Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
The pessimist says the glass is half empty. The optimist says it’s half full. The pragmatist says its liquid contents are at 50% capacity. The ironist says it’s half full of air. The practicalist says the glass is twice as big as it should be. The psychoanalyst says the glass is your mother. The punk […]
Travel update: no language tips in this (long) post! After travelling for about 7 years already, I thought I was immune to surprises, shocks and general wide-eyed awe. And then I came to Thailand! There’s nothing I can say about Thailand that hasn’t already been blogged, Lonely Planeted, Documentary Channelled, photographed or twittered a million […]
If you liked my association technique mentioned below, you would also enjoy my tips on using imagination to memorize vocabulary, which are discussed in great detail with many other hacks in my book. See the most popular posts on the right below for other interesting topics. For those curious, this post discusses Thai, but the […]
In my travels I always try my best to speak a language fluently (or better), but sometimes this is not possible, since I may be only spending a few days in a country. As well as this, you need to start somewhere if you want to eventually speak fluently, and “enough to get by” is […]
Note: Posted in 2010 Sceptics beware; as always I’m going for an ambitious goal 🙂 In a few short hours, I’m going a complicated route (Krakow –> Prague, Prague –> Amsterdam, Amsterdam –> Bangkok; it was the cheapest option and gets me “miles” in my preferred programme) to Thailand. With an extended tourist visa and […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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