How to learn any language in six months: Chris Lonsdale

[Flickserve]

Some generic advice on language learning as per found on TED talks

 

Figured the pdf may be useful to serve as good reminders

TEDx-ChrisLonsdale-LearnAnyLanguage6Months.pdf

[Lu]

In English, 1000 words covers 85% of anything you’re ever going to say in daily communication. 3000 words gives you 98% of anything you’re going to say in daily conversation. You got 3000 words, you’re speaking the language. The rest is icing on the cake.

Granted, this is better than '50% of all English consists of just 100 words!' or what was it, but this still seems a misconception. It's nice that this guy found a method that worked for him, but I don't think this is any kind of holy grail.

[roddy]

Victor Mair was not impressed.

I thought that surely it would vie with ShaoLan Hsueh's Chineasy for the worst language boondoggle swallowed by masses.

 

[Flickserve]

To be honest, I didn't even look at the numbers. I just looked at the principles and thought they would be helpful (not a Holy Grail)

 

Having seen the criticism, perhaps the mods can just delete this thread

[Gharial]

I wouldn't mind these "1000 words = 85% of typical text" statements if they made clear the intricacies and ability involved in actually producing such text. 85%+ doesn't just suddenly leap out of nowhere with no effort and leaving only the supposedly "harder" (less frequent) words needing to be dropped into readily-filled "slots" or whatever. There is so much going on in language that it is no mean feat to make even basic utterances cohere well and reasonably idiomatically.

 

And the bonus of taking a more complex (or rather, detailed) view of language and learning, such as COBUILD's lexicogrammatical approach (see the attached pdf, and here: http://arts-ccr-002.bham.ac.uk/ccr/patgram/ ), is that it reveals something very helpful: that items plural of lexis, when detailed and organized into shared pattern groupings, is (perhaps unsurprisingly!) also similar on the semantic level. The meaning groups of the COBUILD Pattern Grammars are thus providing something akin to a thesaurus, but of not only meaning (hitherto quite decontextualized and handwaved at in more or less the abstract), but also the necessary structure. So in fleshing things out sufficiently one can move more easily between form and meaning, and vice versa. Whod've thought?! LOL

 

Verbs Observed - A Corpus-Driven Pedagogic Grammar.pdf

 

And now Patrick Hanks (editor of NODE fame) is doing something similar with his PDEV (Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs) at Wolverhampton:

http://pdev.org.uk/#browse?q=;f=C

[Lu]

Flickserve, I don't think that's necessary. While it's not any kind of holy grail or revolutionary method, and while few if any people are going to get 'fluent' (whatever that is) in 6 months, there is still useful advice in there.

[Xiao Kui]

"How to learn any language in 6 months"

the problem is Chinese is not any language

[michaelS]

You can watch Chris Lonsdale in action speaking chinese here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVO5_kGnWU4

 

Talking about education in China - near the beginning making a little joke, then in a bit more detail around 16min

[studychinese]

Quick question: why does the subject of language acquisition tend to attract snake oil salesmen? No one says that you can learn rocket engineering in 5 minutes a day.

[Gharial]

On the one hand, people know that learning a foreign language is hard. On the other hand, they also feel that it indeed can't be quite as hard as becoming a rocket scientist. The two poles, hard and not that hard, combine to produce this belief that it can be done, but only or best with a spoonful or two of that skilled orator snake oil to help it "all" go down smoothly.

 

The only problem is, it then becomes a case of linguistic eyes being bigger than linguistic stomach, as it is hard to digest a whole language in just a few soundbites, and most people consequently lose their appetite and give up (and a few may even decide to try rocket science instead!).

 

If only the snake oil salesmen made it clear that the full distance of the linguistic journey was the equivalent of the 384,400 km to the moon (assuming one even makes it into space in the first place). That's obviously quite a way and a lotttt of baby steps (seeing as language learning as opposed to rocket-boosted travel only really has bodily ability and thus "human locomotion" to depend on. Grease not only your tongue but also my brain please, oh snake oil master!). The few spoons of oil soon run out over that distance.

[Jan Finster]

Here is a recent interview with Chris and Mandarin Corner: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHgi1MLCUN4

 

I wonder what you guys make of his Chinese?

[Weyland]

On 10/24/2016 at 9:12 PM, roddy said:

I thought that surely it would vie with ShaoLan Hsueh's Chineasy for the worst language boondoggle swallowed by masses.

This Victor Mair guy really is a ivory tower kind of linguistical elitist. Having just read his pieces on Chineasy, I don't see why he takes such offense to a popular culture book about learning Chinese characters existing. I often give Chineasy as a book to people who are interested in knowing about Chinese and the characters, but who I know will never study it beyond a few simple phrases.
 

 

2 hours ago, Jan Finster said:

Here is a recent interview with Chris and Mandarin Corner: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHgi1MLCUN4

 

I wonder what you guys make of his Chinese?

Just no. If he has been studying since 1981 then it's not something he should be bragging about, let alone write books on. Apart from the really weird word choice, faulty grammar, not knowing tones of even HSK1/2/3 words... I have met plenty of students who have been studying for less than 1/10th of that time and who are much better at expressing themselves.

[Tomsima]

8 hours ago, Weyland said:

Apart from the really weird word choice, faulty grammar, not knowing tones of even HSK1/2/3 words...

is this a comment on his Chinese? Sounds like good typical northern Chinese from the minute or so I just watched. Regardless of his rose tinted glasses of how he learned Chinese, I don't see anything worth criticising about his language abilities...

[feihong]

8 hours ago, Weyland said:

I often give Chineasy as a book to people who are interested in knowing about Chinese and the characters, but who I know will never study it beyond a few simple phrases.

I think it’s fine if you’re pretty sure they’re never going to really get into Chinese, but my main beef with Chineasy is that their Kickstarter page has a pretty obvious mistake in it (明 is written incorrectly). If QA is that bad on their marketing page, I shudder to think how bad it is in their actual product. There is almost no chance someone didn’t notice and tell them about it either, so I have to assume they’re just too lazy to fix it.

[Flickserve]

9 hours ago, Weyland said:

Just no. If he has been studying since 1981 then it's not something he should be bragging about, let alone write books on. Apart from the really weird word choice, faulty grammar, not knowing tones of even HSK1/2/3 words... I have met plenty of students who have been studying for less than 1/10th of that time and who are much better at expressing themselves

He is definitely comfortable at using the language

[Weyland]

He pronounces 应该 (yinggai) as jingai. What are you guys on about? @Flickserve @Tomsima

[Flickserve]

27 minutes ago, Weyland said:

He pronounces 应该 (yinggai) as jingai. What are you guys on about?

There are plenty of people who slightly mispronounce words and yet can still be understood without a problem. And that’s not just for Chinese. Native Chinese speakers are not perfect either judging from all the regional accents that abound. I am surrounded daily by native Chinese speakers who don’t speak mandarin well - they are far worse than him!
 

Did he claim to speak perfect chinese?

[Dawei3]

2 hours ago, Flickserve said:

Did he claim to speak perfect chinese?

No.  However, he did claim that a colleague learned to type Chinese in 48 hours because she wanted to.  (I'm sure that EVERYONE here did so too, right?).

 

Or that after arriving in China without knowing how to speak the language & after just 2 weeks, he talked with a train guard for 8 hours.  Sure.... he's obviously honest & credible.  Believe everything he says.....

 

 

[Flickserve]

5 hours ago, Dawei3 said:

However, he did claim that a colleague learned to type Chinese in 48 hours because she wanted to.  (I'm sure that EVERYONE here did so too, right?).

that’s diverging from the focus on his speaking skills. 
 

5 hours ago, Dawei3 said:

Or that after arriving in China without knowing how to speak the language & after just 2 weeks, he talked with a train guard for 8 hours.  Sure.... he's obviously honest & credible.  Believe everything he says.....

I thought that was Benny 

 

 

In any case, he seems to be pretty fluent with his Chinese or is he speaking rubbish ?

[roddy]

I only watched a couple of minutes of the video, but from what I saw, any complaints are unnecessary nit-picking. A full watch might turn up something consistent, but... well, who's going to watch a whole hour of video to try and catch someone out?