Fluent in 3 Months... by Benny Lewis

This is a good book for beginning language learners. It argues against many of the common excuses people will have with learning their first foreign language and describes many free or cheap resources which beginners likely won't know about but are common tools of the trade for more experienced learners.

What differentiates Benny's method from most others is his recommendation to start speaking right away...even from day one, and he gives some pretty convincing arguments for it.

I also want to give him credit for mentioning other polyglots with different methods than his and resources which may be in competition with his such as the forum at http://how-to-learn-any-language.com

I didn't learn much from his book other than a few tips from the section on body language, but it helped to motivate me to speak earlier in my studies which will be beneficial so I feel like it was worth my time and money to read.

Nice review. I've heard a lot of good things about this book, but I haven't read it myself.

By speaking from day 1, I assume he means conversing with a native from day 1, right? I don't do that mainly because I don't want to rely on a native speaker to teach me pronunciation and grammar. I also don't like having big listening problems in the beginning. I find that I can learn pronunciation, grammar and listening much better on my own, so I speak along with my language programs from the beginning, but I don't start my conversation component until I feel good about my pronunciation, have a few hundred words, some basic sentence structure and listening skills under my belt. This is usually about 3 months in. Then I jump right into 30 minute conversation sessions, and make it the most important part of my learning for the next few months, using it to get new vocabulary and sentences.

So does Benny learn exclusively from conversation at first, or is it a small component that grows bigger with time? How does he handle the problems I mentioned?

Yes, conversing with natives.

Not exclusively. He uses courses like Assimil or Teach Yourself and sometimes works with tutors, but he skips around in the courses mostly focusing on what will help him the most with his next conversation whether it's new vocabulary or grammar. He uses conversation to practice his speaking and listening skills and to learn new phrases/vocabulary. He thinks you can do this up to about a low B2 conversational level then if you want to progress he recommends a more academic approach: grammar drills, getting writing corrected, and lots of reading and listening to native content.

He has a section on pronunciation, prosity, accent reduction, etc. but either he didn't say or I can't remember when he recommends focusing on it.

Skipping around in other stuff makes more sense than exclusive conversation to me, so it's good to hear that's what he does. I'm not asking you to repeat it here, but does the book get into a lot more detail regarding that? Otherwise it might be hard for a beginner to follow. Actually, most languages learning methods are hard to follow, even if there is a lot of detail. For example, I remember reading about Luca Lampariello's method, and still not seeing how it could work with Russian. Later I found out he's in the process of writing a book about it. Don't blame him - it's obviously a good method, based on the results. That reminds me; I need to be sure to provide enough information to allow people to follow my method.

He just says to learn the most common words and grammar and then focus on what you'll be using in conversation so it will be a bit different for everyone. As one obvious example, he says that if you're talking to natives in person then giving/receiving directions is something you might want to learn fairly early, but if you're talking on skype then it's one of the last.

To me it sounds like he's tried to make his goal of becoming as good at conversation as possible after 3 months fit into his general language learning plan. In my mind, there should be some differences between
1) a language plan that makes you as good at conversation as possible at 3 months, and
2) a language plan that gets you to a solid C1 as quickly as possible
Or even B2 for that matter. It keeps things simpler to have only one plan I suppose, but if your goal is always to keep your conversation the best possible, you could neglect the other skills, which would make this method fall behind well rounded ones imo. For example, when you realize you aren't being understood well, is that really the best time to study pronunciation? I don't think so.

fyi - I bought a paper copy of his book for the sole purpose of reviewing it. I read it 2 weeks ago, but am still writing the review. I'll post it here when I'm done.

Have you read the amazon reviews? Some are quite impressive. By some amazing
coincidence, many of the 5 star reviewers have only done that single review, but I'm sure there's nothing shady going on there. Here's my favorite review:

Apparently it isn't safe to read this forum while eating. I had to choke down a mouthful of diet Coke to avoid spraying my monitor when I read this.

I keep telling people diet soft drinks are dangerous, but nobody listens.