Benny Lewis’ journey with Arabic (Polyglots) Language Learning Forum

Benny Lewis’ journey with Arabic
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tarvos
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Message 49 of 79

24 March 2013 at 10:15pm | IP Logged

Zundung wrote:

You always take my words out of context.

Nope, I just disagree with you. That's not taking words out of context. And you can do
better than an ad hominem.

Quote:

I didn't say B1 is a tourist level. But many of Benny's readers want to achieve
similar goals. Only to communicate and then move on to something else.
On the other hand. I don't think he's B1 in Mandarin. And I don't think he's C2 in
Spanish or French. "A professional evaluated his level" - Yes. And I played for FC
Barcelona.

He has the diplomas to prove it. But if you don't want to believe it, that's up to you,
of course. But then don't come here and botch up a thread about it, we're trying to
discuss things normally. But he has nothing to prove to you, and neither do I or anyone
else. If you don't want to believe that global warming is occurring, that the world is
not 6000 years old, and so on and so forth, we can't stop you either. Good luck with
your worldview though, we're allowed to find that a bit warped.

Quote:

And finally. I was only trying to prove a point about the Chinese grammar. But
again and again you ignore the facts. As a non-speaker of Chinese, you may find his
progress amazing. But you don't hear him repeating the same 100 words over and over.

What facts? Where did you point out facts? I only read a lot of invective about how
Chinese is the hardest language in the world and it must be because you said so. By the
way, I didn't really watch his Chinese video and present no judgement on it because I
don't, tada, speak Chinese. So I don't care. The inspiration I derive is from the idea
that concerted application for short deadlines yields results. I also know a Filipino
man who had to learn Dutch fluently in 3 months to obtain a job here. He succeeded and
is still succesful within the technical university. Is he supremely intelligent? No, he
was a motivated student under a deadline.

Quote:

You're B1-B2 in Russian? Congrats. You're better than me. But now I see why you
said that thing about the Russian grammar. B2 isn't advanced fluency.

Which I do not claim to have. I will claim basic fluency at best in Russian. And that's
a very recent development. My Russian grammar isn't perfect and my use of aspect can
vary from anywhere to correct to atrocious, usually within the space of a few
sentences. But even if I make a bunch of mistakes with aspect, 95% of natives don't
respond with "you used the wrong aspect, error error does not compute". That is my
point. Making mistakes is inevitable and I don't claim perfection. I'm not even sure I
want it.

Edited by tarvos on 24 March 2013 at 10:15pm
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Serpent
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Message 50 of 79

24 March 2013 at 10:39pm | IP Logged

fabriciocarraro wrote:

Zundung wrote:

EDIT: This thread is nothing but OT. It should get locked or something.

No, it should not, because YOU are one of the people making it this way. I created the thread to discuss about his mission with Arabic, not the 3 months title or the Chinese one.

Does Benny's Polish mission also deserve its own thread? One thread for all things Benny is enough. Fasulye or Iversen don't start new threads every time they post videos.

Edited by Serpent on 24 March 2013 at 10:39pm
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Zundung
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Message 51 of 79

24 March 2013 at 10:41pm | IP Logged

I never said Chinese was the hardest language on the planet. It's not. Neither is Navajo or any other complex language. I only pointed out that the grammar is an issue too. It's not "tones hard, script hard, easy grammar or no grammar". I didn't give any examples. 如果我考不好这个考试，我要等到明年一月之后才可以毕业。Here they are. A very few westerners would just wing this one. (note: I'm not one of them )

Your other comment is invalid though. I don't believe Earth is 6000 years old, but global warming may be just a theory. Then you use the pronoun "we" as if this whole forum full of independent people all believed your truth.

There's no winner in this battle. Just a few pages of disagreement. Your world will keep on revolving around Benny and protecting him at all cost. I'll keep my doubts.

I have no personal grudge against you, nor Benny. I like this polyglot community and am not envious, because I like the process of language learning and wouldn't want to skip to the part where I can call myself a polyglot. Still I'm entitled to my opinion and can express them here. tHat's it. Farewell.
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Josquin
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Message 52 of 79

24 March 2013 at 10:49pm | IP Logged

Without wanting to take part in this quarrel: tarvos, have you ever read a Chinese instruction manual that has been translated literally from Chinese to English? That might give you an idea how different Chinese syntax and idiomatics are from Indo-European grammar. You understand all the words, but you can't make out the sense of the sentence. Chinese has few Indo-European-style grammar rules, but instead sentence patterns that have to be followed strictly.

I have heard from several people that actually more or less every single sentence has to be learned seperately because of these complicated patterns. Even if all your words in a sentence are right, a wrong construction will make it unintelligible. And even if the sentence pattern is right, it might be culturally inappropriate because of the different mentality. It's not like using wrong conjugational endings or choosing the imperfective instead of the perfective aspect. And then there is still the whole business with tones and characters.

With all due respect, tarvos, I think you are underestimating the complexity of Chinese for native speakers of an Indo-European language. For further reading, I recommend this famous article: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard.
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tmp011007
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Message 53 of 79

24 March 2013 at 10:53pm | IP Logged

there's one thing I do not understand about this egyptian arabic mission: why he started learning MSA?. he didn't have enough time to ask/google around?.. he wanted to review Assimil so badly that he forgot about everything else?..
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tarvos
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Message 54 of 79

24 March 2013 at 11:08pm | IP Logged

Josquin wrote:

Without wanting to take part in this quarrel: tarvos, have you ever
read a Chinese instruction manual that has been translated literally from Chinese
to English? That might give you an idea how different Chinese syntax and idiomatics are
from Indo-European grammar. You understand all the words, but you can't make out the
sense of the sentence. Chinese has few Indo-European-style grammar rules, but instead
sentence patterns that have to be followed strictly.

I have heard from several people that actually more or less every single sentence has
to be learned seperately because of these complicated patterns. Even if all your words
in a sentence are right, a wrong construction will make it unintelligible. And even if
the sentence pattern is right, it might be culturally inappropriate because of the
different mentality. It's not like using wrong conjugational endings or choosing the
imperfective instead of the perfective aspect. And then there is still the whole
business with tones and characters.

With all due respect, tarvos, I think you are underestimating the complexity of Chinese
for native speakers of an Indo-European language. For further reading, I recommend this
famous article: Why Chinese Is So
Damn Hard.

I don't know, I haven't tried Chinese yet, but it's human so I'm sure I can do it,
there are a million others that have gone before. I prefer not to waste time on how
hard something is, but find the things that make it easy for me - they're much more
motivating. I don't care what it is or is not like. I plan to learn Mandarin in the
future, so we'll see. I don't think it's anything more than scare tactics anyways.

Unlike most people here, I refuse to see what is "hard", more "what do I need to adapt
to" and "what do I already know how to do". Much more productive mentality I find.

Back to Benny.

Edited by tarvos on 24 March 2013 at 11:10pm
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Serpent
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Message 55 of 79

24 March 2013 at 11:22pm | IP Logged

tarvos wrote:

Serpent wrote:

tarvos wrote:

getting used to tonal pronunciation (if you don't come
from a language that has the same phenomenon).

Isn't it like saying "if your
native language has an r sound, you won't have problems with the French/Spanish/English
r?

I was not thinking about Swedish but about other tonal languages such as Thai. In that
case you might be familiar with the concept of tone, even though you might need some
adjustment to the Chinese version.

I didn't think you meant Swedish or Norwegian. Still, differents language have a different number of tones, and the tones themselves are different. It's probably somewhat easier than for most Europeans, but I suspect it's like the German or Icelandic cases. The fact that Russian has them too makes it easier to understand the concept, but mastering them isn't significantly easier than for a native speaker of English or Spanish.
Of course it's probably much more of an advantage if you go from Cantonese to Mandarin, which are related and where Cantonese is the more complicated one tone-wise (afaiu?).

I'm really sorry if I messed up here.
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tarvos
Super Polyglot
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Message 56 of 79

24 March 2013 at 11:28pm | IP Logged

It's probably somewhat an advantage. You don't have the same thing, but something closer
to what you know (at least the fact that tone matters is already a help to you). But of
course you can still go wrong in execution.

My point is there's always something around that can help you. I prefer to see the
positive sides of a language, not the negative ones. Right now I am annoyed that I am not
producing proper breton and that I have not studied it for a while and forgot how the
imperfect tense works in Breton. I can either think "well Breton must be horrifically
difficult because it has 20 tenses and I can't use any of them properly" or I can think
"well at least I don't have to include pronouns, I can play with the syntax and they do
follow a pattern and are almost all regular". Which is conducive to better learning in
your view?

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