Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
The time for excuses is over. Stop studying your language too much and go out and speak it! It’s the only way you’ll make real progress. Think you can’t speak it because you can’t travel? Travel is quite easy, but speaking your target language without leaving your home town is too easy. The countless opportunities […]
From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014) — kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions. Of all the idols to have when learning languages (I’m sure there are plenty of amazing polyglots throughout history), mine is quite an unlikely one: Captain Jack Sparrow (from Pirates of the Caribbean). As far as I […]
Whether your goal is to lose weight, save money, or speak a language, out of the many obstacles you will encounter on your path, the biggest one by far is you. In a language-learning context I see people spending countless hours on forums and even the few blogs like this one to get the latest […]
If you read different sources to see what language ‘experts’ have to say about mastering a language, you’ll get such vastly different advice that sometimes it’s hard to know which one to apply. Listen a lot even when you sleep, read all day, study thousands of words of vocabulary before you are ready to speak, […]
It’s September and people are going back to school and are learning languages inside classrooms again. I think it’s time for me to open up this pandora’s box and discuss why I don’t think classrooms work for language learning. Of course, the classroom itself isn’t the only problem so rather than argue for the sake […]
I get told so many times that someone has been studying Spanish/French/Japanese/etc. for five, ten (or whatever) years. Despite this, in most cases, if they tell me how many years they have been studying it, it’s usually a precursor to “but… I don’t speak it!” This is usually to justify how hard their language is, […]
From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014) — kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions. It’s been a few weeks since I arrived in Hungary and got my teeth into my latest mission. I had a bumpy start, but got over it and am on schedule towards my end goal! So it’s […]
If you’ve come here to find a detailed explanation categorising down to precisely one answer, or a small list of the toughest languages, then stop reading the post right now. I’m not in the business of discouraging people so if you are looking for some more discouragement, you’ve come to the wrong place! The term […]
I’ve had many jobs in the last many years on the road but the one that I could always rely on was ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. I worked in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and Ireland as an English teacher for non-natives and found it to be very satisfying work. However, what I […]
Social