I've probably made clear my views on this guy whenever he's appeared and feel less incentivised to watch him.
He has a few problems. I find he can be too absolutist over something that's affected by individual differences between learners. He can be on the pretentious side and over confident. He is inflexible and also comes off as arrogant. And we've seen all the click bait "you have doing this wrong" or "this is something every language learner should know". And when people do this, it's an immediate red flag that they're a BSer.
And looking at how he speaks and composes himself and the comments he gets, I'm starting to wonder if he's trying to be a cult leader.
But I'm gonna do a Cainntear and then maybe consider watching this later to correct myself if my opinion changes:
Language is a tool for acquiring knowledge, as opposed to giving knowledge or for communication.
Speaking ability is a byproduct of acquiring knowledge, not a goal.
Speaking practice is useless; if a person can read fluently, speaking fluency automatically follows, whereas the reverse is not true.
A native speaker can't tell you how to learn their language, only a foreign speaker who has actually gone through the process of learning that language can tell you how to learn that language. (E.g. Vladimir can tell you how to do it because he's done it himself.)
1) Language is a tool for all of those things. How do I know Mystic Meg died? Somebody used language to communicate the knowledge to me (apologies to Mystic Meg fans that are finding out via my comment here), I didn't use language to reason out that information in an a priori kind of way. Nor did I show up to her dead body to confirm it. We're using information right now for communication and for giving and receiving knowledge.
2) If you're wanting to converse with people in that language, speaking ability is a goal. And given I'm somebody who is interested in oral cultures, where things like storytelling and music are central, spoken language is at the very core of it all. Knowledge is passed through stories told and songs sung. You learn about and understand a culture by experiencing it, not reading it, and speaking the language is a part of that. Reading still has a lot of value and you can learn a lot, but there's a difference between what you can learn by reading and what you can learn through doing.
3) I can test this claim, for anybody here who doesn't have any experience speaking or listening to Mongolian, tell me how you think the following are spoken:
- Sain baina uu
- Bayarlalaa
- Bi mongol ruu yavna
Transliterate the way you would speak it from only reading it or give some representation to give an idea of how you think it sounds.
I even confused a Tuvan woman by saying, "Ekii. Eki tur siler be?" because my stresses were off and it took a couple of moments before she clicked (and I would be curious how people think that sentence is pronounced too just from reading it). And this is from both reading and practicing speaking. Arguably, a native speaker was a good test on whether I was saying things right. Though in fairness, it is her American husband that's since been teaching me to pronounce Tuvan correctly. And Tuvan pronunciation (like Mongolian pronounciation) is unnatural to an English speaker. And there are things in English pronunciation people aren't just going to read into existence, like "th", which most languages don't have an equivalent for. And heck, in English we butcher the word "khan" because we don't have a that "kh" sound in English and reading something like "khalkha" would have use pronounce it, "kalka", which is wrong.
Another anecdote was ordering mead in Germany, I only ever read the word and my pronunciation was off. The waitress corrected me and made the joke, "the way you say it describes a type of dish that has a small piece of meat, you will not chat up any ladies with a small piece of meat".
4) I'm learning Vietnamese from a native speaker. The guy is also a language teacher. Whilst I would agree a native speaker doesn't necessarily mean a good teacher, though a native speaker still has value especially as far as sounding natural is concerned and what is typical speech. A native speaker who is also a good language teacher is a boon. And how does he suppose the first non-native speaker learn the language? And I can tell you from being able to read Vietnamese, even knowing how tones work, I definitely need to speak it to get it right, because of tones and because it is very fussy when it comes to pronunciation where small mistakes can affect meaning.