Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Here it is! My video of the epic 2,000km (that’s about 1,250 miles in “old money” as we say) train ride I took to get to Chengdu, starting from Shanghai. This video shares the people (and pandas) I met along the way! 🙂 Click CC to enable subtitles (in English, and traditional or simplified Chinese) […]
“Mastering” Chinese can indeed take a long time to do, but getting to a very useful intermediate level is well within the reach of most people, and from that point progressing further won’t be that bad. It is indeed hard work, but if you put it side by side with European languages, then saying it’s “damn hard”, or “orders of magnitude harder than European languages” is nothing but an exaggeration
Someone thinking you are a native speaker of your target language is the holy grail of language learners. It’s something many of us dream about, but then sigh to ourselves that it’s just never going to happen. Well, today I want to burst that bubble and tell you that many people genuinely thinking you are […]
Here you go! My 3 month and one week Mandarin video! [Video also available on Youku. Click CC to enable captions in English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese] My interviewer is John Pasden, who writes at the 10-year-strong blog dedicated to all things Chinese-learning, Sinosplice. He is a co-host at Chinesepod (which I’ve been listening […]
It’s time to announce my next 3 month project, while clarifying what the real motivation behind my Mandarin 3 month project has been! I am going to travel deep into China – beyond 1,000km inland – by land (no flights), over the next two months, and then travel through Taiwan (outside of Taipei) for several […]
Back in December, I hiked a segment of the Inca trail over several days to eventually end up at Machu Picchu. This photo is of me looking on to Huayna Picchu (in Quechua, literally “the young peak”, where Machu Picchu is “the old peak”); about 400m (or 1,300ft) of vertical hiking that I still had […]
One of the biggest questions I get asked by people already deep into their language learning project relates to how they should get over the plateau they are stuck in. There are many different types of plateaux you could be looking at. Maybe you have learned some basic vocab but can’t muster up the courage […]
This weekend is St. Patrick’s Day, the background of which I discussed in this post a year ago (while insisting that Americans do NOT call it “Patty’s day”) Another thing that happens this week is Seachtain na Gaeilge [literally, Irish (language) week] – an awareness initiative aligning with the week leading up to or around […]
When discussing language learning with people who have unrealistic standards for what they must have in their second language before they consider their level good enough, I’m left amazed at the screamingly obvious issues they don’t seem to be aware of: The elitist standards you require are something that we may not even have for […]
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