Wanda Kaishin

This has happened to me; it's quite normal and will resolve itself. It's due to your level in one or more of your languages being low. After you reach B1 or so this type of interference is rare.

Japanese when it's spoken with it's highest level of politeness.

Benny Lewis's advice is mostly useful for: 1) People who need encouragement, and 2) beginners who don't know how to begin learning a language, and haven't spent much time learning about languages or language learning. I've never needed encouragement, so I'm never much impressed by language products or gurus who spend a great deal of their time dealing it out. I started using the internet to research language learning in 2005. Before that. I would have been a pretty good candidate for his advice, even though I was on my 5th language by then. But doing a lot of your own research is far superior to just reading Benny's blog. That's because things are always changing, and there's a lot more information out there than just his single website. Benny Lewis's method is: 1) Spend a few hours learning beginning conversation type phrases in a phrase book or some other source. 2) Have a short conversation. Make a note of the words/phrases you thought you knew but forgot, and the words you needed but didn't know. Learn these words/phrases before your next conversation. 3) Keep repeating 2), but add in material that your partner uses and you don't know. 4) Start to use a beginner's language course to fix your grammar problems as needed. Only learn the things that you've encountered and need to work on. That's it in a nutshell, so he really is speaking from day one. All the other advice is very general, and not unique at all, so I wouldn't call it his method. It's funny, because I've been using a technique very similar to 2) & 3) for when I begin conversing, and I was initially a little bit annoyed when he claimed it for his own, but that's how it goes.

The OP is false, ime. Women appear to have no more problems than men when learning to speak a foreign language.

"Thank you sister" in Swahili.

As others have pointed out, this is normally called language exchange in English, and our administrator has created a sub-forum just for this purpose. That's why I moved this thread.

I gave up in 2 languages (Swedish and German) when I was much younger. I've quit 2 languages (French and Japanese) only to pick them up again in the future. I'm also a believer in Spurt Learning.

I've heard lot's of parents do this because babies can use it before they are able to converse. Has that been your experience?

I find subtitles in L1 to be of limited use, and I only use them at the very beginning of the learning process. Subtitles in L2, on the other had, are extremely useful, and I tend to use them well into the intermediate phases. But to become a good listener, you eventually need to listen to hundreds of hours without subtitles. So don't hang onto them for too long.

I just posted this in another thread, and am curious to see what others think of this very famous language acquisition theory:

You might be interested in this famous language learning theory when select ing material to study:

Learning languages from significant others can be a dangerous proposition, that's for sure.

I'm not Chinese, but h is pronounced like h in english, often with a little friction like the ch in loch. S and f are about the same as the english s and f.

I actually don't think this is the OP's intended question. Everyone who wants to be able to read normal Japanese needs to learn Kanji readings, so unless you plan on trying to use romaji and kana all the time, the answer to this question is "yes". I think the intended question is "Do you learn readings in a big, isolated, systematic manner such as Heisig 2?" My personal answer to that is "no". I tried it in my second year of Japanese study, and found out it's very inefficient. There are few rules and little order that help you remember readings, so unless you have already encountered the word from which you are taking the reading from in the wild, and are quite comfortable with it, the reading isn't going to stick. There are some exceptions of course, but learning readings in isolation is a big waste of time imo.

That sounds better, especially if it includes media made by and for native speakers.

Just a reminder, because someone might not know this, in the English language if you make an absolute statement that isn't always true, then the statement is false. I disagree with your statement because not everyone's goal is conversation, and I believe that even if your goal is conversation, using a person as your "primary tool" is not always the most efficient. For example, trying to get a native speaker to teach you grammar before you even have the basics down is a poor choice imo.

Assimil is probably the highest rated (by polyglots) multi-language program there is, but it doesn't work well for me either. To be fair though, I haven't used it from the beginning for a language that's supposed to be easy for native english speakers. I bought French to listen to in my car after I already had a good grasp on the language. It was fine for that purpose. But I used Russian from very early on and got results that weren't nearly as good as advertised. I'll probably never use it again.

Did you watch the video? I agree with the first 2 sentences in the quote, and I think that the guy in the video would too. The problem is labeling it "learning styles" and then trying to do a whole lot more with it than what you mention.

Agreed. And let's add no getting overly sensitive and using foul language just because someone disagrees with you.

When people disagree with you, that isn't "hate". It's ok to disagree, discuss and even argue your point on a forum.

What do you mean by "fluent"? I don't doubt that it's a difficult language, but 5 hrs/week for 2 years should make one a strong B1 in any language, and a strong B1 can converse one-to-one quite well. If he can't put in 1 hr per day, 5 days per week, for an extended period of time, then it's unlikely that he'll ever reach B1. I'm just stating the facts; it has nothing to do with how fair peoples' criticism of his level is, so please don't take offense.

I took the survey, Are you going to share the results, or did I just waste 5 minutes of my life?

I won't give this a full review as I'm not fond of products that endorse Benny Lewis. All I read was the first section, on tones. I found his description on how to use a pinyin table to get familiar with pinyin helpful. The other information didn't seem as useful. The verbal description of tones was poor, and the whole treatment of tones was very shallow imo.

Learning styles don't exist.

asante sana dada