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Benny Lewis | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| tmp011007 Diglot Senior Member Congo Joined 5850 days ago 199 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 49 of 164 14 April 2012 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Christophe Clugston's video? Benny is one thing but Clugston? I mean, are you any serious? xD
p.s. "Who is the best Polyglot? I bet you don't know. Christophe Clugston tells you, based on scientific criteria.".. come again? "SCIENTIFIC criteria".. hahahahaha Edited by tmp011007 on 14 April 2012 at 7:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5510 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 50 of 164 14 April 2012 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, no, not Christophe Clugston, he's definitely the most unpleasant and egotistical of the YouTube polyglots. He told this one guy he'd never get a native Spanish accent if he never left the states.
His response: You can kiss my accent! As far as Benny is concerned, I don't like the way he treats people who disagree with him, although I do think he makes good videos and is a good language learner. I don't care to follow him on YouTube or elsewhere. I wrote about this back in January, but I thought he treated Sprachprofi horribly when she was just trying to help him, and they had met each other in Berlin. That's when I decided I could do without listening to Benny. Edited by Michael K. on 15 April 2012 at 7:54pm 13 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| NewLanguageGuy Groupie France youtube.com/NewLangu Joined 4388 days ago 74 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* | Message 51 of 164 15 April 2012 at 12:14am | IP Logged | |||||
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People in any kind of specific hobby can be eccentric and occasionally come across as unpleasant in their
behaviour. Most of the time it is not intentional, but just their "way". They are just people sitting behind a computer with a camera. This confers no superhuman status, and is certainly no reason to get worked up. When I created my Youtube channel, I knowingly opened myself up to comments about my language skills, both positive and negative. It's the nature of being in the public domain. Why would I care either way? I'm just here to have fun! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4911 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 52 of 164 15 April 2012 at 12:44am | IP Logged | |||||
The best thing you can do with his videos (or anybody else's, for that matter) is take it as one person's opinion. Learn something from it if you can, discard it if you can't. Personally, I've never learned anything from Clugston's videos, but I admit I do find them entertaining. Life's too short to get worked up over one person's opinion. R. == 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4452 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 53 of 164 15 April 2012 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
It's unfortunate that he was speaking with a non-native speaker, but this was a descent improvement over his 2.5 month video. He went from not quite A2 to a strong A2 in 3 weeks. Not bad. For a 3 month 1 week effort, this is very impressive. For 1000 hours, less so. But maybe he didn't spend that much time - I just remember speculation that he was studying 10 hours per day. I hope he works on his accent right away, now that he's gotten that pesky video out of the way. 很 is not pronounced like a female chicken. There were several really common phrases with glaring tone mistakes. I recommend he crank up his tone awareness. If he doesn't, I predict this will be a problem during his travels. There were several grammar errors and misunderstandings in this short, edited video. The video was almost completely about language, which I assume is the most familiar material he knows. That's why I couldn't imagine someone at this level in a european language being evaluated as B1 by a language teacher familiar with the scale. Could someone at this level in a european language study for and pass a B1 test? Sure; it happens all the time. But imo, the level shown in this video is A2. 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6700 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 54 of 164 15 April 2012 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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All of the YouTube videos are about learning languages. How about some videos with two people discussing topics other than how they learn languages. "Global Warming: Is it Real?", "How has the financial crisis affected your country?", "Describe the last book you read/movie you saw and why you liked it". I could easily do this in all five of my languages. I don't care about grammatical mistakes or a non-native accent. I'm looking for the ability to really think, express yourself and use the language for purposes other than introductory chit chat of the "How did you learn Chinese?, "Arabic is hard.", "Where is the Bahnhof?", I can speak 29 languages" parrot language variety.
If your goal is to just be able to exchange brief pleasantries with people in 50 languages, that's fine, but then don't pretend that that makes you in any way a language expert. Again, we are not talking about people claiming to speak numerous languages. We are talking about people claiming to speak numerous languages AND having done so in an impossible period of time and then presenting themselves on-line and in the media perpetuating the myth that language-learning is easy or something you can do in your sleep, at lightning speed, in no time, in a flash, in ten seconds, or any one of the various adjectives used by publishers of language courses designed for the unwashed masses. Edited by translator2 on 15 April 2012 at 7:51pm 19 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6440 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 55 of 164 15 April 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure he's a linguist... They study how languages works rather than the languages themselves... 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| translator2 Senior Member United States Joined 6700 days ago 848 posts - 1862 votes Speaks: English* | Message 56 of 164 15 April 2012 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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That depends on whether you are a prescriptivist or a descriptivist.
In academic circles, a linguist is someone (usually with an academic degree) who studies the structure and history of languages, but may or may not speak a foreign language. In standard colloquial speech, a linguist may also refer to someone who is interested in or who speaks (I would say 3 or more) languages (and who could care less about bilabial fricatives, dialectical sound shifts, etc.). In addition, in the translation world, translators are sometimes referred to as linguists (even though some were born bi-lingual and never actually studied a foreign language).
Edited by translator2 on 15 April 2012 at 8:08pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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