Ahh ok, I see. Pretty sure I found refold entirely separately from Matt when I was beginning to learn, and sometime later discovered he was a creator, so I couldn’t speak at all about how it’s advertised, only the content. I’ll take your word on that part.
Same goes for the rest of it; I’ve read a few people’s summaries and I totally believe you/them that he’s up to some bad things, but I never cared enough about Matt for watching the videos to be worth my time. Would rather go study Japanese, haha.
My native language is a language that utilizes pitch accent however. There are plenty of words that has the same spelling but totally different way of saying them, not knowing the correct pitch accent will cause both confusion and some times ambiguity.
Agreed. This is my problem with it as well. I feel like the only way it would work without a huge amount of extra effort being involved is if one has a teacher or a friend who can offer explanations for queries that one can’t figure out on one’s own. It’s true that I managed to push through quite a lot of N2 grammar without much help or knowledge beyond N3 grammar, but that was doable because I knew kanji to begin with, along with some grammatical terminology that sort of carries over from Chinese, and I had a friend I could ask when I was really stuck. It’s probably harder to do without such support.
Maybe. From my experience, I think it’s more of an assumption based on first contact with a monolingual dictionary. Initially, it feels like there’s this massive wall you’ll never be able to climb over, because you can’t understand more than half a sentence at a time. It only gets easier a while later, and I think that they just didn’t stick with it long enough to realise that. You need to give yourself enough time to accumulate the vocabulary and grammar knowledge necessary to piece together most of the sentences in a dictionary.
Another thing is that I found this excellent textbook covering most of the essentials of advanced French grammar and a good number of words intermediate French students probably don’t know, and I studied that before we started C1-level classes, so I didn’t feel the jump at all, even though I’m aware that the B tier and the C tier are fairly different beasts.
I actually never looked more into it either. I knew what he was up to before this whole thing blew up but didn’t feel like making a post like this one anywhere. Not on here or Reddit.
I just wanted to inform people on here because you never know. There are many people who don’t know any better and just blindly trust others. There are also very young people on here and perhaps they’ll be persuaded by Matt and end up spending hundreds of dollars.
That’s all. What Matt does doesn’t affect me one bit. I just put it out there so that others are aware.
Same for me. Funny thing was, when I first came across it, I thought: “interesting, but seems like it’s overpromising”. Then I saw it was a Matt thing and I thought: “figures”.
You offer them more grace and befit of the doubt than I did. I suspect you are right in this.
The switch to monolingual is very hard. I remember when I made the switch in Spanish. It was hard but I’d had so much exposure to the language, that it seemed to just click. I might have gotten lucky.
Well what can you say? English isn’t considered a pitch accent language. If someone said that the moon didn’t exist, what exactly can you respond with?
English has accent, like many languages. It’s just not a pitch accent. The topic at hand isn’t regarding that though, this is about Matt’s latest shady enterprise, isn’t it?
I am not well versed in linguistics. All I know is what I have heard from various youtubers that teach Japanese. All say that English in fact does not have pitch accent but I won’t debate anyone who says the contrary. I only defend my position on things I have studied or researched on my own.
You can just look it up. English has no pitch accent, as multiple people have now written. As far as I am aware, Swedish does have it, but otherwise it’s rare in Europe.
Well, there are pitch variations within English words, and I think they tend to coincide with the syllables that are considered ‘accented’. But at least the way it’s usually discussed and taught, we tend to say English is ‘stress-accented’, because it tends to be seen as being mainly a change in volume, and native speakers typically don’t seem to pay attention to the pitch variations. It’s also ‘stress-timed’ because words are pronounced so there’s roughly the same amount of time between stressed syllables, as opposed to ‘syllable-timed’, which is used to describe languages like Spanish and French, in which each syllable is about as long.
Always a dilemma. More people warned, obviously a good thing. More places people are talking about this is exactly what he’s going for, because it will be free advertising. Some fraction will “see for themselves” who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of it.
Yes, I’m aware. I don’t have a linguistics degree, nor have I gone for any classes on it, but I’ve done enough reading for the languages I’ve studied to be aware of some of the basics. I just wanted to put the idea of ‘pitch’ being relevant into perspective, because I think native speakers probably would find an unusual pitch pattern strange, even if they might not be able to pinpoint why. I agree that that is not what ‘pitch accent’ means, but I wanted to perhaps explain how we got to the point of considering whether or not English is ‘pitch-accented’, even if it isn’t by definition.
While we’re on the topic of linguistics though, I have a question on what you said on Reddit:
Could I ask what the difference is, or perhaps more accurately what you were getting at? My inference based on the definitions I’ve just read is that phonetics would be the set of sounds a language is supposed to contain, whereas phonology is how one would differentiate different sounds, meaning that (in the context of the /e/ example you raised) it isn’t because one doesn’t pronounce a given sound in the typical way that one won’t be understood. Is that your point?
Phonetics is basically applied acoustics. Modern phoneticians analyse wave forms of speech in special programs and can pick out various things, like how sounds change in various contexts, dialects, between speakers etc. They are concerned with the actual sounds.
Phonology is how the distinct sounds of a language are organised. A phoneme is a stand-in that can refer to a whole cluster of possible sounds, depending on various factors. For the structure of the language, it is much more important which sounds are contrasting than what exactly the quality of a particular vowel or consonant is.
For example, Japanese has no opposition between l and r. That’s why, no matter whether you use (Spanish) r or l, it will generally sound roughly the same to Japanese people. Of course, there is a particular manner of articulation that is more proper (or, more accurately, it depends a bit on context how you articulate it), but that’s not a very conscious and/or consequential thing. By contrast, the distinction between l and r matters a lot in English.
The reason why I wrote that was to counter the silly argument that you couldn’t understand Japanese because you don’t know how the “Japanese” /e/ sounds, but that’s totally nonsensical, as that vowel stands in no opposition to similar vowels, unlike many other languages which do have a distinction between closed and open e, for example.