About

Welcome to fluentin3months.com, a how-to guide and story of becoming fluent in any language quickly.

After over seven years of travelling and learning languages I have picked up quite a lot of short-cuts, unconventional learning techniques, and a pretty good mentality that has hugely helped me to learn these languages, and earn the title of “polyglot”. This site is for sharing these tips so that others may also live their dreams of being able to speak other languages! If you’d like to read my best and most practical tips all in one place, check out the Language Hacking Guide!

Who is Benny Lewis?

My name is Benny (Brendan) Lewis. I’m a vegetarian from Cavan Ireland, and I don’t drink. I like to think of myself a “technomad” -- a full-time technology-enabled globe-trotter.

When I turned 21, the only language that I spoke was English. My love affair with languages began in 2003, after my first trip to Spain, where I blended in with the culture and discovered that learning languages wasn’t so hard when you apply the right methods! This came as a total surprise for me, since I had just graduated University College Dublin with a degree in Electronic Engineering, and was never good at languages in school.

Such love for linguistics and culture led me to further explorations. 17 countries and eleven languages (8 of which I speak fluently; shown on the right) later, I am now a full-time language hacker!

I have had plenty of other jobs in the last decade such as English teacher, Mathematics teacher, French/Spanish teacher, photographer, youth hostel receptionist, tour guide, yoga store manager, first aid assistant, electronic engineer and several others. Before attempting to support myself from this blog, I was a location independent freelance translator of technical documents. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be rich to travel the world!

I am currently trying to support myself by sales of the Language Hacking Guide and by giving private language coaching. If you like this site, maybe give one a try! My goal is to earn enough to hopefully eventually be able to live comfortably in Moscow and Tokyo, each one for 3 months (and unfortunately, the two most expensive capital cities in the world!) to learn Russian and Japanese. Until then, I will continue choosing cheap destinations for my language missions (for example right now I’m in Berlin, one of Europe’s cheapest capitals).

I try to take apart the language learning process and explain it to people who have never had any luck trying. As many details as possible are shared on this blog, in the free weekly Language Hacking League e-mail list (subscribe on the right) and in the guide.

Subscribe to the blog if you want to follow my missions to learn languages (a completely different one every few months) and discover my unconventional “language hacking” tips. Make sure to leave comments and share interesting posts with your friends through facebook, twitter or stumbleupon!!

Here’s a video of me speaking 8 languages and 6 dialects, showing my apartment in Berlin:

My other pages on the net:

You can check out all of my photos (and some short videos) on my flickr page. I have made almost a hundred videos in 10 different languages (so far) that you can check out on my Youtube channel.

Join in on the discussion about fluent in 3 months posts by “liking” this site’s facebook page!

If you would like to hear the kind of music I listen to, check out my last.fm profile.

To see what I’ve been up to lately, have a look at my twitter miniblog . I have 8 different accounts, in different languages, which I try to update regularly.

You can also learn more about me from what others have written about me in the references on my Couchsurfing profile.