Ikenna's advice, what's wrong with it? (Learning Chinese, learning languages.)

I just wrapped the first video talking
in broad brushstrokes about what's wrong with Ike enough's language learning program for how you can supposedly learn any language in six months including Chinese and I thought it'd get right back on the microphone now and record a second video challenging myself to move into more specific details I have indeed change clothes I got into my gym where after this I'm going straight to the gym to lift weights do push-ups so on and so forth however I'm neither studying Chinese as intensively as I did back when I was living in that school and could make nor and my lifting weights at the gym as intensively so yeah my life has gotten worse in many ways these are just two examples all right so I can as advice more precisely what's wrong with it I think what's interesting is that the same broad thematic concerns in the first video are here going to be repeated and one of those is questioning what we really mean by encouragement or motivation it's very easy to treat sophisticated meanings in a simplistic way when the terms we use are so familiar encouragement motivation some of the best results of any language teaching methods in the world show up from the United States diplomatic corps you can buy the materials you can see the methods you can see the textbooks they use you can find out what they do in the classroom I just ended the last video by saying everyone wants to sell you a bottle telling you this contains the secret but the truth is there is no secret if you look into what the United States diplomatic corps is doing right in teaching languages guess what there is no secret the type of person who signs up for that course the type of person who has been offered a job paying more than $100,000 a year in the diplomatic corps that kind of person comes to class unbelievably motivated unbelievably disciplined focused on learning that language you could use the worst language teaching methods in the world and still get great results with the United States diplomatic corps because of the type of people who are there to learn language their motivation coming into the classroom and what they've been promised as the product at the end of that class right so who gets recruited into diplomatic corps middle aged people they often have a career in law already there's something like a trained lawyer something unrelated to language you know they have some kind of background in government bureaucracy and they even offered the opportunity of a lifetime hey if you come to class if you buckle down and hit the books you work really hard to learn Chinese we're going to give you this incredibly high-paying prestigious job in China and then this is what you're gonna do probably with the next ten years of your life probably you're set for life probably this is going to pay for your retirement this is the financial incentive alone is tremendous but there are also elements of personal prestige ego so on and so forth so those students are showing up with a level of focus dedication motivation encouragement that cannot be compared to a normal University student who signs up for an intro to Chinese language class not really knowing what they're signing up for probably not really knowing what they wanted a life and you definitely not bringing that kind of background in terms of really focused hard work sitting down with with pen and paper right so this is one thing when you really get into what we mean by motivation and encouragement you're looking at something that can't be reproduced it's something I can't sell you right it's something I can't give you on YouTube it's something I can't sell you in an e-book it's not a commodity right but on the other hand it completely Trump's sorry to use that verb in the year 2020 it Trump's it outshines the significance of the language learning methods you're using now the other problem is when you use bad methods it will then erode the motivation that people have it will be discouraging for them so I kena specifically encourages you to start with the Pimsleur course that's really the main piece of advice he has is for you to work alone self study in isolation using the Pimsleur method alright and then we're not tracking the number of successes we're not tracking the number of failures he's just gonna present you with emails he's received from people who are happy with the course emails people said hey this worked great element language in six months right this is inherently misleading we are left to imagine what percentage of people buy the book watch the YouTube video follow this advice they get discouraged and stopped or they fail or they work really hard for the six months they still have no listening comprehension of Chinese they can't understand what someone says when they speak to them in Chinese which is very common right the Pimsleur method for chinese specifically is absolutely terrible and will go further the Pimsleur method for Chinese is especially terrible if you're at level one or level zero if you're already like an intermediate student and you want to review you want to refresh your memory by going back and listening for those simpler dialogues and Pimsleur that's okay but in terms of learning alright with Chinese you can't tell from the word form whether the word is a noun or a verb or a subject or an object right you just get one syllable to work with most of the time sometimes sometimes you get two syllables okay you can't pick up intuitively as an English speaker the parts of the sentence the correct word order or the syntax in the implicit relationship between the words by listening through repetition to a Pimsleur tape now how useful is Pimsleur for learning German or French or Italian I've got to tell you I'm also very skeptical with that but with Chinese from day one you must have the accurate spelling in pinyin you must know how to spell the word phonetically in the artificial system of phonetics the Chinese has and you must get familiar with the non phonetic Geographic written from from day one otherwise they're going to be two different words that sound like Dai Dai and you won't know which is which they're gonna be two different words that sound like Dao and you don't realize they're two different words for you just listen to the Pimsleur you think the same word and you're gonna hear words in different parts of the sentence and you're not gonna know the role that word is playing so the main piece of advice he offers you for learning a language in six months is absolutely terrible for Chinese I would also say it's terrible for any really difficult language like Cree a jib whale ocean Cambodian Japanese say it's terrible advice for and if it is okay advice if it's just not terrible if it's mediocre advice for a language like Italian or German I would say even so that's only because your own motivation is so great that it is outshining that it is trumping what's basically a bad method for language of language acquisition for language learning encouragement and discouragement what we're talking about here and implicitly what all of the YouTube gurus are profiting from is just how discouraging it is to study a language alone all right you can be wrong about something and make the same error again and again and there's nobody there to encourage you you can try your hardest to write something on internet and Chinese and people ridicule you and people are cruel to you and people are discouraging you can be an University program I told anthro about that already and you go to class and the teacher treats you like crap who has the motivation who has the encouragement to sit at a desk alone to really study a language in isolation when language itself by its very nature is social and when the refinement and correction of language requires these sorts of social relationships so he mentions he makes a big deal out of this I cannot claims that the fundamental method of language learning as a child is just to talk and then have a parent lovingly correct you right parents say oh no you say it this way up towards the wrong way you know know it you were in your or two different words this kind of thing okay do you have a relationship with somebody like that in your life to teach you Chinese if you're learning Chinese do you have someone who will act like a grandparent to you correcting you encouraging you helping you in this way and if so for how many hours a day okay so it's fine to offer this observation in theory right like oh well this is the natural way to learn a language is to do this like a child with a parent okay can you employ someone to move into your apartment and practice Chinese with you and to do it in this you know a sinuous way noticing the errors you're making maybe they're taking notes and saying okay there are two different words that sound like Dao and I can tell you you don't know the difference between them okay there are two different words that sound like diono in that sentence it's not this diet the other die and then go through it with you this way can you employ someone to live with you and act this way and even if you could we were talking about six months here after five years of this kind of passive parental loving language learning you would be lucky if you could speak that language at the same level as a five year old okay it takes five year old children five years to get to that level and be a lisping incoherent and that's not what you want okay after six months studying Chinese I was able to write articles that got published in newspapers in Chinese my ability language is really limited my vocabulary is really limited really really limited but within those limits I could write an article that was good enough to be published by newspapers without any Corrections they didn't change it they didn't even change the title they didn't fix there was not a single error in it they got correct and I still do that now once in a while I've read an article a couple weeks ago in Chinese that got published in a newspaper pretty pretty silly article and you know obviously I use a dictionary to look up the words I don't know not saying it's easy for me but it's a language exercise if I can do that at that level there is no five-year-old child who can do that so if you're being honest with yourself but the outcomes you want and then the methods and the sacrifices you're gonna have to make to get there probably you're now looking over at the United States diplomatic corps you're probably looking at the methods they're using you're probably looking at the CIA Central Intelligence Agency or US military you're probably looking at some of these super intensive super exhausting methods of language learning saying okay could I do this for six months I mean the method I used I described as being in some ways like the military and in some ways like living in a Buddhist monastery it is what it is and then again implicitly and tacitly it's going to come down to a question of motivation and encouragement are you just going to experience this process of language learning as denigrating the discouraging and disheartening or you can have a positive attitude through it now some people might have this kind of optimistic sunny attitude where they can listen to the Pimsleur tapes memorize a bunch of stuff completely wrong like that with very low levels of accuracy just oh yeah yeah this is fun I'm learning these phrases like and there were all these little traps in Chinese what it's like oh no you can use that verb positively but you can't use it negatively oh yeah that verb in order to make it transitive you have to add this word to the sentence but then if use a different verb than it doesn't work like that at all the idiom the syntax the grammar isn't like that okay I give you an example wool cow suni I told you we'll do a nice warming I explained it to you okay yet add way and one but not the other okay this is easy all right there were just these patterns and rules and exceptions to the rules it's all ATM all the time there's absolutely no way you're even going to notice those problems working from Pimsleur so if you just start like a sunny optimistic happy person so this is great I'm just gonna memorize this stuff from this language tape without even having accuracy about the difference between like tan and con right that's hard to get from audio-only right there are going to be things you get long phonetically probably Shou and sau and you know this kind of thing the different s sounds and what-have-you maybe a lot you get wrong even phonetically because you're not learning the opinion you're gonna have no idea what the written characters are they're gonna be I guess I can say homonyms they're words that sound similar or sound the same where you think they're the same word and they're not there are two or three different words crit examples duh sort of just de how many words of it sound like duh and you really need to memorize which one is which and you need to know what orthographically not just phonetically okay but there are some people who are so optimistic and so positive motivated that they could just memorize this crap with zero accuracy and then speak Chinese completely incomprehensible it would come with zero comprehensibility to native Chinese people they would come out of that talking Chinese in a manner where native Chinese speakers have no clue what you're saying they just said oh what and then flip it around and vice versa when they listen to a native speaker talking she it turns out in real life Chinese people don't talk the way people do in the Pimsleur tapes at all and again in terms of idiom where you're only able to understand exactly the verb you learn before and only learn only understand it when it's used with the idiom or the sentence pattern that you're familiar with like oh they took that verb but now they're using it with a passive voice construction in Chinese and now it's incomprehensible to you or now when you hear the sentence you don't even know which word is the verb and which word is the noun because in Chinese they all sound the same and you can't guess from the position in the sentence because of these myriad idioms or sentence patterns okay uh yeah I'm getting the point across here the choice is really really hard with or without it can as a Miracle Method without his advice but if you are so optimistic and sunny and positive a character if you have that motivation right then my point is here the outcomes will be even worse for you right cuz you'll be miss learning the language okay the actually the people who get pissed off and frustrated and discouraged in a sense they're the lucky ones right they're the ones who say hey this is a broken tool this is bad method this is a waste of my time I'm not learning the language accurately I'm putting myself back instead of forwards so forget it I quit if you measure them a very very large percentage of people using this kind of method they're gonna fail but what theme do not realize is they're better off than the people who are so optimistic and so diluted that they think they're succeeding when in fact they're setting themselves back by years because they're inculcating bad language habits just artificial textbook broken use of the language that they're gonna have to undo and relearn they're going to go back to scratch they're gonna have to throw that all away which is very very hard to do I mentioned this in my channel once before I knew an old man I think he was more than 60 he was a white man who had lived in Thailand for many years let's say he had lived in Thailand for 30 years and he had language errors he never learned the written script so this is very similar to doing Pimsleur method he only learned through speech he only learned in this so-called organic method from talking to people he didn't know when a word had a TT like a double consonant sound or just one consonant right because you can't hear that in the Thai language you also can't hear it in in English most of time the word batter in English are there two T's is the one T well if English isn't your first language it's hard to guess just from hearing you know so these kinds of distinctions he completely lacked he had no idea about elements of meaning that were written into the words he didn't know word boundaries so there could be a phonetic component which is actually ending of one word that he thinks it's the beginning of the next word I saw this guy speaking the language fluently but with zero accuracy I saw him standing around with a bunch of construction workers and one of the construction workers came up to him as a female construction worker around the construction site and this female construction worker says to him in Thai she says hey you know my husband dumped me so you and I we can get together we can be a couple now and he replied in Thai and all the construction workers broke out laughing he were applied in Thai Oh service no good that was what he sent I like that your husband leave you because let's you know good at cleaning up the apartment of something because he said it in three two words and they're all these construction workers they're her colleagues and they're all falling over laughing they thought this was so funny right so I mean the guy could communicate in the language but and one of the most astounding language errors he made there was you know to me I kept saying to know you're this isn't this isn't correct don't keep there were basic nouns that he had misapprehended and memorized with the wrong meaning the name of a city versus a word meaning the mayor's office like you know he thought the mayor's office was the name of the city and vice versa I guess and we'll get into more detail so it's very misleading to think the only problem is learning a language or not learning language like fluency or lack of fluency what's more dangerous is false fluency what's more dangerous is the illusion of having confidence and ability and understanding in a language when you don't learning a language in an inaccurate and sloppy way it's like if you're a tailor you do a bad job stitching something up and then you've got to go back and tear it apart and put all the pieces back together again okay I Can Has advice in short I think it's terrible the only thing I can say about the guy positively is obviously there are people who watch these videos and think wow if he can do it I can do it they feel some kind of positive encouragement and maybe in a sense that's a beautiful thing