Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Want to speak Spanish well, speak French well, speak German well, or any language for that matter? If I can do this with Czech starting from zero, imagine what you can do! I’d like to summarise everything I’ve discussed on the site regarding my earliest intensive language experiment. I was initially aiming for fluency in 3 […]
You can call it a brick-wall or a plateau, but if you work on a language long enough you may eventually hit it; a point where you simply aren’t making any progress. This has happened several times for me in the past in other languages, especially after sprinting into it in the initial stages and […]
A lot of people have been asking me how I fund my language-learning travels – did I win the lottery? Do I have really rich parents that pay for everything? Maybe I donate a lot of plasma, sell property or invest in the stock market? Actually, for many of my travels, I had quite normal jobs […]
Edit: This post was so well appreciated by people that I’ve rewritten it and added it to lots of other unconventional tips, in the Language Hacking Guide. I recently shared my most important decision ever that started me on the path to becoming a polyglot, but it lead to a lot of questions that some […]
In an ideal world, you would have a native beside you every time you spoke or wrote something, so that they could help and correct you. This is not possible for many of us! Luckily, thanks to modern technology and the Internet, you can have your grammar and spelling corrected immediately and automatically, in any […]
So here I am, a lad from Ireland (a country famous for its drink and its drinkers) in the Czech Republic (ditto). The nightlife in Prague is great, but of course a lot of party-goers take advantage of the cheap beer! From the armies of 3-day tourists to the local 20-somethings, and of course to […]
I promised to make a video in Czech at the end of my stay here, but I am going to break that promise and deliver one right now! I’m still far from fluent, but I also believe that we should never wait until we are “ready” before trying something with languages, since that day may never arrive if you put “ready” on an ever rising pedestal…
Today I’m going to share the most important decision I have ever made in learning languages. This choice changed me from a hopeless “I’m not talented with languages” person to eventually become the polyglot that I am today.
This week I’m taking a break from my Czech studies and spending 7 days with 400 Esperanto speakers in the north of the Czech Republic, in Liberec. What is Esperanto? Esperanto is a constructed language with the purpose of connecting people from across many cultures who each natively speak different languages, without giving an unfair […]
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