Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
My 8 weeks in Thailand are up – I had made some great progress in reading Thai symbols and tone rules in the first month, but for nearly all of the last 3 weeks in Bangkok I’ve have to work double time and have, unfortunately, barely been out of my apartment! This meant that the […]
When you take on any major project like learn a language, get out of debt, lose weight etc., out of all the things that can hold you back from reaching your goal, there is one that stands out above all the rest: Motivation You clearly want it; it could even be one of the major […]
Over the last month, I’ve changed my ways of trying to communicate in the local language, and I’ve been living the life of a typical English-speaking tourist. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve tried this, as I almost always work on linguistic immersion as a means of getting to know […]
Learn how to read Thai tones with a practical starter method using consonant class, syllable type and tone marks.
This post includes an embedded video. If you are reading it through RSS or email and don’t see it, click through to watch it on my site! Note: Rather than this video being a how-to about Thai tones, it’s simply giving an idea of the way that I’m looking at and approaching them to help […]
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 […]
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