I’d like to learn Mandarin and also have interest learning Russian, Arabic and Spanish, but don’t really know where to start. I know apps like Duolingo and Mango exist, but are those the best options? Would I be best off taking a class? To my multi-lingual comrades, where should I start?
Edit: Thanks for all the great replies everyone! I have a lot of resources to look into now.
I think this is the kind of accusation you shouldn’t make as someone who admitted to not even checking out the YouTuber in question. He’s not “blanket demonizing CI” he’s running an extremely long, intensive experiment to test the claims people make in favor of this method, and the results are not particularly impressive.
If he just wanted to “blanket demonize” anything he wouldn’t bother dedicating so much of his life to it (it certainly doesn’t make him much money!) he’s doing it because he’s passionate about language learning and wants to understand different methods of learning and their pros and cons.
CI is, by the way, of course a good component of learning a language. You should be using it. But the idea that it is, on its own, an effective method with no other studying or supplementation strikes me as obviously absurd, as shown by the YouTube series in question.