Kanji Keith
I finally found a video of him speaking!
Okay so: Kanji Keith's old blog is here where he documented how he studied. I can't find the blog he moved to.
He studied Mandarin by first: going through a beginner class, and FSI audio/lessons, and some chinese recorded audio sentences resource.
Then he watched 2000+ hours of chinese dramas, not caring if they were comprehensible. So if you believe in learning through 'comprehensible input,' he did not use things that he necessarily understood the main ideas of until 1000+ hours in, when he finally had learned enough words to start following the main idea of some scenes.
My personal thoughts: it would be way more productive for a learner to use INPUT THEY COMPREHEND, as in it will take them less time to learn things. But on the other hand? At least this guy used visual-audio input, which I believe is always going to be at least slightly comprehensible because you have VISUALS to use for context.
I have read about someone who studied Japanese by just LISTENING for 1000+ hours and... he made no progress. Listening provided no visual context, and he knew no prior japanese to provide any context for the words he listened to. So nothing was comprehensible.
Anyway. Someone shared a video of Kanji Keith speaking Mandarin for the first time:
I am asking y'all to judge his accent. Tell me if he's messing up tones. Tell me if he says anything hard to understand.
To me? A learner who doesn't have super strong knowledge yet? He sounds understandable. I can listen, without looking at the video, and know what words he's saying. He sounds better than fucking Mark Zuckerberg, who pronounces Chinese with really strong English sounds. I'm not sure if he's messing up tones though... probably because I mess up tones. If I had to make a guess... I'd guess he heard more southern Chinese accent when he watched dramas, based on the softer way he's talking. Or he's worried he's going to pronounce something wrong, so he's just speaking softly because he's less confident.
I'm not going to grill him on sentences, because the first time I ever tried speaking French or Chinese I also sounded like this. Lots of short phrases, not sure what to say next, plenty of words I knew but could not for the life of me recall when speaking. So I think for his first time speaking, it's pretty normal to talk like this. From what I've seen on r/dreamingspanish subreddit, people tend to take 25+ hours of speaking practice to get more comfortable with saying longer sentences and at least basic common vocabulary for the ideas they're trying to convey.
