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Ziad Fazah - does he exist? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| asad100101 Diglot Senior Member Pakistan languagel.blogspot.c Joined 6240 days ago 118 posts - 137 votes  Speaks: Hindi*, English | Message 281 of 377 09 April 2007 at 7:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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my humble opinion is that once people know 3-4 languages under their belt other languages will come to them naturally. I have known a new yroker speaking urdu (if you guys know the Junoon sufi rock band from Pakistan) - one of their band members was an American from New York who had lived in Pakistan for 12 years. He was fluent in day to day conversations yet he had a distinct American accent...while speaking urdu... but in case of Dave, he spoke some sentences and they sounded much more native like...they were sounded on my ears like they were spoken by a native speaker. You see, he has not even spent a single day in Pakistan...so some language learners are exceptional to the case and you can not doubt their innate ability for learning lanaguages.
Dave has not yet spent much time on learning urdu, if i am not wrong he has been learning it for the past two months or so under the guidance of Ziad Fazah... so if his student's results are impressive then I hardly can doubt his mentor's ability for learning languages. In my rough estimation, Dave will make much more rapid progress if he follows an imitation approach..more like hearing sentences and repeating them(knowing in what context they are used)...rather than focusing on grammar points/structures. mein kul call karoon gaa aap ko (I'll call you tomorrow). Shub'ba Kher (Good Bye). Edited by asad100101 on 09 April 2007 at 7:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dave M Groupie United States bfmfightwear.com Joined 6711 days ago 56 posts - 63 votes | Message 282 of 377 09 April 2007 at 8:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I did not mean to come across as mean,
I feel a certain responsibility. Ziad is in his 50's bit an old 50. This is currently the only place his name is kept alive and until I can get my own life together I cant help him promote a website or book which is his dream. When people discredit him I worry. Please dont take offense. Anyhow I will say this. Myown phonetic knowledge and language gift has been in accent and communication,. I can communicate exceptionally even without knowing how. It takes me more meticulous study to nail down the grammar. Ziad is a bit the opposite. He is more of a mathematicion. His accent is preetty good and hsi coomunication may sound sstrange,but thats his personality. I am an extroverted outgoing easygoing guy and Ziad doesnt communicate outside of his own world much and doesnt express himslef like a poet. His grammar is perfect and he has a aurreal ability to innately understand why one declension is this way versus another particle or verb tense being another way. He knows gender in Hebrew perfectly. You have no idea how hard gender is in Hebrew. His lessons are similiar to Pimsleurs actually He starts a phrase and makes you repeat it, go back build on it, advance a bit more, push you a buit past your memory point and then return to the original phrase. When you least excpect it, you find that you remember it because it wasnt rote memorization, you went on and then back after about 10 minutes. Its a great method. He also, in Lebanon worked like this. He went to the public librbary and got available texts on whichever language. 20 minutes phonetics, 20 minutes grammar, 20 minutes practicing forming sentences. Then out into the streets to find natives] Languages have gratitude factors. If an America wants to learn French or Spanish no one cares. If he wants to learn Tagalog or Hindi or Cantonese people are happy that the American values theri culture. If the whole world speaks english (and they do) and you still find that persons language important enough to spend hours on, you are saying that persons culture is beautiful; I find Urdu beautiful and poetic. The written language is fascinating. Speaking it reminds me of the capacity of human beings to be more than mere worker drones and be spiritual beings. Most language lovers feel the same way I suppose 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6653 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 283 of 377 16 April 2007 at 6:14am | IP Logged | |||||
I asked Ziad for his side of the story about this. If I remember what he said correctly, he told me that he had been invited to do an interview for this TV show, and so he accepted it. However, when he got there, he discovered that he'd been cheated, in that he had somehow been misinformed of what languages he would be tested in. So he did admit that the first time was a bust. But when I read the article that is on this thread (the English one) and I got to the end where it said 'Same result, same failure' Ziad became quite surprised and said that the second time was quite a success. I guess everyone here has the right to believe the version they choose, but I wanted to put his side of it out there, as well.
But if one doesn't use the languages that often, of course one would have to review them. To be fair to your question, I don't know how basic the conversations he is being asked, but even with some many years gone by with no real use of a given language, even basic skills become rusty. I can't speak for Ziad, but if he's learned a language well, I think he has the right to say so, even if he has forgotten it. I think he should clarify that despite learning them well, he needs to spend some time to review one ones he hasn't used much before speaking them; and when I've spoken with him, this is exactly what he's told me. Also, I think he does recognize the problem with knowing so many languages. He indicated that he really doesn't need the vast majority of them for any given job, and adviced me to not try to depend solely on languages as a means to make a living. I told him it was just a hobby of mine, and he said that is fine (as it's probably a hobby of most language learners, too), but he certainly isn't blind to the fact that he needn't have learned so many languages in his youth (I'm still planning on learning quite a few, though, if I can). Edited by Journeyer on 16 April 2007 at 6:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woland Diglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 6196 days ago 21 posts - 23 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Spanish | Message 284 of 377 26 May 2007 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I realise there hasn't been a post here for a while - I hope I haven't missed anything in the saga! Firstly, I want to say that I truly believe that Ziad has a good knowledge of all the language he claims to know. Unlike some others on this forum, I'm not interested in questioning his level of fluency in each of these languages; if he 'only' knows 3000 words in every language, then that's nearly 180,000 straight away! OK, I know there are cognates and the like, but that's still pretty impressive. In any case, he's likely to have a much larger vocabulary in some of those languages - Portuguese, English etc. Anyway, this is not the reason I am writing. I am writing because, after reading thirty-some pages of this thread (something which I have never done [and smething which took the best part of two hours - shame on me, I read slowly even in my native language!]), I can still see no evidence of a website, or of any sound clips. I am certainly not trying to offend anyone, I am simply (like many of us, I imagine) extremely interested to hear this man speak. I believe I am also speaking for a number of people on this forum when I say that ringing him up, or talking to him via Skype is not really an option - Ziad seems to be a very busy man and I, for one, do not wish to burden him with an ultimately unecessary phonecall. So, all I ask is for someone to post some audio/video on him.
Although I feel that I've missed something big on this topic... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6653 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language | Message 285 of 377 27 May 2007 at 3:05am | IP Logged | |||||
I would say your guesses are probably right. His English is excellent. Not perfect, he doesn't pass off as a native, due to some idiomatic errors and an accent I can't place (Brazilian? Lebanese? Both?) but his knowledge of the language is certainly mastered and expansive. He and I have spoken about languages, computer technology (he knew terms I wasn't even aware of, although I'm not a computer whiz), politics and current events, and so forth. Never once did he have to say, "Um...Now what's that word?" His Spanish and German are likewise excellent, although I'm not yet at the level in either of those languages to have quite as expansive a conversation as I did in English with him. However, when I asked him about Dzongkha, he said he used it once while talking to a monk from the place where it's spoken, I forget the name of the country. He suggested that his mastery of the language was not at the same level as some of his others. He also said that if he can listen to the spoken language and understand 80%-85% of it, than he considers that a fluent knowledge, even if it isn't a perfect knowledge. Plus, some languages he will have more access to, and thus of course his vocabulary will be larger. Portuguese, Spanish, and English especially, due to the amount of media available through them and where he lives, not to mention his native Arabic. Edited by Journeyer on 27 May 2007 at 3:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| volapuk49 Tetraglot Groupie United States Joined 6052 days ago 73 posts - 86 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Yiddish, Modern Hebrew Studies: Esperanto | Message 286 of 377 29 September 2007 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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An earlier post said that gender in Hebrew is difficult. It is actually very simple. I am not sure what the writer is
referring to when he says this. There is masculine and feminine. Period. Most feminine nouns end in -ah. Masculine doesn't. What is the problem? There are a handful of exceptions; that's all. Similarly, adjectives and verbs have masculine and feminine. It is all quite simple. There are things which make Hebrew challenging for a learner but gender is not one of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| HTale Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6163 days ago 164 posts - 167 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)* Studies: French | Message 287 of 377 29 September 2007 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree. Unlike romance languages, learning gender in semitic languages is pretty straight forward. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Polyphemes Bilingual Hexaglot Groupie Virgin Islands Joined 6074 days ago 48 posts - 60 votes Speaks: German*, Dutch*, English, French, Italian, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Bulgarian, Greek | Message 288 of 377 30 September 2007 at 7:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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Seeing as this thread is re-activated anyway, any news about that alleged website or am I missing out on something?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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