Ferriss on how he learned Japanese, and other stuff

Posted on 13. Mar, 2010 @ 11:34 am by in Language Views: 560

I found this TED Talk with Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, where he happens to mention his approach to learning foreign languages, and specifically Japanese.

Pretty interesting. I had no idea he was an old school Japan-head.

I think his idea of focusing on the joyo Kanji is a good idea. It certainly cuts out any useless learning(?), as the joyo Kanji are all certainly useful. At IUC Japan we also focused on the Joyo Kanji hardcore, so he’s not the only one promoting this idea. Hrm… maybe I should be doing something like that for Chinese…

Here is a blog post by Ferriss on How to Learn any Language in Three Months.

Four hour work week… learn any language in three months… I’m not going to say I’m a total believer in his voodoo… but I’m also not going to discourage anyone from trying his techniques either.

What do you guys think about all this?

Harvey

  • http://kanjiwarrior.wordpress.com/ Kanjiwarrior

    I’m very impressed with this guy. Seems like he’s really smart about breaking stuff down to the essentials. I really liked his presentation on swimming and ballroom dancing. He didn’t talk about Japanese “enough” though, but from what I know about Heisig’s RTK and AJATT method I think it sounds like he did something similar (although probably with professional lessons). I like his focus on efficiency too, I’m trying to do the same now. I recently started to focus on one of my weak points, vocabulary. I am using smart.fm’s core2000 and core6000 vocab lists sorted based on a list of kanji that goes from easy to hard (kanji odyssey 2001 books) and it is helping a lot. I’m not worried about short term though, I’m totally ok with the long term so I’m trying to do a little bit each day and just be consistent so that I don’t get burned out.

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