Becoming great with foreign languages

Most people overstimate their language skills by a lot. It happens regardless of the language. I don't know if he blatantly lied when he said he was fluent or if it was just a huge lack of self-awareness.

When do we bust out the steel cage for the match between Levy and rick?

I’ll supply the metal folding chair.

I'm the best writer on the forum 😀

Facts.

Be careful Rick,, Levy might be Daniel Tammet

full documentary

there's definitely a non zero chance there's some smoke and mirrors at play - could honestly just be an obscure form of mentalism

ie they could have had a group of topics and even specific questions lined up - in which case i imagine anyone with some good intelligence and knack for languages could knock out a prepared 3 minutes discussion in a week

especially notice everyone's praise is based on the timeline, not the fluency - everything is "good" and always couched with "and in one week"

fact the teacher goes on as a hype man saying "icelandic is an impossible language" when that is just a blatant lie as in fact it takes about a year to become fluent in it as a native english speaker - it's harder than learning french or spanish for us but still very much related to other european languages so a fairly natural progression and if you already know a bunch of germanic/nordic languages (which that man is already fluent in) then you can expect fluency in a few months

and what controls do we have to know for a fact he didn't do any pre-study?

mind you, that guy makes a living off selling books and giving talks - not saying he's not very good at languages but the performative aspect of this is a little too on the nose for me

much like with mentalism, what we're seeing here is an expert in vaudeville who is very smart and well versed in human psychology, not someone who is capable of paralyzing someone at will - i imagine tammet is a decent mix of both the legit and vaudevill

while i have no doubt he is very likely one of the best in the world at acquiring languages, there are also those who believe miss cleo can also read your fortune

Kenneth Hale, a famous 20th century linguist, was reputed to be able to learn a language in 15 minutes.

That claim as is doesn't cut muster, but here's what Andrew Carnie (a renowned syntactician) says about Hale in the latter's LA Times obituary (24 October 2001):

'During class demonstrations, Hale would sit with a speaker of an unfamiliar language “and within 10 minutes he was able to start conversing--not very fluently and not about anything profound. But he was able to absorb the structure of the language right away.”

Mr. Rickroll,

Surely you are not disparaging the talents of Daniel Tammet, right? Have you seen his interviews? He's the real deal.

This is pretty suffice:

King Savant
Absolute Hero

again, i had no skepticism of him whatsoever until it was "let's get an icelandic teacher to outright lie to the camera for this doc to hype up to absurd exaggeration how difficult this language is when it's actually fairly easy for someone who already knows the closely related languages which daniel already knows"

the hype man presentation was a little too on the nose, felt more pt barnum than anything else

Just looking into how he multiplies numbers in his head, and it's absolutely wild, he takes shapes and colours and turns them into multiplication somehow. Sounds kinda unbelievable!

Concepts take the forum of geometric shapes in my mind, and it is completely useless!

Are you synaesthetic? Do you get any mixing of senses, or do numbers, letters or days of the week have a particular colour?

As far as I understand you can have synaesthesia without any extra heightened abilities, but it's an indicator for potential savantism. Any crazy heightened abilities to report?

Maybe only slightly synaesthetic if that, no to the follow-ups. On mushrooms All senses sort-of merge into a tapestry of maths and sciences.

Nothing crazy. The most real thing I can think of is being able to clearly see the radical when doing long division in my head. Which started one day in 2nd grade when I was incredibly bored. I can quotient out an irrational number, but that is incredibly simple and I'm almost embarassed to report that as potentially special.

agreed, but i think the main thing is that quite a few people could do this if they wanted to dedicate weeks of their life memorizing useless numbers

ie i count cards in blackjack, it's very easy for me to do at this point, most people think it's impossible to do so they don't even try, but anyone willing to put in the time can do it

same with david blaine, literally everything he does is something the general population assumes is impossible, but what they don't know is that david is willing to hire the best teachers in the world to coach him how to do it for 8 hours a day for 6 months - when he does that he will learn how to do things like swallow frogs and then bring them back up, put steel rods through his arm, not via magic but actually doing it by finding seams in the body which won't cause any damage etc etc

none of this is slight of hand, he literally does this - you and i could do it too if we found a frog coach and spent 6 months practicing

again, i don't mean to take away from his ability/skill etc but the real skill he has is his autistic devotion to spending several weeks memorizing pi, not memorizing pi

and given the performative aspect of it, you gotta at least concede there could be some smoke and mirrors involved along the way - ie how do we know he didn't have a vibrating butt plugg when he did that trick to help him when he got stuck?

Well, I'm not so sure that you could take an average middle-aged person and get them to a point where they could easily and fluently count cards (I've not done it for BJ but I did for punto banco) or memorise long numbers.

Having said that, Derren Brown did manage to coach a grandma in an afternoon or something to the point where she could beat some 'pros':

Now there's lots to critique in that video, variance etc, and while Derren Brown isn't widely known to use stooges or be a fraud in the slightest, he is also a performer, and he is known to be a little deceptive with his editing (for example, using different reaction shots).

There's also good reason to believe that like any of these types of performers, what we see on tv is, IDK, ~1/10 or less of what he tries, a lot of which just won't work as well as he hoped. Pretty standard feature of magic shows, right, that you line up a few cards with increasing reveals - magician's choice, I believe it's called?

I don't see any reason to believe that Tammett gamed the Icelandic thing (though I haven't looked into it deeply) and the fact a famed linguist can grasp the rudiments of a new language within 15 minutes suggests at least that this sort of thing is possible, though ofc it says little about how common or trainable these abilities are. Hale was likely some level of savant as well as dedicating his life to linguistics.

Try watching Spanish shows or movies with subtitles to pick up context and vocabulary. You could also use language apps like Duolingo or Memrise, which make learning more interactive and less tedious!