[Authors Note: I'm not a Benny expert. The following is what I gleaned from only parts of Benny's Mission. If you want to understand his methods more, head to his site (link below)]
Benny learned Chinese. If you were in a hole earlier this year (or don’t read language learning blogs), you might have missed it.
I never really knew what to think of Benny.
He’s a polyglot, I focus on learning one language.
He’s all about conversations, I’m all about learning through listening, watching tv, and reading. It didn’t help that I could sense a lack of fluency in some of his videos. Even though I didn’t really pay close attention to what he was doing, I doubted his skills, and questioned his approach. When Benny was learning languages like But who am I to say that someone learning Polish isn’t doing a good job of it? So when he decided to learn Chinese, it gave me an opportunity to take a close look at his methods.
Talky, Talky, Talky?
A quick reading of Benny’s blog will leave you with the impression that Benny is all about speaking and that he doesn’t care about grammar or vocabulary at all. It’s one of reasons I secretly doubted him. But from watching his videos, it’s clear to me that he’s compressing his studies, that is, he’s working on grammar, vocabulary and speaking all at the same time. This is advanced language kung fu.
How does he do it? By memorizing a dialogue and recording himself speaking it. The dialogues that Benny memorizes are full of useful vocabulary and grammatical patterns. Learning the dialogue teaches him vocabulary and memorizing sentences forces grammatical patterns into his mind. Finally, recording himself gives him ample time to practice speaking.
This approach also has the benefit of providing Benny with feedback and lets him gauge his progress.
Downsides to the Benny approach
If you want to be really fluent (e.g. native speakers can’t tell you’re not a native speaker), then you’ll need to do more. More listening, more grammar, more vocabulary. The good news is many of Benny’s techniques scale: you could learn a lot of Chinese grammar and vocabulary by learning and memorizing different dialogues, for example.
But you’ll never master tones (or even pinyin) without lots of listening. If Benny wanted to spend another 9 months learning a language, I’m sure he’d spend more time listening (but he’d probably find some way to combine listening with another activity) and he’d end up being relatively fleunt.
On the other hand, Benny’s not really trying to be fluent. His goal was never to be able to play chengyu games or do a xiangsheng routine. His goal was to get to a level where you can start engaging with real people who speak the language. If you’re planning a trip a few months from now, it’s a good method to try. I wouldn’t call it fluency, though.
What did you learn from Benny’s 3 months of Chinese?
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“If you want to be really fluent (e.g. native speakers can’t tell you’re not a native speaker)…”
“Benny’s not really trying to be fluent”
Fluency is not the same as being mistaken for a native speaker all the time. From the Oxford English dictionary:
FLUENT:
1 speaking or writing in an articulate and natural manner. 2 (of a language) used easily and accurately.
There is no 3: Sound like you were born and raised speaking the language.
I agree with you that I wouldn’t call what I have fluency yet, but I continue to improve on it. The level I did reach (as of about one month ago) was B1 spoken (a.k.a. lower intermediate), as confirmed by the LTL school. I’ll upload more videos in a few weeks for what I reached at the end of my entire stay in Asia, and will continue to improve this summer so the project is far from over.
To me, fluency is a solid B2/low C1 and upwards. C2 is mastery and anything higher is verging on bilingual. Don’t mix up “fluent” and “bilingual”.
With comments like “I don’t care about vocabulary”, it’s pretty clear you don’t know what my approach involves and other things you say show you weren’t even watching my videos or reading what I wrote. Memorising dialogues was only part of my first month. Every other video I made since then was entirely spontaneous. I couldn’t have gotten LTL’s evaluation based on scripted conversations.
If you want to aim for the ludicrous goal of getting confused for a native all the time (I don’t see the point? Want to become a spy or something? I prefer to focus on genuine communication), all the studying in the world won’t make a sniff of difference if you aren’t using the language with actual people (rather than only grammar and vocab books) for some real feedback.
Thanks for the post, but I’m disappointed that you were not actually paying attention enough to see that my dialogues were spontaneous or that I always say that I care about learning vocabulary. Saying all I do is talk-talk-talk is such a weak oversimplification of efficient immersion strategies that many people apply. There is no “Benny approach”. I only have my own particular style of efficient immersion.
@Benny:
I appreciate you coming over to comment (and correct) my post.
Most of your criticisms are correct: I’ve never paid close attention to what you’re doing. I stated so at the beginning of the post. The impressions I have from quick readings of your blog did leave me with the impression that you don’t really care about vocabulary or grammar. You can’t fault my impressions.
And by dialogue, I meant the monologues you’d occasionally record. You’re correct in saying that your dialogues were spontaneous.
We’ll continue to disagree about what fluency is, but I do think trying to achieve B2 / C1 level of a language is pretty good goal to have.
Achieving a ludicrous goal isn’t such a bad thing. I’ve talked to people on the phone who had no idea I wasn’t native Chinese speaker: when we met, they’d start out insisting I wasn’t the person they spoke to. I don’t think it’s right (or very nice) to criticize or belittle anyone’s goals. It doesn’t matter how big or small one’s goals are; what’s important is making progress towards achieving those goals.
I must say, I am a bit confused by you’re last comment:
I’d call that Benny’s approach. I don’t think I’m alone in calling it that.
I don’t see the point in writing a blog post about something you clearly have no idea about, but at least you are honest about it. I should point out that I haven’t recorded a single monologue video in Chinese since my one month point. I find it ironic that you talk about being in a “hole” this year, because that’s exactly where I feel you were since February…
Aiming to sound like a native is a noble goal, and something I’ve written about recently. But it happening 100% of the time is not going to happen unless you really are a native. Your phone conversation is impressive, but far from what many people consider “native speakers can’t tell you’re not a native speaker”.
I have indeed been confused as a native speaker in French, Spanish and Portuguese, and to me it entails as much an impressive accent and mastery of the language as it does body language, cultural appreciation, dress sense, distance you put yourself from the other person, how long you maintain eye contact etc. Skipping all that and only doing it on the phone is where I have to put it back to you that we differ in our definitions. You think I’m too flexible with the world “fluent” and I in turn think you are too flexible with the term “native speakers can’t tell” unless you specifically add “… on the phone”.
However, I was confused as a native on the phone too in Chinese, shortly after arrival in the mainland (in Wuhan). Not because my Chinese is so amazing, but because the Chinese simply don’t expect to talk to foreigners when they make a local phone call. There aren’t enough of us to make this something to consider. All my mistakes and hesitations meant that for almost 30 seconds someone must have just thought I was a really stupid illiterate native with a speaking impediment and was genuinely surprised when I said I couldn’t follow what he was saying because I am a foreigner.
This is why I don’t hold telephone conversations as the standard for counting as being confused for a native. This is harder in Chinese because of ethnic differences of course, and why the line may have to be drawn with a telephone conversation. But to me, the other person can FEEL like you are a native when you act like one as well as sounding like one, even when your skin colour may say differently.
What I find ludicrous is simply this binary view of language learning, and this idea that fluency is nothing less than sounding like a native speaker! With that logic, every C2 speaker and pretty much every professional (translator/interpreter etc.) don’t speak “fluently”. Aiming for perfection is impossible, that’s what I mean.
If you are happy with your current level, good for you! But if you want to point out not being “right or nice”, then perhaps you’ll appreciate that I didn’t feel this post was so nice in misrepresenting me. But I appreciate your straightforwardness at least.
@Benny:
I apologize if you feel misrepresented. It wasn’t my intent. I added some language to the beginning of the post to try and address that.
No need to be so defensive. I wasn’t trying to attack you. This post should be read in the following way:
1) I had impressions about how and what you did.
2) After looking at parts of your Chinese mission, I found that you do have some very strong methods (kung fu).
3) The methods you used good for acquiring a decent baseline in Chinese, but in order to progress beyond that, one would need to change their strategies.
As for the phone call: I’m not talking about a short conversation like the ones you described. I’m talking about longer drawn out conversations where the person.
A better analogy would be this: to sit behind a Chinese screen and have a conversation with a native speaker for a few minutes without them realizing they weren’t speaking to a native speaker. It would be like a Turing Test for Chinese, if a majority of native speakers think a person is a native speaker, then that person has native-level skills.
I agree, a binary view of language learning is ludicrous. My view of language learning has many different levels, including being a beginner, competent, proficient, conversational, or fluent. Each level also has many different stages, as well.
Fair enough. Thanks for the explanation.
Benny, you say here that you don’t see the point of getting confused for a native, but I honestly thought that *was* part of your ideal level of acquisition: to learn a language so well that locals can’t tell you’re a foreigner. I could’ve sworn I read a comment from you on someone else’s blog saying (paraphasing) “when I do decide to take on an East Asian language I want to get to the point where even if the locals will be able to tell I don’t look like one of them, they won’t be able to tell whether or not I grew up among them.”
That was 2-3 years ago, so maybe you’re attitude here has changed?
My position on that quote hasn’t changed. But see this very recent post for a better understanding:
http://www.fluentin3months.com/native/
However, getting mistaken for a native SOME of the time is a point I aim for beyond 3 months. If you define fluent as no different to bilingual, then of course you’re not going to like a blog with the title mine has. But most people don’t understand the word that way.
My point of sounding and acting as convincingly native as possible is because it makes other people feel way more open to communicate and share with you when they “forget” you were born in another country.
We always treat foreigners differently. When this fact has slipped the minds of Brazilians, Spaniards and French I’m with (even if they are “aware” that I’m Irish so it has nothing to do with fooling people), I notice a very different and more intimidate way of talking to me. This is what I do it for.
My long term goal with Chinese still complies with that quote, but it was never my objective for these 3 months
What Benny achieves in three months isn’t what I, or even most people, would call fluency. But it is extremely impressive and better than what the vast majority of people manage in three months. I’d also say it’d be a very good way to get started on the road to fluency.
I guess “Impressive proficiency in three months” isn’t quite such a catchy blog title, though.