Articles


What will I talk about when my language level is so basic?

written by Benny Lewis

One of the biggest questions I get when I encourage people to just speak, no matter how bad your grammar is and how few words you know, is “What will I talk about?? They’ll just get bored and angry with me!” This attitude is quite strange because it presumes a level of rudeness of foreign […]


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Reading time: 3 minutes

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Why your smartphone will NEVER be a universal translator

written by Benny Lewis

Anyone who follows sci-fi will have come across the “universal translator“. To get around use of other languages on the shows that aliens would undoubtedly speak, (other than when part of a plot device, like Klingon or Na’vi), a computer does all the work of understanding other languages so the human explorers don’t have to. […]


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Reading time: 10 minutes

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What’s it like to attend a Star Trek Convention?

written by Benny Lewis

Other than for Burning Man, and to generally travel and get to know new cities, I’m mostly in the US to speak at conferences like TEDx and Blogworld over the next month, as well as to attend other ones, so when I saw the official 45th Star Trek convention opportunity between it all, I knew […]


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Reading time: 10 minutes

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Tour of my home… in Klingon!

written by Benny Lewis

As promised, here is a video of me speaking Klingon 😀 Laugh and enjoy as I give you the most guttural tour of my home I probably ever will… and I do it in costume and in character of course! I only started to learn this a couple of weeks back, and as you can […]


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Reading time: 2 minutes

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Multilingual San Francisco: Susanna takes on Spanish, Italian & Russian; Benny interviews Brazilians in Portuguese [video]

Multilingual San Francisco: Susanna takes on Spanish, Italian & Russian; Benny interviews Brazilians in Portuguese [video]

written by Benny Lewis

Title explains it all! 🙂 I met up with Susanna, who has guest posted for this blog on the topic of “Language is music” and who has her own site about language learning, and she had a great idea to make a multilingual video together to show how any city in the states has plenty […]

How to travel the world like Indiana Jones

written by Matt Kepnes

While I mostly talk about language learning here on Fi3M, I know a lot of you follow the blog for the travel/culture aspect of it, since travel can indeed be a huge adventure for so many of us. So today’s guest post is from Matt Kepnes, who runs Nomadic Matt’s travel site. I’ve met Matt […]


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Reading time: 7 minutes

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Handcrafted audio for remembering what you learn

written by Guest Author

Today’s guest post is from Aaron G. Myers. I met him while in Istanbul and he had some interesting ideas about language learning that he blogs about regularly, so I thought they’d be worth sharing here! Off you go Aaron! One challenge language learners face is in retaining the immense amount of new information taken […]


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Reading time: 5 minutes

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New mission: Speak Klingon in time for the Star Trek convention

written by Benny Lewis

While I usually travel to new countries for cultural immersion, and learning the local language hugely enhances that experience, for the next four weeks I’m taking a fun diversion! My next language is Klingon. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s the fictional language used by one particular alien species on the TV […]


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Reading time: 2 minutes

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