Category: Language Hacks


Interesting and confusing aspects of Colombian Spanish

written by Benny Lewis

A few years ago I had an amazing trip to Colombia. I spent a quick weekend in Bogotá, almost two months in Medellín, and my last days were spent in Cali. I talked about a few ways I was speaking many languages as part of my mission here, but of course the one I was using the […]


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Reading time: 8 minutes

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Learning Spanish with Shakira’s Tortura

written by Benny Lewis

To expand on the range of articles here on Fluent in 3 months, I will be welcoming some interesting guest posts from other language bloggers. Today’s guest post is by Andrew over at How to Learn Spanish – Teach Yourself Spanish with My Help and came appropriately while I was spending time in Shakira’s home country […]


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Reading time: 19 minutes

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The engineering mentality for language learning, being ready & input vs output

written by Benny Lewis

For those of you who don’t know my background, I have a Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering and actually worked as an engineer several times. Perhaps you would think that it’s hardly the pre-requisite for becoming a full time language hacker, but I actually feel that my engineering background has been a big contributor for […]


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Reading time: 9 minutes

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Fake it ’till you make it

written by Benny Lewis

In about a month I’ll be starting the first of several intensive missions of 2011 to learn to speak a new language well starting from scratch. It will be totally unrelated to any language I’ve learned to date, and yet I’ll be speaking it confidently from day one. How can I be so confident about […]


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Reading time: 7 minutes

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How to speak multiple languages without mixing them up

written by Benny Lewis

Let’s face it; being able to speak multiple languages would be really cool. But can it be done by the average person without getting really confused? When I was living in Spain, still only able to speak English, I hung out with a Brazilian who absolutely wowed me as he switched between people at our […]


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Reading time: 8 minutes

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Why Hungarian is easy

Why Hungarian is easy

written by Benny Lewis

I’m sure the title of this post will have many people doing a double take, but yes you read that right: Hungarian is easy. Hungarian is not an Indo-European language (i.e. Hindi actually has more in common with English/French/German/Russian etc. than Hungarian does), so it’s very different to all of its neighbours and this gives […]

Free book: The polyglot project, how to learn languages

written by Benny Lewis

Today I’ve got an interesting treat for you all! Almost 140,000 words (534 pages) of free information about learning languages. This project was headed by Claude Cartaginese, who gathered the advice from dozens of “youtube polyglots, hyper-polyglots, linguists, language learners and language lovers” and put them all in this one book, which is free to […]


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Reading time: 3 minutes

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Any language anywhere hack 3: Helping tourists for free language practice

written by Benny Lewis

In my current language mission I’m trying to prove that you can speak any language in the world anywhere in the world. So far I’ve mentioned how you can search social networks for nearby speakers, and take culturally relevant classes in the target language. There are actually infinite ways to practise your target language without […]


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Reading time: 7 minutes

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