Benny Lewis... fluent in 3 months...?

People who know me from sites such as HTLAL will know there's no love lost between me and Benny Lewis. The man always refuses to discuss anything, and takes mortal offence at anyone who doesn't agree unquestioning with every single word he says.

This is a shame, because Benny has a wealth of experience in language learning, and being able to "mine" this experience would surely reveal a lot of good stuff. Sadly, though, Benny's refusal to engage in any critical analysis of his own performance has led him to maintain a blog that is full of positively charged platitudes and little of practical substance.

Years ago, I borrowed a copy of his "Language Hacking Guide" from a friend, and blitzed through it making notes for a review on this site, but in the end I decided to let it slide and never published anything.

Now, though, the guy has another book out, entitled Fluent in 3 Months and published by no less than Harper Collins, and the press seems to be lapping it up.

Has Benny grown a clue recently? Has he stopped and given any serious thought to the language learning process? The writing on his blog is as devoid of content as ever, so I doubt it.

I'm hoping to get a loan of a copy of the book in a few weeks time to do my own review, but for now, you can read a very thorough review of the book by the user Big_Dog on the Polydog forum (accompanied by much discussion).

I have to say, most of what he says strikes a chord with me as typical of Benny's style. Woolly definitions, constantly moving goalposts, contradictions, overinterpretations, and just often downright wrong.

Does Benny say anything useful? Yes, he does, but then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

3 months or 5 days?

You may be aware of Benny Lewis and his blog Fluent in 3 Months.  If so, you'll probably be aware that he's generally involved in some controversy or other.  If you had to pick someone as his "arch-rival", you'd probably have to go with Steve Kaufmann.

Now I'm not a fan of either, but this morning I was alerted to a new video Kaufmann posted on YouTube which would appear to be a direct challenge to Benny.  Not only is it called "Fluency in Five Days", but he even makes reference to the 3 month thing in his opening.  Take a look if you like:



The whole thing hangs on the meaning of "fluency" -- in technical terms, fluency is the ability to function flowingly and without (much) hesitation.  The other parts of language are "accuracy" and range.  So what he's proposing to do is just to cram as much and build his accuracy, and then immerse himself for a week to get up to speed in actually using it.

Basically it's a direct challenge to Benny's idea that you have to speak from day one (which is the name of Benny's current commercial product).  I have to say that I agree with Kaufmann on this.  I don't agree with his methodologies (or that of his commercial website Lingq), but I definitely agree that there is value to initial study without any immersive usage... as long as you later go into an immersive situation.

I've always said that the value of an immersive environment is limited by what you know going into it -- the more you know, the more you'll pick up.

I look forward to seeing Steve's results.