Warning: This video contains a silly looking Irish guy singing a German song in bad karaoke-style. Protect your ears! Singing is an amazing way to dramatically improve your language learning strategy. To prove to you that I’m serious about this, here is a video of me singing in German. It’s a pop song called “Pflaster” from ich und ich that I like. (Here’s a vague translation of the lyrics). I’m not a good singer, but that doesn’t stop be from trying… Hopefully the Berlin scenery behind me distracts you from how bad my singing.. || Continue Reading →

After years of investigating what separates successful language learners from unsuccessful ones, I believe I have found the one thing that those who ultimately succeed and speak the language fluently, all have in common. It’s not the course materials they use, or their ability to travel, it’s not a particular aspect of their “method”, it’s not their wealth, and it isn’t even their natural born intelligence. It’s PASSION. Oh, but I’m passionate already! I “really really” want to speak the language! you may say R.. || Continue Reading →

A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish. Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results. The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand. Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do you.. || Continue Reading →

It’s time for a new 3 month language mission! Since I started the blog about a year ago, I’ve learned pretty good Czech in 2 months, convinced some Brazilians that I was a Carioca, got by in Thai, and just recently passed 4/5 of one the hardest formal examinations in German. So now it’s time to take on one of the toughest challenges yet: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months! Hungarian: a non-Indo-European language Before the Chinese/Japanese etc. learners jump on me for lazily taking on another “European” language, there’s something you .. || Continue Reading →

After slightly more than two weeks since sitting my third CEFRL exam (German this time), I have just gotten the results of it today! I have to say, I am very pleased with the results and happy to share them with you all! One unique thing about my language learning projects is complete transparency of the good and the bad aspects of how these missions pan out, so I will continue that in this post and share full details of my results, what I did right and what I did wrong. I know several readers are considering sitting a similar exam, so hopefully my recommendations will c.. || Continue Reading →

At midnight tonight I will have successfully completed 28 laps of the entire solar system. That’s about 26,264 MILLION kilometres! Phew, it’s exhausting! But I’m ready for much more! So, I will take this short off-topic break from saving the world from being doomed to a a boring monolingual fate, to asking for a birthday present from you! If you’ve enjoyed any of my blog posts in the past, then this will be hugely appreciated as a thank you! Best part is: it’s completely free and will take you 20 seconds max. Although those of you willing to.. || Continue Reading →

NOTE: The Language Hacking Guide is now available to be read in its entirety in six languages (seven next week), translated by natives. The stone of Rosetta You might think that this post has something to do with expensive yellow boxes that you can buy at airports with language learning software. Nope. The Rosetta stone is, in my opinion, one of the coolest contributions to languages of modern times, and I’ll refer to it as the stone of Rosetta so that there is no confusion. The people who wrote the software program are very clever for using that title, but I find i.. || Continue Reading →

Every Monday I send out an e-mail to the Language Hacking League (you can sign up on the right of the site) with a language hack or interesting website, as well as more precise updates regarding my own language missions. This particular tip got a great response from people last week, so I’ll share it on the blog too. It’s very easy, and yet overlooked by many people when looking for content in the target language. iTunes – not just for people with iPods, but don’t search for the language name iTunes is a free installation and you can sign up for a f.. || Continue Reading →