Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!

Category: Language Hacks

My Conversation in Polish After One Hour's Learning

My Conversation in Polish After One Hour’s Learning

written by Benny Lewis

As you saw last week, I challenged myself to take five hours to learn enough Polish to help me get by on my brief visit to Warsaw.

In the end, I didn’t actually do that as planned… because I was so busy preparing for my TEDx talk (which will be completely different to the other one I gave, but still with the same topic of encouraging adult language learners – online in the next month or two), and working on my secret 3-month contract, that I only had two hours total time to invest into learning Polish.

Despite having even less time than I initially planned, I was pleased to learn what I needed and can even share the results with you on video!

Mission Impossible? Polish in 5 Hours

Mission Impossible? Polish in 5 Hours

written by Benny Lewis

On Wednesday, I’ll be arriving in Warsaw to give a TEDx talk. Unlike the first one I gave, which was completely made up on the spot and only the second time I ever had a stage to myself like that, this time I have been preparing for it in advance and want to give a completely different but really powerful talk that could inspire many language learners. It should hopefully be up on Youtube in a month or two!

I’ll only be in Poland for 3 days, but I’m going to have a unique mission this time of giving myself 5 hours to cram for Polish to become as effective a tourist as I can be! Right now, I don’t know any Polish at all (other than likely common vocabulary that many languages share), and I’ve been too busy with a full time contracted job I have here in Berlin (much more on the top-secret reason I’m in Berlin later) as well as preparing my talk over the last week.

Watch Benny Speaking in Arabic

Watch Benny Speaking in Arabic

written by Benny Lewis

This has been a very interesting project!

I started back in September, with three months to intensively learn the language while in Brazil, and then spent January and February travelling through Egypt (ultimately not doing more than a couple of hours intentional work on my Arabic level, although getting lots of practice), and if you check out the above completely unedited, and unscripted conversation, you can hear what my Arabic sounds like!

Unlike in my other videos, where I was focusing much more on an interesting message that the native speaker could share with the world, this time I did most of the talking, but had a very special guest interview me – the first person I ever spoke Arabic with! It’s got an almost poetic conclusion to the mission that I should finally meet her just before I leave! I found Amera on italki in September, and she is one of the teachers I stuck consistently with all the way through to December.

Nubian history: discussion in Arabic about ethnic group in Egypt

written by Benny Lewis

After leaving Cairo, the first stop on my Egyptian travels was Aswan, the furthest south in the country where you can find a major settled area, and where the Egyptian part of the Nile begins after Lake “Nasser” and the High Dam.

By far, the most interesting part of my time there was discovering things about the ethnic group known as the Nubians, which at one point in history were able to overpower the Pharaohs of Egypt, but have had an unfortunate history of displacement and migration, especially in the last century.

To share that story, I let Gasser M. Anwar, a Nubian working in the tourist industry, take the microphone to share his perspective on it all with us. With subtitles in English and Arabic as always!

5 steps to overcoming your fears and conquering the world

written by Matt Kepnes

Today’s guest post is from my friend Matt Kepnes (aka Nomadic Matt), who wrote here earlier about How to travel the world like Indiana Jones. He has extensive travel experience, and his book How to travel the world on $50 a day has just been published today. If you are in any of these cities, […]

Language:

Reading time: 8 minutes

Read More
How I learned to speak Arabic while living in Brazil

How I learned to speak Arabic while living in Brazil

written by Benny Lewis

My three months are officially up! From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014) — kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions. In a few hours I’ll be getting a flight back to Ireland to spend Christmas with my family, then heading to Germany for a few days to celebrate the New Year […]

Why focus will get you much more than talent ever will

written by Guest Author

Shortly after I started blogging on Fi3M, I came across another site about learning and improving your ability to learn and made contact with the author. A few months later, Scott Young and I met up while I was passing through Paris briefly. (He’s the one who took that photo of me in front of […]

Language:

Reading time: 8 minutes

Read More
1 … 72 73 74 75 76 … 93