I learned Chinese in Six Months! But You Can't! (IKENNA)

there is a man named I cannot hear on
YouTube and he is making money with the claim that you can learn any language in six months Annie's willing to sell you an e-book that tells you his method he's got plenty of YouTube videos that tell you his method his advice for free claims you can learn Russian in six months you can learn French in six months you can learn Chinese in six months now it's a little bit strange for me to see this and respond to this because I did learn Chinese in seven months I have this certificate from the language school prove it that might sound very impressive that might sound like I could have a career just like I cannot coming on here and telling you guys pep talks about how you can learn Chinese in seven months okay as soon as you move into the details that claim becomes less and less impressive and it's also clearer and clearer that you can't possibly expect to get results similar to my own unless you make unbelievable sacrifices for that period of seven months right so on that surface level let's just say I upload a YouTube video like I cannot and I say how to learn Chinese in six months and I can say hey I did it so you can do it too no you I lived in the school I slept in the language school in China I ate breakfast and lunch in the school I worked with the teacher face to face for four hours a day five days per week no other students one teacher one student when I wasn't in class with the teacher I wrote essays I brought those essays in she corrected them right writing essays in Chinese yes okay the more you know about what I did during those six or seven months and you know the level I achieved by the end of it the less and less encouraging this story is going to become the more and more discouraging it's going to become because you realize that you couldn't possibly recreate the circumstances that I am describing here and probably even if you did you would struggle to be highly motivated enough to get these results in the same space of time right look if I were to do it again today I might be I might struggle with motivation also my life has changed my life has gotten worse in the years since then when I had these six or seven months of intense focused work on Chinese with really no distractions in my life I had no distractions except making and uploading YouTube videos that school was very impressed with the progress I made some teachers said that I had made more progress than any other student they ever had but I had more hours more hours of studying there than any other student ever had and when I first arrived I was really at level zero because I just been studying Japanese at study Japanese for quote unquote two years in an academic setting a year in university does not mean twelve months so to quote years unquote of Japanese and immediately before I went to that school I'd been in Thailand speaking Thai every day so like my brain had switched from Japanese to Thai and then tie two Chinese so I was really struggling to say the simplest of sentences in Chinese when I first got there and then wow like magic six months later look look at the results of God right but wouldn't it be misleading even in these circumstances closed for me to come here on YouTube and sell you the dream that I learned Chinese in six months and you can too when you move past the the headline what becomes clear is instead I learned Chinese in six months and here's why you can't here's why nobody can here's why nobody else does just add up the number of hours I had one-on-one with a dedicated teacher was really talented really excellent Chinese teacher - if you do the same amount of time you have a worse teacher you have a worse method you'll get worse results you know like we could start to break down just how unique exceptional and special those circumstances were and this is not even disclosing the amazing background I had in language education before going into this even if you just talk about languages I'd studied and kind of fail that like yeah well I'd already studied Pali for 10 years had already studied Thai Lao and Cambodian a little bit of Burmese a little bit of sinhala he's you know like Korean back in the day I just mentioned I did two academic years of Japanese like Wow okay so yeah I learned Chinese in six months this is not even in French German you know other languages that are less less difficult okay so I stepped into that school with this incredibly robust background in other in other languages I stepped in with a really peculiar set of motivations with this really intense schedule and then I was willing to live my life eating my meals in that school and doing nothing but study Chinese eat vegan food in the cafeteria I'd go to the gym twice a day and lift weights and I'd make youtube videos and that was it alright I didn't talk there was I didn't have any didn't have a girlfriend didn't have any distractions you know what I mean um I in a sense I didn't have a life and there were other people in that school who lost their minds after like two weeks of having a less intense schedule night it they couldn't put up with the monastic quality of it like it was like living in a Buddhist monastery they couldn't put up with militaristic quality of it that it was like living in an army camp they couldn't tolerate that I remember there was a girl from Sweden she couldn't do two weeks she'd like paid for a month and after two weeks she was like no forget it I have to get a refund she has to go on vacation because she was flipping out and her schedule was way less demanding than mine almost nobody was doing it's very you do four hours a day face face teacher for this week okay so look the moral the story I'm presenting here so far is not that it's impossible to learn a language in six months it's just barely possible but when you get into the type of circumstances the type of caveat sin type of commitments you're gonna figure out why it's impossible for you why this is not an option for you why this is inaccessible for you with that haven't been said do i consider i kena to be a scam artist no do I consider the e-book he's telling to be a ripoff it's currently about 20 US dollars no okay do I even consider these YouTube videos that from my perspective are full of lies look what he's saying is just wrong and it's bad advice but do I consider that to be a scam no what he's selling that still really worth something people is encouragement and encouragement is very hard to put a price on if you can pay twenty dollars and get this ebook and you watch his YouTube videos and if you have some other interaction with him online and that gives you encouragement and motivation and makes you feel like hey this guy managed to learn Russian this guy managed to teach himself Chinese so if he can do it I can do it also I really deeply appreciate how that encouragement could be worth sign to you especially in the context of people paying twenty five thousand dollars a year to study a language in university and receiving no encouragement or only receiving negative in courtroom you paid $25,000 a year go to university to study a language and you get treated like garbage by the professors okay there was one professor of Chinese at my university in Canada and a formal complaint against her for misconduct to be to be blunt she was abusive towards me I had to take a formal complaint to the Ombudsman and the head of the department the head of faculty does this big thing and a huge negative impact in my life all right how did usually give impact on my life for years that this one professor you know was an [ __ ] towards me and look you know what would it take for this professor to just be kind and decent and professional towards me but she can't do it sure there was a moment that was real interesting she was cussing me out she was she was really calling me idiot she was insulting me and so went on and on and she spoke Chinese as a first language her English was not that good so it's also very hard to just communicate with her once she got angry she was going on this crazy rant and when I got up to leave you know my notebook sat open on the chair I just stood up I had to kind of get my bag and stuff and that was the first time that she saw my handwriting in Chinese and she gasped her eyes went wide open she been teaching Chinese for years she never seen like a level one student with Chinese handwriting as good as mine and you know again already mentioned I'd studied many other languages I'd lived in Asia there are different reasons in terms of the discipline I had studying a language like lotion pally there were skills I brought to this from lore I learned how to write the traditional orthography for her Cree okay I done a lot of work with strange languages and a pen and paper right she saw my Chinese handwriting and she gasped her mouth was always open her eyes were wide she pointed and she said that is your handwriting I wonder if she would know I laugh that spelled I said I'm a good student you didn't know the suppo fee like you're treating me like crap you're insulting me you're a volume you're discouraging okay what is encouragement is it worth $20 yes if it's worth it to you to watch these YouTube videos and get this encouragement I completely sympathize and I know how most of us struggle in isolation with only discouragement and no positive encouragement at all however if you take these claims made by I Kenna the problem is you have to interrogate them in terms of how many people fail on this program he puts out an e-book he puts out YouTube videos he says here's the process follow these steps you can do it and then he posts email comments he posts you know people send an email saying thank you it worked these are the results I got it was great he posts only those positive comments you don't know what percentage of people failed okay the most basic element of social science research is that you have to survey the failures just as much as the successes if anything you want to interrogate the failures even more the method I used to learn Chinese in six months let's just say we had the budget and we've repeated it with 100 different students I would bet that zero of the students would get positive results from the same program the way I did that would be my bet and maybe there'd be one maybe there'd be one guy like me who could take advantage and thrive and in those six months really do well in Chinese or do better than I did maybe there'd be one in a hundred but I'm not a gambling man if I were betting on it I would bet zero success rate 100% failure if you define success as you got the same results I got from studying Chinese intensively in six months with those same methods okay the results would not be reproduced you get failure and if you did this let's let's apply for funding and do this study how many people can learn Chinese in six months using the Izone was hard method using the abolish yell method okay how many people can do that all right if you and if you then did a survey and ask them why you'd get very human answers you get answers like that Swedish girl I mentioned who said oh I can't stand it this is like living in an army camp this is like living in a Buddhist monastery I'm losing my mind you're gonna get all kinds of different answers gay people saying oh I feel discouraged I can't just sit down and write an essay like this every day and I don't like the teacher or I don't get on you're gonna get all kinds of complaints and gripes you're gonna get people who's complaining that they're lazy or people say they're addicted to video games they signed up for this when they spend all the time sitting in their room playing video games or something you can get a whole range of human explanations for why this didn't work for them okay and that's the tragedy of giving language-learning advice on the Internet is that everyone wants to pretend they've discovered the secret and they've got it in a bottle and they can sell it to you now for there's $20 if you buy my ebook and the reality is there is no secret