Le Baron wrote:Magic shortcuts are lies and fantasy.
Nicely said!
Le Baron wrote:Magic shortcuts are lies and fantasy.
Another childhood story, since we're sharing . When I was a kid we lived in a pretty multicultural neighbourhood. My grandad had a shop, and for whatever reason learned many curious phrases in languages that his customers spoke.Le Baron wrote:When I was ten my mother taught me to count to ten in Italian and other random things like 'happy birthday' and lots of other bits and pieces. Just for entertainment purposes. I didn't forget them, but it didn't make me speak Italian, didn't 'put me on my way' to learning Italian or any of that. If I want to learn Italian I'll have to start learning Italian and it's going to be longer than 7 days or 7 months and likely about three years to get functional. Magic shortcuts are lies and fantasy.
s_allard wrote:I'm planning to do something like this in Russian
s_allard wrote:I don't think I could do a real-time video any time soon
Cainntear wrote:s_allard wrote:I don't think I could do a real-time video any time soon
Not wanting to speak for anyone else, but I kind of think that was einzelne's point.
The guys you're defending are using their slick marketing and sophisticated video production to make something massively misleading because no-one is going to be able to make live chat videos worth watching in anything like that space of time.
This is the other side of the "caveat emptor" -- there is pretty much nothing out there that shows realistic achievements, but there's lots of us writing about realistic and unrealistic achievements, and that is not just negativity -- it's the other side of the story.
s_allard wrote:Rather than turn this thread into another sideshow with the usual cast of characters, I really prefer to concentrate on the subject at hand.
We all know that in the world of independent language learning, there is a long tradition of publishers and more recently internet entrepreneurs making all kinds of wild claims about their products.
There are two sides of the equation here : the product and the user. There all kinds of products out there with lots of marketing. I really don’t see a big problem of misleading or dishonest claims.
On the user’s side of the equation, it’s a question of finding the right fit. Most of us cobble together our own personalized solution based on trial and error. That’s why I always look past the marketing fog of these commercial offerings to see if there is anything I can learn.
For me, if there is one key takeaway from this entire thread, it is that it is impossible to debate this issue (any issue, really) with individuals who are not interested in actually engaging the subject matter, no matter how plainly it is stated.Cainntear wrote:We know that you don't -- that's clear. Some of us do though, and if you want us to come to agree with you, you should discuss what our concerns actually are, so that we can better understand your point of view.
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And that's nothing that hasn't already been discussed. Several posters on the anti-influencer side here have already stated that the issue is not that this marketing is harmful to those of us in the language learning community, but that they're potentially harmful to people currently outside the language learning community, because they do not yet know enough to make that informed judgement for themselves.
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