The WORST Way to Learn a Language, Especially Chinese.

so a little while ago I spent four years
in school learning Mandarin Chinese my friends who also took the class still weren't near fluent and taking a four year course in school when you could have reached the same skill level in six months on your own well it's pretty easy to tell which is the better option we're dealing with two very different questions here and it's easy to get them confused because they overlap in a dynamic way one question is what is and what is not a good method of learning a language and the second question is what are you willing to do I completely agree that it's possible to learn more sitting at home alone in your own apartment with no teacher just working with your computer and some textbooks it's possible to learn more in six months alone in your apartment then you would learn in two years or even four years in a university program especially with the Chinese language it's possible but are you willing to do it are you really so highly motivated and so self disciplined that you actually would sit down and hit the books for six months solid and get those rewards get those outcomes or are you the kind of person who needs the social experience who needs the encouragement of seeing a teacher face-to-face of seeing other students of seeing the other student's progress of seeing maybe at some points that you're falling behind seeing in other points that maybe in some ways you're more talented the other students getting ahead that may motivate you that maybe in an indirect way what compels you forward in learning Chinese or whatever language your study even though the methods being used in the classroom may be horrendously inefficient you may learn far less than some other person would who was willing to just sit at home with the computer and the textbooks and work unbelievably hard for six months with no teacher with no colleagues with no one coverage Minh Pimsleur Pimsleur is hands-down one of the most efficient ways to learn a language it is laugh out loud hilarious that this guy has just slammed and insulted rosetta stone as a terrible way to learn Chinese and he's now praising Pimsleur as one of the best ways to learn Chinese in the world no no way dude look I've used Pimsleur for Chinese so I could say this with direct experience for the Chinese language specifically Pimsleur is the worst method on the planet and that is because of the unique and uniquely awful relationship between the written form and the spoken form with Chinese and because of all of the distinctions that you really can't make but you're alone as a native speaker of English learning Chinese Pimsleur may work well for you if you're learning German it may work well for you if you're learning Italian those are the languages it was developed for that the scientists who founded the company worked on mostly teaching French Italian German these European languages okay when you get into Chinese Japanese Thai Cambodian even a difficult language Jib way or Crete no the Pimsleur method isn't just poor its laugh-out-loud hilariously awful for teaching or learning Chinese and that's why the methods used by the US diplomatic corps the US military etc do not resemble Pimsleur however if you look at the differences in similarities between Pimsleur and rosetta stone it's kind of hilarious that he just insulted rosetta stone oh that turns around and praises Pimsleur but if you love the Pimsleur method if you are obsessed with if you're passionate about listening to these audio tapes and Pimsleur again and again and again and you managed to learn chinese the way this is what you are motivated to this is what you're willing to do that I can't knock it because however inefficient and however deeply flawed it may be eventually with enough passion and enough repetition you will get results ASIMO SML is a company that creates and publishes foreign language courses they are highly regarded by many experienced language learners I am NOT here to say that a Samil is a terrible way to learn a language it's a main dream corporate language education product it's just really strange to me that this guy hates on rosetta stone but praises a semental basically what you get with SML is the same as what you're going to get with any language textbook from any university there means three methods there's absolutely nothing special about it and with any particular language if you compare what SML is selling you to what rosetta stone is selling you or any other mainstream publisher or brand the difference is going to be very slight so I do find this strange that he's really promoting and pushing SML and Pimsleur as if they have something special to offer and then the strangest thing of all is this claim that it's effective with only 30 minutes per day with Pimsleur you only need about 30 minutes a day to become proficient in a language this is good because in 2020 only psychopaths have an attention span of more than 30 minutes I did make a separate YouTube video specifically addressing this misconception or you might say this marketing ploy that you can learn a language more effectively in only 30 minutes a day it's a lie it's also very strange that this particular YouTube channel says it in this context because earlier in the video he said that if you worked alone when he worked really hard you could get better results than being enrolled in a university course for many months although I agree with that in principle the question is during those months working alone what are you willing to do 30 minutes a day will not get those results with Chinese you must be joking just to look up one unfamiliar word in the dictionary figured how to write it properly figure out it's adam ology figure out the components that form it visually practice pronouncing and practice using in a sentence figure out in different context what kind of different meanings it has just one unfamiliar word is 30 minutes one unfamiliar sentence one difficult understand sentence can take you more than 30 minutes Chinese is a very difficult very time-consuming language beginner intermediate and advanced at no level with Chinese can you do 30 minutes a day if you think 30 minutes a day with Pimsleur is enough for you to work on German or Dutch or even Italian good for you I'm happy I'm not planning to like you know slap the microphone at your mouth and say you're a bad youtuber for claiming that but for Chinese 30 minutes a day for Chinese you must be joking the way you are currently learning a language is probably very inefficient the best way to learn a language isn't exactly plastered on a wall for every newcomer to see apps like duolingo and companies such as rosetta stone capitalize on the inexperience of newcomers offering them a way to start learning a language without them knowing that they could actually learn much more much faster by utilizing better resources one part of what we're doing here is passing judgment on a particular language learning method as being effective or ineffective but the other thing we're doing is passing judgment on ourselves for what we are and are not willing to do okay really terrible really inefficient language learning methods will still get results if you are willing to do it in the old days people used to praise to me going to bars and flirting with bar girls in workers local language probably if you go back to the 1960s or even the 1860s people would say this was a great way to learn language why because they were really motivated to do it me I'm not that kind of guy I I would not be willing to do that I was the kind of guy who was willing to go to manuscript Oriya and look at ancient stone inscriptions and study all kinds of weird stuff in the library write essays about political history I had a different kind of motivation different things were rewarding for me okay and that showed in which methods of language learning language acquisition I was willing to do and that I actually actually did it in the 21st century people don't just go to bars and flirt with people face-to-face anymore with learning language like Chinese or learning language or Japanese a lot of men are willing to pay websites where they get to flirt with chitchat with a pretty girl and if probably there's something for women and gay men maybe not but you can probably flirt with someone you find attractive over the Internet I heard someone praising this method on YouTube and saying that what he did was he would record these languages so he didn't just have the conversation once he would have the conversation he would record it then later he would play it back he would write out the vocabulary he would take notes on like the mistakes he made right and he would even put the recording the conversation on his cell phone and listen to it back again like while he was walking to do his grocery shopping that's gotta be okay I can imagine that being an effective method of language teaching and language learning where he's intensive ly studying what he said in these conversations and then going back and having another conversation next week memorizing finding mistakes doing corrections Wow okay I can see the virtue in it petti oh I would never do that I am not willing to do that and I'm not positively motivated to do that is this really some kind of deep judgement on Who I am or what kind of person I wanna be maybe maybe maybe it's shallow but even if it's shallow it's a very real pragmatic importance if you meet someone who really has the motivation to just memorize a list of words the vocabulary lest at the back of the textbook an incredibly boring you know repetitive kind of drudgery based method of language learning that's gonna get results right so I wouldn't discourage that person I wouldn't say oh no no stop memorizing the list of words at the back of the textbook when you can be spending your time chit-chatting with girls you pay to flirt with you hook the Internet what is most effective is partly a judgement about these methods and it's partly a judgment on who you are what you are willing and motivated to get done Anke Enki is a free application that basically does two things one it's an application to make digital flashcards - it's a tool that tells you which flashcards to study each day when you see a flashcard you tell Anki if you got it right or wrong and how hard it was if you did get it right if you got it right and it was easy you won't see it again for a while if you had trouble with it you'll see it again soon in the year 2020 many many applications have this kind of functionality built into them by default Plinko has an excellent card shuffling program of this kind there's absolutely no reason to use Anki I would say that Anke is unbelievably time consuming in terms of programming it to test you in terms of the data input in terms of creating and managing the card deck don't lie to yourself try actually timing how much effort you're putting into that if your choice were between between using Anki and pieces of paper I would say every time use pieces of paper because you will waste so much time dealing with set-up card creation and management with Anki it will never be justified you'll never get more value out of it than you would have gotten just writing something down on a piece of paper and starting to learn immediately I would say that pleco is an app that's much better than Anki in many many different ways including the connection between it and the dictionary so you can look up the words you didn't recognize so on and so forth however fundamentally you have to ask yourself is technology really providing you with something better than pen and paper for this specific function aside from the convenience of being able to use a mobile phone while you're writing the bus the answer is no using either Pimsleur or Assam oh if you do 30 minutes a day six days a week you'll reach decent proficiency in around six months I would like to end the video just by pointing out that that is an outrageous lie unless you have a footnote after the word proficiency where you give it a special definition that doesn't mean proficient at all anyone who claims that they became proficient in the Chinese language after only six months could not possibly have been studying for only thirty minutes per day if you were taken prisoner during World War two for six months and you spent those six months in a prison cell all day every day practicing speaking fluent Chinese with all the other people who are in prison with you and maybe with a chalkboard and a piece of chalk writing out sizes like you were the only white english-speaking person in a prison where every other member of the prison let's say everyone else in the prison is also a language teacher and intellectual now I want to help you learn okay it's a very unusual prison sure maybe you achieve professor proficiency in six months working up more than twelve hours a day incredibly intensely and maybe you were doing it motivated by fear for your life because you knew at the end of that six months you were going to be put on trial and you'd have to plead your own case in Chinese there you go perfect scenario if you got proficient in six months afraid you were gonna be executed by an unfair court trying to learn Chinese with all these people help you 12 to 14 hours a day six months would feel like a long time you'd make a lot of progress you'd still have to provide a footnote on what you mean by proficient because the Chinese language there's really no way you can learn it all it will be six months I learned a new word a couple of days ago a single syllable verb that means to help someone along by lifting them with one arm so it lifting someone up with just one arm and helping them along and this is one special word Chinese the depth and variety of vocabulary the way in which idiom and sentence patterns unexpectedly completely change the meaning of what you think you understand when you don't get the page Chinese doesn't take six months and it doesn't take six years it takes like sixty years so just gotta say this youtuber is being 100% dishonest with you I don't know why I don't know what his definition of proficiency is and even if something like this could be claimed for casually learning Italian for 30 minutes a day with Chinese absolutely no chance don't kid yourself and don't reward youtubers who say flattering things to kit you what makes the whole world go round in the 21st century seems to be newspaper articles and YouTube videos that provide you with good excuses for your bad habits one of those bad habits is being lazy fat us self-indulgent it self-important they're probably a lot of people who want to think that 30 minutes a day listening to Pimsleur audio tapes is enough and they're probably very high here this message and unfortunately it's wrong wrong wrong