Best regards from Germany
Ionize

I think studying one kanji at a time and writing it hundreds of times until you memorize it (the normal way) is extreme. On the flipside, memorizing 20+ kanji a day with simple stories and mnemonics seems less extreme to me. 🙂

Yes, exactly, somehow I swallowed a space and the following word got glued to the short link.

@ lingvoj

I commented on bit.ly/10kh5 because Khatzumoto put it in his twitter updates. Except the thing about classes, the rest is utter boll#cks to me 😉

Sure what Khatzumoto emphasized in the link description was the thing about classes *only* but I continued reading that text to the end and was quite horrified. Several weeks to fluency? I don’t know. Maybe geniuses exist. I also read Mr Ferris’ 4-hour week book, ie I only made it to page 100 or so 😉 I loved the quotes from the great and famous of this world, but there was nothing new in it and I think it might be appealing to just some people in some Western countries. Being Polish and knowing what people can do in my country without being oppressed I don’t think it would be feasible for many people to follow the advice from this book. I don’t just mean other people looking down on them, I mean the reality of living in Poland with its economy, law and all. I don’t even want to think about people from other countries compared to which Poland seems paradise.

My cousin’s Japanese wife learned Polish in less than two years and she’s perfect at speaking, her Polish (spoken and written) is mind blowing, but in those few initial weeks she was only able to function well up to the glass ceiling that always exists after just a few weeks’ work. What, can anyone cram 20,000 or more words into their brains in such a short time? Not to mention other areas of the target language…
When I started my English studies back in 1993, anyone whose active vocab comprised fewer than 20-30,000 words on the very first day of the university inevitably lost it after the first semester because it was simply impossible for them to maintain the pace. And in those first months it didn’t really look like academic work – we just read all sorts of magazines and novels (tons of them, British and American literature), discussed them in class, did lots of fun stuff too, went to the phonetic lab etc. All that geeky linguistic stuff came *later*. They simply required us to be fluent and their definition of fluency was what I really liked – aim so high that the fall would kill you. I have been learning English since around 1988, worked as a translator (English-Polish) full time for eight years (IT, medical, legal, marketing, 2-3000 words a day), learned Welsh in Wales in the meantime (I had to take some classes; it’s a minority language and it’s not always possible to practice on the street), now I’m working full time for the kings of localization industry in Ireland, but I still feel there are gaps in my English. Fluency is an F word… So much for aiming high, soon I’m going to die 😉

The guy is an efficiency guru. Because you learn fastest in language at the beginning, his approach is to learn ’til it gets slow and then stop. As you said, different approaches.

bit.ly/10kh5

Or, the full URL:

www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/09/22/why-language-classes-dont-work-how-to-cut-classes-and-double-your-learning-rate-plus-madrid-update/

and there will be no school district in this planet that will stop me

most of my brazilian friends with kids have done it this way, and the kid grows up to speak perfect portuguese and perfect english, and end up being even smarter in school because the extra language gives their brains an edge that the other kids don’t have….it makes them more curious about learning because they are constantly asking their parents for portuguese translations of new english words they learn in school….

so its a real shame your friend chose to listen to the close-minded school district….even if the kid is a bit slow in the first year or two because of “language confusion”, the kid will eventually get it and will be all the smarter for it

i myself moved to the US when i was 8 and speak both portuguese and english fluently, with no problem….i speak portuguese at home and english at school…there really is no downside to raising a bilingual child

Dunno where to put this comment… Doesn’t the stuff at bit.ly/10kh5contradict much of what you wrote on the AJATT website? I don’t know what kind of fluency Ferris speaks about but it certainly isn’t fluency across multiple fields in the languages he speaks…

Warm greetings to you as usual.
Efeilliaid