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Foreign Language Road Running DVDs | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4820 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 17 of 72 19 May 2011 at 10:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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I do wonder why one needs to buy one of these courses when he has already posted such a detailled outline?
@Leosmith I see your profile lists you as speaking an impressive number of languages. Did you, at least in part, utilse similar techniques to aquire these? (i.e use of keywords etc) My main concern with these courses is price. If they where cheaper, I would definetly try one. Im sure a lot of people would. But a $400 price tag means one needs to consider the pros and cons carefully. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6380 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 18 of 72 19 May 2011 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
I rarely buy courses. I already have a lot of methods that work well for me. If I hear about some method I might try it out, but I wouldn't part with money for it. I just now listened to a video that Moses made in Mandarin. His tones are pretty bad, but he says himself that they are, and frankly, the tones of almost every westerner I've listened to are pretty bad. He speaks with a good flow, though he uses pretty basic language. But he says that's because the video is intended for one of his students. So all in all, his Mandarin seems pretty good to me. I then checked a vid in Cantonese. His tones were still quite off, but all in all his pronunciation was better. He speaks a bit like a news anchor in that he uses the "correct" pronunciation that everyone says one ought to use but very few actually do (like pronouncing the 'ng' in 'ngo5'). It's clear in his vocabulary that he hasn't studied it as much as Mandarin. He can make himself understood quite clearly, but he's not advanced. Also, please note I try to avoid judging people on their pronunciation, as it's a feature that's very hard to improve. Some people have bad pronunciation, others good. It seems to have little to do with their other abilities in the language. Edited by Ari on 19 May 2011 at 12:51pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5136 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 19 of 72 19 May 2011 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I would very strongly discourage you. While, like many others, I appreciate Moses commitment to language learning, I struggle to see what he brings to the table that's new. There's a bounty of free resources on the internet and books that can be bought for $20-40 that are designed to help you learn the basics of a language quickly. I really struggle to believe that Moses has anything to offer that would be worth more than $40 dollars. To the extent that he has a method that he can teach, I doubt it is new. I suspect his method is simply a mixture of enthusiasm with the targeting of conversational competence, and there are a lot of courses and programs that take that approach.
More important, if he had a method, he could publish it as a book, as many other polyglots have done before him, often for free. Instead you have to learn the "method" by following one of his courses in a particular language, which is my biggest problem. As has been mentioned, repeatedly, his level in a lot of his languages (I think most) ranges, in absolute terms, from ok to quite bad. Is it impressive to speak many languages badly? Yes, in a sense; it requires a lot of time and dedication. But one of the trade-offs of learning that many languages in a superficial way is that you are an expert in none of them. To then take your broken, heavily accented Arabic or Spanish and offer to teach these languages to beginners (even if you are using TY as a textbook) for $400 dollars borders on fraudulent. Yes, there is a money back guarantee, but the problem with being a beginning language learner is that you can't judge the level of your teacher. Moses sounded reasonably impressive to me before I heard him speaking languages I could actually understand... I don't mean to be too hard on the guy, but when you start selling a product, especially such an expensive one, to people who are unable to evaluate your skills, you should expect to come in for harsh criticism. There are plenty of distinguished language learners who have reached very high levels in many languages and who share their passion and advice quite freely. Under these conditions, if you're bringing something to the table and charging for it, you should be sure you are really that good. As a beginner, I would advise you to sample a bunch of different approaches and find what works for you. There is no reason to invest all your money in one expensive program. In fact, in my experience there is often an inverse relationship between price and quality when it comes to language learning. If you have the enthusiasm and are willing to experiment, you will be able to develop your own method. If you're lacking enthusiasm, there's plenty to be found online for free. I mean, practice away for a few months and, if you're in the UK, you can spend your $400 on a trip to Spain! ed: One last thing - the FSI has been looking for the magic key to language learning over the years. They haven't found it. Their conclusion after nearly fifty years of intensive language training for the US government? What matters is your skill level and how much time you spend with the language, not what particular technique you use (perhaps with the exception of some that don't work...) Edited by cmj on 19 May 2011 at 8:50pm 16 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6348 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 20 of 72 20 May 2011 at 3:11am | IP Logged | |||||
I like your post, but disagree with what you consider FSI's "conclusion" to be. I think you meant to say intensity rather than skill level, but they say so much more in their "Lessons Learned" that it seems incomplete to summarize it like that. What do the readers of this thread think the conclusions of this exceptional article are? Decide for yourselves. Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6348 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 21 of 72 20 May 2011 at 3:18am | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, but I don't have time to pa-ruse his language videos. And what you posted isn't enough to explain his method. I'm not sure what he means by keywords, or how he uses them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cmj Octoglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5136 days ago 58 posts - 191 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Arabic (classical), Latin, Italian | Message 22 of 72 20 May 2011 at 10:15am | IP Logged | |||||
That's fair : ) It was a throw-away remark but I shouldn't have provided a "summary" of the work without rereading it first. By "skill set" I meant aptitude (both natural and acquired) and I should have mentioned intensity as a separate element beside time (although I tend to think of them as linked). The article itself is well-worth reading and useful for the language learner. The only thing I wanted to highlight is that while there are less effective methods, there is also no magic bullet and that after 60 years, they haven't been able to significantly on improve the learning time needed by their students. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5809 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 23 of 72 20 May 2011 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
He's taken a simple idea -- the idiom principle -- and stretched it out very thinly. The idiom principle suggests that much language is simply a set of fixed phrases (idioms). Some people conclude from this that you can learn to say a lot without learning grammar. I disagree with this point of view. Of all the idioms in all the languages I've studied, the vast majority are grammatically regular -- that is to say that they are built from standard grammatical elements. Only a small minority of idioms "break the rules" of grammar. This implies that in our brain, we still recognise the grammatical structure of our fixed phrases. If this is the case, then learning fixed phrases before you have mastery of the grammar means learning them in an unnatural way, as though they were mere words, not phrases. Moses proposes learning lots of fixed phrases simply to allow you to keep talking, because stopping and panicking is a confidence killer. This is true, but then if you don't want to pause, actually learning the language is better than blagging it by memorising a few phrases. Last time I was involved in a discussion on the specifics of the techniques, I commented on his English-language demonstration. The phrases he used were excessively flowery and he used them in inappropriate sentences. I was cut down with "it's only an example", but if he couldn't give a good example in English, it suggests the method is flawed. My general experience of learners of English is that they overuse certain fixed phrases -- fixed phrases are more subtle and context-specific than I think many learners (and teachers) give them credit for. I had a friend from Barcelona who learned "out of the blue" in a class, and has overused it ever since -- the subtleties pass her by. I have another friend who says "to be honest" far too often, prefixing almost every opinion with this. The effect is a bit strange, and this appears to be what Moses goes for. And I'm sorry, but I can't comment on Moses's techniques without commenting on his abilities, because his abilities are the result of his techniques. I feel that Moses's techniques are a distraction from properly learning the core of the language. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to learn a little of a language without mastering it, you want to keep your options open. Good teaching/learning gives you a little bit of the language, and the option to master it later. Bad teaching traps you in the basics. Overreliance on fixed phrases falls into the latter category -- you develop coping strategies for dealing with complex input that basically involve ignoring most of it, and you do not set the foundations for future learning. 15 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6473 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 24 of 72 20 May 2011 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Why don't you try the phrasebook method? 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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