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Comment by aussie_mate | Hacker News Reader

this guy is a fake. i am polish and i can guarantee that there is no way in the world that one can speak the way he spoke in the video in just 1 hour of learning. polish is very hard to learn (ask my wife, she's an Aussie and after 10 years she still cannot pronounce my name/surname correctly). great PR stunt but hardly believable. i speak 5 languages but it took me 20 years to learn them (excluding polish) and it's not a walk in the park......definitely not 3 months......just ask any linguist or foreign language teacher. it's just like saying that you can read a programming book or watch a video tutorial and get a job hacking for google or facebook. what a load of bullshit! btw, i work as a programmer and used to work as a teacher

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He only picked up bits and pieces. A Polish native speaker myself, I think it's entirely believable.

Creating an impression of language fluency out of a very limited set of words and phrases is a talent in its own right.

It certainly has an element of deception to it :) but he can still be legit in the sense that you mean.

Polish pronunciation is notoriously difficult, but once you can make yourself understood, pronunciation is of secondary importance. There's a lot of people with a near-native command of foreign language with accent as thick as mud.

I agree about the talent for creating the illusion of fluency.

I think that's the real difference maker for Tim's guest blogger, he has a strong sense of what a language is in the abstract, a sense for how people use language in general, and practice at getting through the awkward time when you are frustrating to speak with.

Those universal gifts are the most valuable ones of language learning, and they can come while learning your second language, but they come faster when you have dabbled in 4 or so.

Some of what Benny does is based on Boris Shektman's teaching at the US Foreign Services Language Institute. It's extremely pragmatic (borderline cheating) At time, really steamrolls the conversation with a set of trick and tactics. It's not really knowing the language in any sense, but it does massively facilitate learning in immersive environments. It's language learning for people without time to take classes and it works. It takes a certain personality to steamroll someone and control the conversation, so hence its use in US diplomatic language training :)

Benny & Tim make some claims and use words like "learn" and "know" differently than you or me. I agree with you and don't agree with much of their preamble copy, but what they're doing is long held in aggressive training scenarios (foreign service postings, for instance) and a solid hack.. well, for type-A extroverts willing to dominate a foreigner socially.

My native language is Polish too. I wouldn't be 100% sure that this guy is a fake. Polish is indeed a hard language - pronunciation is tricky and there is a lot of conjugation struggle to get through (even names are changing suffixes dependently on context).

What I think happens on the video is that the guy has a list of different phrases/words (prepared for this particular situation) and maybe some pronunciation notes. That's ok, I would do exactly the same. You just cannot memorize all the necessary core words in one hour but you can use them easily if you have a reference material (plus you keep the conversation going and practice more).

He does standard mispronunciations that every non-native Polish speaker does at the beginning. However, you can hear that when the lady replies in Polish, there is nothing to indicate that he actually understood what she said. He gets the questions after she gives him some hints in English. If he was preparing just for an hour for this skype call it is certainly an excellent starting point.

>My native language is Polish too. I wouldn't be 100% sure that this guy is a fake. //

Agreed on that second part. I'm skeptical too but having seen Benny's Youtube videos and knowing that he already speaks a dozen or more languages and that he has reportedly learnt them enough to be conversational in months ... I think he has a handle on how to make specific sounds already and probably knows a lot of cognates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITzFRlVhMVs&list=TLnnk46TOLw... - shows he's at 12 languages at least.

He's not just a random guy, he appears to be trying very hard; I wouldn't call it fake without further evidence; he clearly has a great talent and many people appear to have had success using his methods (which he passes on for free).

In this TEDx video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZqUeWshwMs, he says he started learning new languages at 21. He looks mid- to late-30s to me which tends to support his "3 months" claim as being viable as well.

I don't know your definition of "very hard" but there are certainly harder languages for a native English speaker to learn:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Language_Learning_Di...

Pronunciation specifically can be hard to learn without actually focusing on it, such as recording your own voice or having a tutor specifically teach you how to make each sound. A normal class setting is very bad for learning pronunciation while a one on one conversation with a teacher focusing on pronunciation will bring much better results.

Thats possible, but some people do learn languages a lot faster than other. Kato Lomb for example. That guy is also a polygloth, so I'm sure he would learn faster than I would (or another random person).

it's true that some people learn faster then others and that some people can understand notions and ideas that no one else can (at last not as quickly) but there is no way in hell.....i repeat NO WAY IN HELL that one can have a conversation in polish after studying the language for 1 hour (regardless of how bad their pronunciation or choice of vocabulary is). take it from a polish native who is also a polyglot. i guess some people like to believe scams like these and would be quite happy to also accept the fact that you can become a millionaire in 3 months if you only follow my technique etc. or you can learn how to advance your stock market analysis skills if you only try hard enough/have a knack for it/follow me blindly etc. put it that way......if it's so easy, how come nearly every school in the world offers some sort of foreign language curriculum yet after years of studying the given language 99.9% of students will not remember anything past counting to 10 and 'how r u'-type phrases? seeing is believing but not in this case. good luck learning.....i suggest starting with polish :)

If polish is going to be his 13th language and he has already strong bases in russian and eu languages, I don't see why it should be impossible. Keep in mind that is not true that is one hour. Is all his life learning other languages that is applied here. (there's a famous quote among artists about this that i cannot remember right now...)

Anyway my point is, that you are able to pick up CoffeeScript in one hour if you are fluent in javascript and python, aren't you?

Based on language classes I've taken very few students have decent study methods and the teaching methods are very archaic. The pace kept is glacial.

> if it's so easy, how come nearly every school in the world offers some sort of foreign language curriculum yet after years of studying the given language 99.9% of students will not remember anything past counting to 10 and 'how r u'-type phrases? seeing is believing but not in this case.

How many of them really have the incentive to be efficient? Maybe as long as the students are learning something, that is enough. I can't imagine that a large swath of Germans are going to form a protest ten years after graduation and proclaim that "my subpar Italian ruined my life", or something like that. English has been very useful for me, but I feel like I've learned most of it from the Web, video games, movies, other pop culture ... it's hard to tell how important it was at this point, though.

Most teaching is variations on "throw information at your senses until something sticks", and the input is reading, doing exercises, discussing. There's nothing about specific mnemonic techniques, just read it and hope that you recall it. In elementary school, they told us to remember 50 English words by trying to write them down and reading them, reading them and then trying to recall them, rinse and repeat. This technique is laughably inefficient compared to trying to associate the words with something, like associating things that the word sounds like or remind you of, perhaps in your own language.

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