Scott Chacon wrote:The rare ones that did succeed under these circumstances were often found in the polyglot communities. Nearly everyone I read about (Benny Lewis, Gabriel Wyner, Luca Lampariello, Ashwin Purohit, etc) cobbled multiple tools together on their own. Even Duolingo’s own CEO, Luis von Ahn, recommends piecing together multiple tools when asked how to actually learn a language.
Not only that, but contrary to enthusiastic advertising and breathless blog posts you may have seen, it takes hundreds of hours of practice speaking with real humans to get to the point where you feel comfortable having normal conversations with native speakers.
Language learning is a marathon.
Like a marathon, if you have a coach and a plan and a team to help you, it’s not impossible and nearly anyone can do it. However, also like a marathon, there is no way to shortcut it. You can’t learn to run a marathon in a week if you don’t normally run. You have to physically change your body (in the case of language, your brain) and it’s not possible to do in less than several hundred hours. Not one of the famous polyglots in the world has ever figured out how to get to real fluency in less than that, and unfortunately you won’t either. If they’re fluent in three months, then invariably it means they’re practicing hard for 8 hours a day, every day.
Apparently he wants to make a single course that cobbles together all the resources you'd need to make it make it to B1 (or maybe a bit higher), without having to scrounge around like most of us do. I have no idea whether he's actually succeeded in doing that with Chatterbug, however. Still, it's a pretty interesting article and I'm happy to see that at least some online course creators understand the problem and speak about it realistically.