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This kind of writing makes me upset. * It's really self-important. Not only is it selling you on a particular strategy for attaining success, it also tries to sell success in things like public speaking and doing architectural work as an absolutely important part of one's life, and that implicitly a person's existence is invalidated if they aren't constantly trying to achieve this kind of success. It doesn't do it explicitly but the very notion of "real" and "fake" and other words like "wasted" complete with the trite diagrams showing that "hey, all your efforts are going into this small circle" give a very strong implicit value-judgement of the reader. * There's no proof. I don't know if I'm on the mark with this one, but I think that the act of omitting any sort of data about measuring the outcome of success when taking different approaches seems to imply to the reader that the argument should just "make sense" i.e. it's a truth that the reader already knows, they should just find it within their own observations in order to understand it. Here, have a handful of anecdotes to top it all off in case you weren't convinced. Overall this just feels like it's made to make the reader feel a certain way (motivated) rather than actually teach them any solid information. * What even is real and fake? The readers are given a bunch of examples and then we're left on our own to figure out what falls into which category. Someone commented on the article saying that if someone wanted to watch and understand anime in Japanese, they could just do that and that'd be the real thing, with the fake thing being taking the time to learn Japanese. This is obviously not going to be successful, so at this point the author's prescription has failed as a framework for achieving success. --- This kind of fiery motivational content could be harmful as much as it is useful. It'd be fine if an article, devoid of substance as it may be, was only meant to make readers feel motivated, but the problem is that this kind of fiery motivational content does different things for different readers. A person in a bad, self-loathing emotional state could be rendered feeling even worse, thinking that everything that they're doing at present is fake while everything that their peers are doing are more real, even when that's blatantly untrue. The devil's in the details and personally, I'm not going to let myself get affected by this personal philosophy if the case for it is this weak. |
As for you second point, what kind of proof do you need? Do you want scientific studies that dive way too deep into specifics and are not applicable to real life? This article is targeted towards learning, which varies heavily from person to person and can be very subjective. Think about it from your perspective and see if the ideas apply to what you do. Simple as that.
For your third point, yeah sure real and fake are pretty subjective. In the end it's obviously up to you to decide or come to a decision about what is and what isn't. Our gut instinct usually fails here thought...
However, to address the point about learning Japanese, I would argue that taking the time to learn before doing so is the "fake" way. How do children learn a language if they can't use a computer or phone to get on Duolingo or go to a community college to take a course? They literally just are exposed to it and pick it up over time.
People may not know his background but he is a prominent figure when it comes to language learning and his strategies are to replicate natural learning methods and ignore the canned courses like Duolingo that don't do you any good...