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Were YouTube polyglots a fad? | ||
Tags: Youtube Polyglot | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4626 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 49 of 58 11 September 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I haven't, but I have been asked to do things that I either would not normally do, or things I wasn't planning to do at that time, for the purposes of an interview. Trivial in itself, I suppose, but when I see interviews of other people on TV, or more usually the preview footage, e.g. supposedly them just happening to be walking down a corridor to their office, or whatever it might be, and I can just imagine the way it was set up, and wonder how many takes it took to get the effect the programme makers wanted.
I suppose because TV programmes are made for mainly visual effect, and to get the effect that the programme makers want means it has to be artificially set up in some way. We are very rarely watching anything truly spontaneous in the kind of programmes I'm thinking about, even though they are often presented as being spontaneous.
I don't see the analogy. But it's probably not worth arguing about.
Well it isn't necessary on TV either, but it's done for some reason. Because there is no need (obviously) for visual artifice on radio, that's why I say it's more honest, and also because someone can go in with a microphone and tape recorder with minimal setup and genuinely record a spontaneous interview, and very effective they can be too, quite often. But yes, radio could be edited misleadingly, or, for example, on the Radio 4 Programme "Today", which goes out live, you get a different kind of stage management, where the politicians are grilled on the one hand, the politicians stonewall and don't answer the questions on the other hand, and then the presenter urgently finds out they've run out of time, and go on to some other item, which often turns out to be a triviality. So yes, both forms of broadcast medium are false to some extent, but the visual form is more false, IMHO. Every TV programme is a mini movie film in a way, and we all know how much artifice goes into the average commercial movie (off-beat art-house stuff may be different). That's the nature of the beast. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4106 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 50 of 58 12 September 2014 at 12:10am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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To clarify - the noddy is just a way of covering the seams of editing, which is always
needed for purposes of concision, though of course can also be used to manipulate - some would say inevitably so. The analogy is that this is often done in print, when long quotations are streamlined with ellipses. In practice, I agree that TV is more manipulative, but the medium itself is not inherently so, I would say. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 51 of 58 12 September 2014 at 12:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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There is a course in 'noddy making' here
Noddies are not a bad thing in themselves. The problem is the mannerisms of the people who make TV and other media - like long inwards spiraling towards some person who is going to say a few phrases, and presenting the people you have hired as if they were renowned experts and world master in something. In comparison to that limited amounts of nodding is OK - and better than seeing an interviewer showing clear signs of depair or boredom or hatred towards the interviewee. Or smiling towards the camera to make certain that everybody sees the interviewee as a jerk, just as you do. And showing landscapes or cityscapes may also be better than showing people all the time. Funnily enough cuts aren't treated in the article I referred to, but in practical video making they are definitely the most important kind of editing of them all. Actually most videos would gain from a bit of slimming down, including my own. Edited by Iversen on 12 September 2014 at 12:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4505 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 52 of 58 13 September 2014 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
He has given an appraisal of his skills elsewhere. What it comes down to is that he is particularly good at (English aside) French, Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi. I believe he's also studied a very reasonable amount of Chinese, German and Russian. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4642 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 53 of 58 26 September 2014 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If anybody is interested in what Timothy Doner is up to now, here's an article about him in the Harvard Crimson journal:
A Talk With the Polyglot 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lemberg1963 Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States zamishka.blogspot.coRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4037 days ago 41 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English*, Ukrainian* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Polish | Message 54 of 58 15 October 2014 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think they were a fad, but just that they said all that they had to say.
For example, would you really need more videos to understand Luca's method? Similarly, there's probably a lack of new youtube polyglots because their own methods have already been covered by that first generation of youtubers. Edited by Lemberg1963 on 15 October 2014 at 9:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6501 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 55 of 58 16 October 2014 at 2:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I can't vouch for Luca, but I have changed my opinion about certain things I have described in my videos - like the way wordlists should be reviewed. But I doubt that I'll make new videos just because of that. I rarely learn practical things from videos myself, so for me the idea of making training videos for others is slightly weird. I did it to accommodate a wish from a number of learners, but I guess they have seen enough of me now.
Actually I wonder why I still receive emails about people who subscribe to my channel one year after I last added anything to it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5467 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 56 of 58 22 October 2014 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Goodness, what an honour to have been included among those other names. You are very kind. There is a reason I stopped making youtube videos, and it is a very simple one: I ran out of things to say. I made most of my videos when I was still quite new to language learning, and was thinking constantly how to overcome my considerable lack of talent for languages. This process led to a period of ideas and experiences flooding my brain that I felt compelled to share. Nowadays, I have pretty much figured out a way to learn languages that works well for me, and more importantly, my brain seems to have transformed itself from being useless at languages to being not terrible at them. The result is that I spend a lot more time learning languages than thinking about how to learn them. Alas, this means I don't have many new ideas to share. 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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