Oh, I wouldn't want to have to learn English!

The spelling alone (let alone the pronunciation) would make me want to cry. 

Though, through, threw, thou, tho, thought. What!!!!?

No way. Shoot me instead. I can barely learn Spanish and Portuguese and Hawaiian and those actually make sense! Even German is a million times easier than English. 

Murillo Costa Acho que nunca ouvi um brasileiro a dizer isso :o Estou realmente surpresa, pois apesar de não gostar da variante brasileira acho-a mais melodica e talvez por isso mesmo não goste dela. Gosto de sotaques carregados, daí preferir algumas variantes europeias como no caso do Português e do Inglês (pelo menos) :) 

I suppose it is unlikely to happen that I would study my own language If I were a native speaker of English or any other language. My native is Russian and I am really proud of being the native speaker of this language. I am happy to be born in Russia and learn this language all my life. If I had been a speaker of other language I wouldn't have even tried to learn Russian because it would seem to me to be too hard.

Paul, yes, I agree with you. One thing that I don't agree with Benny Lewis and his girlfriend is the excessive use of google translate while talking to someone on skype (normal people, tutors or even professors). Since I've been studying Russian and I find this language extremely difficult and it happened that Benny's girlfriend started to learn it as well, I decided to go and check it out. The videos she posted during her first conversation was all google translate. She'd type whatever she wanted to say in google translate, speak it, teachers would correct the google translation, she'd go back there and post whatever teacher wrote and the conversation was like this the whole time haha. I don't find that interesting at all. 

I have some students that they use google translate excessively while they're having the session with me. I tell them that I'm more than happy to be their personal dictionary but they insist on using the weird and unnatural google translation. Some of them try to fool me, but I can clearly see their fingers typing silently and out of the blue they come with a weird word or sentence that only google would say :P

Interesting post Murillo.

From what I've seen and read Benny Lewis does use traditional methods a fair amount in his own language learning. He certainly does not discount grammar as your student misguidedly seems to think. 

The whole 'fluentin3months' thing is a good gimmick (he certainly has many disciples out there), and he is is very good at promoting language learning and encouraging others to learn but I take everything he says vis a vis methods with a huge pinch of salt. He does sometimes have some good suggestions, especially for language learning resources but this whole speak from day 1 approach is pretty flawed in my view. The mistakes you make in the early stages of the learning process are really hard to break once they become habitual, as you mention Murillo, so speaking without any focus on trying to understand the grammar is not something I would ever do.

I honestly think some people discount grammar because they find it boring or too intimidating, and they want to 'skip to the end' so to speak i.e. they want a high level in the language without having to put in the work to obtain it.