The thing that I find irksome about Clugston is his mantra along the lines: "you have no credibility unless you have studied linguistics"; "you have no valid opinions unless you have a PhD in the field"; "if you don't have the credentials, you are a complete nobody"...etc...

For sure, there may be a certain sense in which he is right about this. Nobody would, I imagine, invite the local bar-room "expert" to take up the chair in History or Political Science at a major university.

But the notion that an opinion or argument is valid simply because the person making it has academic credentials (or is NOT valid because the person making it does NOT have the credentials) is itself profoundly 'unacademic', in my opinion.

If Mr Clugston actually has attended graduate school (which I personally somewhat doubt) I'm amazed he doesn't understand by now that ideas and arguments stand or fall entirely on their own merits. Gibberish would not become "true" merely because the person saying it has a post-grad degree. And an argument made by an uneducated bum could still be 100% right on merits.

(BTW I also find that people who genuinely ARE highly educated rarely find the need to hang their credentials on their noses...)

I just have a question, how someone say "I know how you can learn all kinds of languages of the world" and never speak a different language in your videos.....

Clugston is a joke!

If he is so smart why doesn't he get a camera with decent video quality. :)

I think we have our answer here. I have tried to grab his attention and discuss some things with him for the last few days. I have been posting on his YT page valid questions and points and he refuses to let them go up, calling me a "troll" because I don't have famous youtube persona or picture or anything. He then blocked me. I sent him a very sincere and even apologetic message while again bringing up the points that I am sure everyone wants to know: What are Clugston's credentials? What gives him the right to criticize established polyglots like Steve and Moses when he has not proven himself? Why should people even seek his assistance when just education is practical only to a select few? Why is it that he says only field linguists can learn 90% of the worlds languages, yet he's offering his services to the average person? I messaged him genuine, sincere, apologetic, and talking from one scholar to another(giving him the benefit of the doubt that he ACTUALLY IS a scholar) and his reply was....

"You got blocked Troll."

I just wanted to share this information with you all because I think it just shows the kind of person Clugston really is, it shows that he is seriously misguided in his views, and is very uneducated. I gave him the opportunity to explain himself to one of his critics in a professional and academic manner, and his reply is "You got blocked Troll." Honestly, this guy is not even worth wasting time with.

I think he may have a genuine personality disorder: Odd paranoid aggression and narcissistic delusions, then again, I have no credentials in psychopathology : )
But yes, certainly a conflicted message from the start.

Even I make the bed before switching on the webcam.

I find it quite amusing how he hurls dumb insults at all members of this forum, because he still doesn't seem to grasp the arguments of his "opponents". In his last comment on the youtube video, he even has invited odiernod and martialartsdude to fight him. :-D

Sebastian is right. I just checked the comments box at Clugston's video: a homophobe calling himself "Czech Experiment" (possibly a sock-puppet of Benny Lewes) posted the following comment:

QUOTE: Chris, just to inform you that there is a "Clugston attacks Steve Kaufmann" topic on the Lingq "private g*yclub" forum. They never ever let me comment there. They just have censored that "Imyirtseshem" character too. Can "slidplayaone - Paul Copareli" who whines about censorship over there explain me why is that so?

Maybe you should try once. There are also guys over there like "martialartsdude", "Chris" and "odiernod" who believe that they are better martial artists than you. (rofl) UNQUOTE

Clugston's reply:

QUOTE: @TheCzechExperiment Steve's sycophants: like Zombies. They try to troll here thinking they can do as they please. IT's a good thing they never tried Academia they prove time and again they have not the right stuff for it. As for the hobby martial idiots--what flight are they on? Tell them I am ready for them anytime the little boys want to get their asses beat, filmed and put on YT. I may make a point by point vid of how faulty their specious non sequitur arguments are. UNQUOTE.

"Specious non-sequitur arguments" :-D

The guy really is too entertaining to be true, isn't he? :-D

@Rank: You may know TheCzechExperiment under his name "Igor the Macedonian".

What is funny is how one of his followers is asking why don't I(Paul Copareli) put some input in, yet he's blocked me from commenting because I rose questions about his credentials and methods which he doens't want to answer because he knows he is a fake.

I find it amazingly interesting that Mr. Clugston can't seem to separate learning methods of undocumented languages from languages like German. Why? Because his arguments only work if he bunches all languages together in vague category and ignore the fact that "documentation" exists in the first place to save you all of the extra discovery work that others already did in the first place. If every physicist had to re derive the laws of physics through experimentation, we'd still be back in the iron age.

And why does Mr. Clugston assume that I am to go to him for this "beat down" he's talking about? Is he paying for this plane ticket of mine? It's such a lame and easy argument to hide behind: "No one will take my fight challenges because they are too scared" when in reality he puts the onus on his opponents to pay for the transportation to go out to fight him, which no one is going to do because he isn't a big enough deal in the martial arts world to waste the time an money on. I could say likewise that he is too scared to fly to Milwaukee to fight me.

Its also worth to note, Mr. CzechExperiment, that Imyirtseshem edited the contents of his own posts, nobody censored him.

Odiernod, you are twice the size and half the age of Clugston - I have no doubt you would put him in hospital in under 30 seconds!

Haha, well we'll never know, because I doubt he's willing to fly out here to fight me "As for the snake-oil salesman hack martial artist, what flight is he on? Tell him I am ready for him anytime the washed up old geezer wants to get his ass beat, filmed and put on YT." lol

Yup, I edited my own posts, odiernod. I just saw no further point in trying to defend linguistics here. It's a losing battle.

I've learned that this site, while it claims to be open concerning the sharing of opinions, it's basically where anything but what Steve says in his youtube videos 'comes to die'. If you have different ideas, don't expect them to be heard, don't expect your arguments to be taken into consideration. They will just keep arguing against you from their interpretations of what they think you believe and do.

But @Imyirtseshem, nobody here is knocking linguistics, or even field linguistics, as multiple people on this post have said. What we are knocking is this crazy character Chis Clugston who can't respect that people can learn languages using documentation that exists for that language. All of those YT polyglots he hates have very good opinions on how to learn languages by taking advantage of audio recordings and written script. We are basically saying, "if we happen to be interested in learning documented languages, everything CC is railing at us about being unable to learn undocumented languages is not relevant".

In this day and age, are we seriously talking about fighting each other to prove points? To satisfy our egos? Seriously? Or when we say fight do we mean get in a ring and spar? Either way, it all seems a bit primitive.

I'm not against the idea of a respectful challenge to test one's martial skill, but it doesn't have to be an egobooster nor should it be a fight to the death!

I honestly did feel kind of childish writing the posts, but Clugston started it! :-)

Odiernod, I find myself in a position where I deeply respect the YT polyglots and the field linguists equally. Both have great things to learn from each other.

Imyirtseshem, I want you to know that I also respect both YT polyglots and the field linguists (with a few notable exceptions on each side). After all, it was field linguists who gave us the documentation we as language learners use to be able to learn documented languages more efficiently.

I actually do enjoy watching his videos --IN THAT-- He provides some useful information, such as learning the IPA and stuff. I like some of the information he offers, but I can't stand when he has to pause in his discussion and say "Sorry if you guys can't understand me, but that's how it goes in the linguistics world, it's very technical." I'm no linguist (in any definition, I'm fluent in my mother language, English, but when it comes to Russian, I'm still very slow.), but I understand concepts such as morphology, etymology and phonology. Don't keep talking to us like we're idiots!

I agree with Odiernod: I think most of us (perhaps apart from Steve?) have complete respect both for 'Linguistics' as an academic science and for trained 'field linguists'.

However this respect doesn't imply that we have to sit here like little schoolboys and be insulted by an arrogant phoney-baloney like Christophe Clugston! :-0

The guy has launched repeated gratuitous attacks against 'linguists' (in the sense of polyglots or language learners) in his Youtube videos, calling us all - basically - a bunch of complete ignorant fools who have no right to any opinions at all!

If he behaves this way, then obviously people are going to start fighting back at him, aren't they?

Yeah, you could say it's all a little childish - but HE is the one who started the rumble! :-D

His name is Christopher. Not Christophe. Here is the real story...

http://www.bullshido.net/forums/showthread.php?...
He is a joke. He basically flunked out of ALL of his language courses and can't speak any language (save for English).

quote from a poster on that site....
"Looks like he went to Ft. Sill for Basic (based on his point of entry, but it could have been Leonard Wood, the entry's very blurry). From there he went to DLI, looks like he rocked out of Arabic, rolled back into Thai and from there was discharged. Doesn't seem to say why. What's been put out about his discharge?"

Another quote...
"I have been to 2 Clugston seminars. (Not because I am a fan of anything that he has done, I went because John Saylor was hosting them.) He told us about his linguist skills, how he could speak fluently in 10 languages. There were a couple of guys who spoke french at the seminar, when Clugston spoke to them it was usually in english, with only a spattering of french words mixed in. Having taken high school french I understood the words he was using to them, but he never put a full sentance together. I said a few things to him in spanish(another language he said he spoke fluently), his answers were not to the questions I asked, and a couple of times his syntax was off. Now, these small things that I noticed don't mean that he is lying, but is a strong indication that he is not the "Boxing Linguist" that he calls himself. "

You guys need to learn how to Google ;)

Wow. This is getting weird......

Odiernod, do you fancy a tag team match against him? although it probably wouldn't last long...although interestingly I didn't think I would get to 3rd dan in kyokushin and be teaching 500 people if I was just a 'hobby martial artist' :P

Also being called out for calling someone a doughnut is rather funny as well :P