Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
My big hobby after languages is making videos. I’ve combined the two on my multilingual site with several videos about my travels and other subjects, in 7 languages. This has really helped me to practise my languages as I travel. But instead of just making the videos about different random topics in several languages, I’m starting on a long-term project of making videos about languages as I learn them or travel to the country where they are spoken.
Some people may be surprised to hear that even when living in the country that speaks the language you want to learn, it can still be very hard to convince someone to actually speak it to you! Presuming you can read this blog you have been cursed with being a native (or fluent) in a […]
So, you’ve got a couple of phrases learned off from your phrasebook, you’ve got a positive attitude and you’ve even enjoyed quickly learning off lots of new words, but the whole point of all of this is to actually converse with native speakers! In the early stages of speaking a language you may think that […]
Do you feel like you your memory capacity for learning lots of new words is holding you back? I certainly felt that way… When I was given a list of foreign words (German in my case) to learn the meaning of in school, it was always unclear how to actually do this. Nobody ever taught […]
Continuing from my previous two posts about focussing on specifying your motivations and minigoals, it’s important to have a clear idea of the end-goal. i.e. FLUENCY (for many people). You will find this hard to achieve if you don’t know what you are aiming for, so today I am going to attempt to define this […]
I am continuing from yesterday’s post about how Redefining your Motivation can give you new things to aim for in the long-run; by going a step further and looking entirely at the short term. When we think of goals, we may think of something to work towards over a long period of time that you […]
Why are you learning this language? We all have a good reason to learn a new language; discovering our roots, passion for travel, academic purposes, pure interest etc. Once again, I’ll start off my post with another frank and sweeping statement; these reasons are useless if you want to become fluent quickly. They are vague, […]
Greetings from Prague!! After arriving, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the new country and new language, but it’s never to early to get going in your target language 😉 When will I be ready to speak the language? This is an important question that a lot of people ask themselves. Surely if you don’t […]
Please note: this article was written in June 2009. Those who know me, are aware that I can actually take a lot with me on cheap flights, but I still have to decide what is and what isn’t coming with me for my next 6 months on the road! (Czech Republic, then likely somewhere in […]
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