Is Laoshu's Language Learning Method a Scam? Yes, IMHO.

I saw a documentary about American
boxing many many years ago I probably saw the documentary 20 years ago and probably the film was made 10 years before that so my apologies to the American boxing league the information I'm going to share with you now is probably way out of date but in that documentary the filmmaker asked someone asked an expert what is the evidence that boxing in the United States America is corrupt that the the League standings so to speak are controlled by corrupt mafia and business concerns and what-have-you that they were established through bribery and he said well here I'll show you what the league standings are according to the different authorities ultimately these authorities are linked to different belts and titles they said the top ten lists for who's the best boxer and who's the worst they have no resemblance to one another in these these different league standings because they're all based on these corrupt criteria and the guy argued look if there were any legitimacy to this boxing league system at all maybe there'd be a 10% difference between one version of the top ten and another maybe there'd be a 20% difference but you couldn't possibly have this kind of total day and night difference between the evaluation of who's winning and who's losing in the world of boxing this this inconsistency is itself a really powerful sign that something is wrong here something is corrupt so in the same way I just want to start by stating the total difference in the methods being advanced for language learning both in you know formal university institutional settings and by language coaches experts and gurus here on YouTube that is already a hint that there is something very fundamentally wrong with this world of for-profit language teaching I have some other red flags about laoshu in particular English is his first language and yet I notice his command of the English language itself is remarkably poor here he says if you worry women I would be in love with you close quote so this is women as apparently a spelling error for woman that's not the sort of error most English speakers make in their own first language here's another title he typed out Somali man shocked by black American in convenient store a right convenient store not convenience store this disappeared as an intentionally made misspelling in a Canadian comedy show of famous comedy TV show called Trailer Park Boys two of these kind of high school dropouts opened a convenience store and they they both spelled it and pronounced in this way again that the reason why that's a funny joke is because it's an error a native speaker of English would never make as someone who has ostensibly if not actually devoted his life to language learning and language teaching there seems to be a lot wrong with laoshu even looking at his first language so now going to quote for you an opinion from reddit they'll give you the source at the end of this quotation I did not write this myself and I actually don't agree with this criticism a hundred percent but I think again it raises serious salient questions quote I just googled the flr method and when I finally found a page that wasn't trying to sell me stuff I wasn't sure if I should have been disappointed in the method for being even lower than my low expectation from what I can gather the goal of the method is not to learn languages the goal of the method is to memorize stock phrases mainly questions and answers as a whole package meaning you aren't actually learning words and grammar you are memorizing a fixed and extremely limited amount of strings of sounds off of which you run an algorithm question a requires answers a 1 plus a 2 after that s question B this isn't being conversational this is being a recording right he's making an interesting point here even deeper there's the concern that in your first three months for six months studying a language if you memorize the long strings if you do phrasebook methodology like this and you just drill single phrases you're not learning the smaller components that make up words so in some languages what you need to learn are morphemes in some languages you need to learn something like a stem or a root in some languages you need to learn an infinite an infinitive form of a verb and then how that relates to the particular use of the verb um it's not as simple as saying morphemes as opposed to whole words because if we're generalizing your abut all languages in the world I mean Chinese there are even graphical components of the word that aren't pronounced we have to learn visually what makes up the symbol that expresses the word apart from the sound and what-have-you on the other hand of course Chinese doesn't have gender doesn't even have singular versus plural or you know past tense or what have you but nevertheless so you know that there are actually components within the words you should be learning from day one and if you don't learn them then later you have to unlearn the bad habits you've gotten into by learning whole phrases and sometimes there are shall we say aspects of the word that are external to the morphemes like they're not within the word written there whether that's learning something like an infinitive or gender there's a lot of this other kind of apparatus of language that if you don't learn it near for six months you're later gonna be struggling against the bad habits you've learned the bad things you know okay so just to finish this quotation learning phrases per se is not a bad thing especially in the beginning but then claiming that just because you can replay a bunch of fixed sounds in six combinations means your quote-unquote conversational is nothing but bass Charlatans tree so that condemnation was certainly harsh and not at all half-hearted or halfway so I now think to be fair I have to play Lao shoes on pitch for his method let's hear that out and you'll notice that he is not recommending this as a self-evident and adequate way to learn a language for ever and ever he is talking about the first six months and his main claim is that his method will you to remain highly motivated and get results within those first six months and then you transition to more of an analytical and grammatical approach to the language I start at a natural way and then I spent six months doing it naturally after six months then I start getting some grammar stuff and start getting it trying to understand grammar concepts you know after six months then it wouldn't affect me as it would if I was just starting and language that's a complete beginner but if you look at level one it's all phrases and key words every week this which is up a different keyword phrases do that's like three months worth of material right there that I just explained to you just described that's how set that up now like I said that's not all if you want to go further there's more more to that you have to learn you know to increase your vocabulary you know and that's what I do you know it's not all about just learn questions and answer stuff it's more to it and if you go through all levels you will see the progression it's abused progression from level one going all the way up but the question is are you willing to put that time in and put that effort in are you are you willing to put that work in to learn all that stuff so let's contrast this to the world of diet and exercise it may seem like there are very fundamental differences between what different diet gurus tell you to do in the first six months or different gym coaches tell you to do in the first six month but you know what with the exception of a few insane crackpots all of them are based on counting the number of calories counting the number of grams of protein counting the number of grams of fat lifting weight progressively heavier weights there are broad outlines here that are very fundamentally similar with different coaches for health and weight loss we could definitely draw out the scientific outlines of what almost all diet and exercise advice has in common and what we find with language learning is that there is no such common ground if you contrast Luca Lum perello sorry for Miss Brown surname and laoshu here if you contrast the various leading competing for-profit gurus what they recommend in terms of language learning protocol language learning methodology they're fundamentally and profoundly different from one another and the world of university teaching the methods used there in the classroom is profoundly different again so something's wrong here there's something worth examining there's something worth reflecting on no I'm not going to end this video to just leave you wondering what's the solution to the riddle and so I'm going to destroy the mystery right here and now and it's twofold one outcome evaluation what none of these people are doing is evaluating outcomes right if we really wanted to know which method was more effective efficient which had better outcomes we'd have to measure the input and the output we'd have to actually keep track of how many students from Lao shoes program achieved what level in how much time with how much effort with how much money right and I have sat in classrooms face to face with the University Dean the head of the department and the head language teacher pushing universities on that issue why is it that you're not evaluating how much Chinese these students actually learn when they spend like $20,000 in four years to learn Chinese from you and the outcomes are they can barely put a sentence together unless you know the professor is cheating because in that same meeting where I met with the professor and the head of the department staff they were like oh but this girl Mimi can speak Chinese so well that's because Mimi's mom is Chinese she grew up speaking Chinese in her living room and singing Chinese karaoke it doesn't count to get you students who came into the program already you know halfway fluent or growing up with the language of their family but they really did reach that kind of thing works like look you know I noticed you guys are not measuring outcomes you're not measuring the actual whole degree of ability that you achieved by using terrible methods like having 40 students sit in a classroom listen to an audio CD that the professor presses play LAN and then doing a multiple multiple choice checklist style test in class every day chief remarkably after four years and twenty thousand dollars it seems like those students speak way less Chinese than I managed to learn in seven months living in could mean China using really intensive methods that I'm not going to now describe by contrast right so it would come evaluation measuring the outcomes would be crucial to backing up the claim that Lao shus method is more effective than luca's method or that luca's method is more effective than university methods or that one University's methods are more effective than another so on and so forth and just like diet and exercise the way that gurus for-profit language courses get around this fundamental problem is by putting the emphasis almost entirely on the magical and difficult to measure world of motivation so I may not be able to prove to you that my clients as a trainer at the gym can now lift 200 pounds and before they can only lift 150 pounds or that they lost weight you know they they used to weigh 300 pounds and now they only weigh 200 pounds those would be objective measures of outcomes right but what I can talk about what I can package and sell you infinitely in many different forms with no limit is this concept of motivation because what really matters for your personal fitness for your weight-loss journey for gaining strength of the gym is what motivates you and what you got to pay me for and why you got to buy my book and watch my videos is motivation motivation motivation and what I see here online and it's not a complete scam there is something to it is that people are asking you to pay their money not for them to teach you the language but really for them to give you a bunch of pep talks that boil down to motivation and the faith that people have that if only they were highly motivated enough they could climb in Milton they could learn any language and hate to tell you this guys if you go back to outcome evaluation that is just not true if you're the most highly motivated hard-working person in the world but you're using bad methods you get bad results at the gym you get injured you get weaker instead of stronger you get fatter instead of thinner great in language learning trust me trust me I've met people who lived in Thailand and spoke the Thai language every day for 10 years and still never picked up the rudiments of how to put a sentence together they didn't know which words were the verb and which was the noun and which was the adjective in the sentence in a monosyllabic language like Thai you can you cannot know those things they didn't know when something was the suffix of one word or the prefix of the next word the really profoundly had misapprehended things the language and those those bad habits they picked up by starting off with phrase book knowledge rote memorization repeating dialogues the same way it allows you endorses those became you know deep-seated inculcated habits of mind that they never did overcome in language learning there really is the equivalent of destroying your health at the gym and if getting weaker when you're working hard thinking you're getting stronger