That was quite interesting actually. I groaned at the start because it seemed to be one of those typical TED talks that always promises to tell you how to do something but just ends up throwing endless worn out clichés at really skips on the useful info. Don't get me wrong, this talk was still full of that but I found some of the stuff he said at the end to be quite like how I forced myself in foreign languages, especially the 'one box different path' method. I don't even remember if at some time in the past I learned it and applied it and it became unconscious, or if it was something I had thought about and decided to try.
Having said that, six months still seems like a pretty short amount of time and I don't buy that for a second. Not that it isn't possible, but the average person doesn't have that amount of time to dedicate to such a goal. I don't like the way he discounts the learning that is useful from reading how a language is organised. It's like he takes that principle that language books are horribly old fashioned and representative of school learning that needs to be abandoned (which has some merits) but a lot of people take it and completely wipe out the need for any sort of rule-based learning. I think as linguists we are more disposed to the usefulness of such methods because we like learning facts in such a way, but there are just too many ways that a learner's confusion could drag on for months trying to uncover some rule in the language that five minutes in a good language description could clear up in an instant.
Anyway, I always take TED talks with a pinch of salt because they really aren't suitable for explaining complicated learning methods or really multi-faceted issues in such a short period of time, so they dispense with the complications and give a somewhat false pretense to the topic they purport to want to explain. However, if it gets people interesting and provokes them into giving language learning a shot, then it has my support (though in my mind this is understood as the-end-justifies-the-means).
