Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Happy New Year!! 🙂 Four years ago I made a New Year’s resolution to never ever make New Year’s resolutions again, and I have stuck to it! The reason? I almost never kept to the resolution. I’d join the gym, and go just a few times and then get lazy, and stop, or I wouldn’t […]
I am absolutely amazed by this city. It has a fascinating cultural history, an active music and dance scene, some of the most outstanding scenery I’ve ever come across, the world’s most famous Carnaval, samba, enough to inspire judges to have it be the host of both the 2014 World cup final and the 2016 Olympics, and, most important of all, Cariocas – its residents.
I came here in September of this year, with the mission of trying to become more like them (me carioquizar), and I got so much more than that from my time there!
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I was about to update my facebook status to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, but this creates a certain problem; most of my facebook friends are not native English speakers and some don’t celebrate Christmas. While they may have enough to understand the simple phrase “Merry Christmas”, it’s forcing a language in their feed that […]
For those of you who followed my Portuguese mission, I was successful in convincing several Cariocas (residents of Rio de Janeiro) that I was one of them. This involved working on two parts of how I interacted with people; my body language/outward behaviour and my spoken Portuguese. In today’s post I am going to go […]
4 gold stars for partial success My most recent “mission” has been to try to become Brazilian in 3 months, i.e. reach the stage that several Brazilians would think that I too was Brazilian. And I can say… mission complete!!! 🙂 I have decided to award myself 4 gold stars for my achievements. To achieve […]
There’s no such thing as starting from zero Great news! You’re already a polyglot! Seriously, if you can read this post, then you can understand and say (albeit with an accent) words in hundreds of languages! It is impossible to say that you don’t speak anything in a language. Any modern language spoken by a […]
Hi! I’m Benny – a long-term world-traveller, I speak several languages, work my own hours at a job I like, have many interesting adventures, meet lots of cool people nearly all the time and am a generally happy and positive guy. There’s only one way all of this can be possible, right? I must just […]
I’ve been travelling for about 7 years so far, and have lived in places like beef-crazy Buenos Aires, shrimp-hungry Brazil, fish-famous Donegal, paella filled Spain, and foie-gras-loving France. My own way to get to know the culture of these places involves learning and hacking their languages and spending my time almost entirely with locals, but […]
What’s the worst that could happen? If you plan on learning a foreign language, and especially if you plan on travelling, you have to meet new people. You can’t avoid this! It’s kind of the whole point of learning a language (unless you are only interested in literature) and travelling (unless you travel only to […]
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