as most language training companies do, but we do get a chance to see some results. I'm actually impressed. At least people are opening their mouths and saying things that are somewhat comprehensible. It's a starting point, and as long as everybody is honest in their claims and expectations, I really don't have a problem with an approach like this.
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Delaunay Pentaglot Newbie Hungary Joined 4981 days ago 16 posts - 27 votes Speaks: German, Hungarian*, English, Japanese, Dutch Studies: Russian
| Message 130 of 200 22 April 2011 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
Whoa,interesting experiment! Though I would have been much more excited if he would have completed the original goal, however unhealthy that was.
And while I understand how horrible it could be to read such negative feedback, it's still a forum, a medium for open discussion, and saying that you think an idea is silly is within everyone's rights.
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Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5948 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French
| Message 131 of 200 23 April 2011 at 7:41am | IP Logged |
szastprast wrote:
carlonove wrote:
He then backed it up with a lot of
pseudoscientific nonsense |
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He reminds me of a person 'with wheels' I read about somewhere on these boards (I
cannot find the link now). He wanted to learn vocabulary by rotating wheels at high
speed.
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The mind portal guy - fun times!
Mind
portal
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 132 of 200 23 April 2011 at 11:15am | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
There's an outfit http://www.fluencyfast.com/ that claims that it can teach the basics of a language in four days. Their site has quite a bit of video of people actually speaking after a couple of days. Of course, we have to be modest in our expectations. Honestly, nobody is going to become a B1 in four days. I think the company tends to exaggerate the actual results, as most language training companies do, but we do get a chance to see some results. I'm actually impressed. At least people are opening their mouths and saying things that are somewhat comprehensible. It's a starting point, and as long as everybody is honest in their claims and expectations, I really don't have a problem with an approach like this. |
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Well, I'm not really convinced by the TPRS methodology in general, and in that video they weren't really called on to make any innovative sentences -- they were just recycling language.
Also, any "learning by listening" method always relies on content/lexical words, which goes counter to the claim that the course teaches the most frequent vocabulary because the most frequent items of vocabulary are generally function words.
In fact, this is the weakness of almost every class in the world -- whether they're teaching through explicit grammar instruction or "leading-by-the-nose" with the target language, they always use too many lexical words.
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lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5290 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes
| Message 133 of 200 23 April 2011 at 11:38am | IP Logged |
Cainntear wrote:
... in that video they weren't really called on to make any innovative sentences -- they were just recycling language. |
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How could one expect more, after four days?
Cainntear wrote:
In fact, this is the weakness of almost every class in the world -- whether they're teaching through explicit grammar instruction or "leading-by-the-nose" with the target language, they always use too many lexical words.
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Almost every class? In the world? wow ...
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Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5400 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese
| Message 134 of 200 23 April 2011 at 11:53am | IP Logged |
I'm wondering about the point at which we can stop our hand-holding and open-mindedness B.S. with this experiment. I'll play along for a few more weeks if folks really want to, but I don't think there's anyone here than really thinks he's learned more than about 60 hours (as that seems to be roughly what he did) worth of the language. And I'm almost positive I won't see more than that proved.
Edited by Sandman on 23 April 2011 at 11:54am
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HMS Senior Member England Joined 5099 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 135 of 200 23 April 2011 at 2:19pm | IP Logged |
Sandman,
How incredibly presumptious and arrogant of you!
Edited by HMS on 23 April 2011 at 2:19pm
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5122 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 136 of 200 23 April 2011 at 4:03pm | IP Logged |
Just going back through the thread, I noticed you had this to say:
Abazid wrote:
I agree that learning anything new needs lots of time & effort , But there are lots of mental strategies that save a lot of time & effort , And could cut one's learning time in half or even more .
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Do you believe you've saved any time - "cutting your learning time in half or even more"?
Oh wait. I found this later in the thread:
Abazid wrote:
It took about 2.5 the time I thought it would (Also took more time along with 10 min breaks e.g ritual prayer)
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and
Abazid wrote:
After calculating how much it all took , It all spanned about 72 hours as a total but not connected though (25+38+9)
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Abazid wrote:
This is what I intend to do , I'll start with Brainwashing .
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Do you still consider this brainwashing?
Abazid wrote:
I'm going to do this 81 hr brainwashing experiment tomorrow .
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HMS asked this:
HMS wrote:
This has been a very intriguing read. I would be interested to know how learning via this method affects retention. The number of times in my life I've "panic revised" for an exam the night before - got decent marks but - after only a few weeks have forgotton aspects in areas I was not daily utilising.
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I'm curious to know how much you (Abazid) believe you've retained, now that you've had a few days.
And aerozeplyn had this to say:
aerozeplyn wrote:
The point is, you attacked a large dataset of information, much of that is surely still in your short-term memory, and
best of all, you can now continue your studies and experience many connections with the Russian language MUCH
better with that larger dataset in your short-term memory.
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I have a different opinion. The MT course is not a large dataset of information.
Volte wrote:
In the end, the original poster used MT, got the kinds of results you'd expect from investing dozens of hours into MT, and that's that.
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Exactly.
Cainntear wrote:
As Volte says, he did an MT course quickly -- there's nothing really special about that.
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Exactly. But because of the combination of speed and tiredness, he probably missed things.
HMS wrote:
I think the learning progress is something that should be cherished by the learner - not something that always requires an external assessor to validate.
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Hopefully what he took away from this is that it really didn't save him any time. Going through the MT course - and that's all he did - would have probably produced more solid results by spreading it out over more than 4 days, with little sleep.
HMS wrote:
Several people have however constructed a somewhat flimsy 'Strawman' argument against him based on him being unable to satisfy criteria they set for him to answer to.
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These weren't strawman arguments. They were warnings by people who have gone through MT courses before.
So, how about it, Abazid, what do you believe that you've gained from this over taking the requisite usual amount of time to complete the MT course (I personally think you could have taken your time and gone through everything in two to three weeks, without all the pain)?
And, to reiterate: now that you've had some time, how much do you think you've retained?
I maintain that you should try and converse with native speakers to get a true sense of what you've learned and retained.
R.
==
Edited by hrhenry on 23 April 2011 at 4:05pm
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