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Comment by marcus_chang | Hacker News Reader

> Not that I had any success with it, but here is a book/site about how to learn which I found interesting:

He hasn't had any success with it either. Benny is incredibly bad at speaking the languages he's claimed to have "learned" in 3 months.

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I had years of classroom German in high school and basically cannot hold a conversation. Yes, Benny sounds like shit, and has to work pretty hard to express himself, but he is able to hold conversations with people (there are videos). To me the idea that one could get to even that rudimentary level of conversational use in 3 months is pretty revelatory.

My point is even if he's "bad" at these languages, he's done something I didn't previously think was even possible.

The only languages that he's become even somewhat competent at are the ones closely related to languages that he already knew.

Here's a video of him "holding a conversation" in Mandarin: https: https://youtu.be/hoWXYmLpNJY?t=643

It's a series of non-stop "uh-huh's" and, frankly, it's embarrassing. He's a marketing gimmick and pretty reviled by the polyglot community for trivializing how much effort learning a language actually takes.

Aaand a glaring hole in my ability to evaluate language learning techniques is revealed to me: I can't actually speak any of the languages in his examples.

Well, at least I mentioned Ms Lomb as well!

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