How I’m learning Mandarin in 2026: My Daily Routine in Taipei
This is what I'm doing this year to make sure my Mandarin is strong, so I'm better prepared to travel deep through Taiwan
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Battle of wits: Nice and nasty ways to win when they want English practice
Nearly everywhere in the world, and with nearly every culture in the world, when you try to speak their language with them they are so pleased. They will encourage you and compliment you, and be happy to hear more. Your fears are unfounded and you should just make as many mistakes as you can – […]
What will I talk about when my language level is so basic?
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 […]
Introducing LWT: The free, open-source computer, iPad & mobile foreign language reading tool
Please note Learning With Texts is no longer hosted at Fi3M, though it has been continued as a SourcForge project. We also recommend LingQ as an alternative with similar features. The video gives my overview of this incredibly useful and totally free tool – check it out! As I say, you are in for a […]
Why your smartphone will NEVER be a universal translator
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. […]
What’s it like to attend a Star Trek Convention?
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 […]
Tour of my home… in Klingon!
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 […]
![Multilingual San Francisco: Susanna takes on Spanish, Italian & Russian; Benny interviews Brazilians in Portuguese [video]](https://www.fluentin3months.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/san-fran-300x164.jpg)
Multilingual San Francisco: Susanna takes on Spanish, Italian & Russian; Benny interviews Brazilians in Portuguese [video]
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
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 […]
Handcrafted audio for remembering what you learn
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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