Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
I spent a month in Austin (TX) and learned enough ASL to make a multilingual music video in ASL, but not enough to record a video interacting with someone. But then I made it a major focus to improve my ASL to a level where I could interview people to share Deaf culture and more about ASL and how it works with the world. Check out today’s video, entirely in American Sign Language.
I met up with fellow Youtube polyglot, Moses McCormick (see his Youtube channel) in Columbus, Ohio and the two of us went to a mall simply to walk up to complete strangers and practise a bunch of languages with them.
Time for another video in Chinese! This is actually part of the summer project of improving many languages, and as such it is the first in a series of many interviews with natives of the languages in my list of 10. Yang Yang works as the Mandarin speaking presenter for the TV show “Hello Hollywood”.
Those of you in the email list, and following my Facebook, or twitter found out about this in advance, but today it’s time to announce on the blog what my epic summer language learning mission is, tell you where I’ll be, and precisely what I’ll be working on in TEN languages so that you can […]
The big question regarding my Mandarin project that a lot of people have been asking is How well can you really speak it Benny? I’ve been saying it’s about a B1 (lower intermediate), but I’m sure self evaluation (even though I have indeed sat so many CEFRL examinations ) can lead to some scepticism, so […]
Fun video to share with you today… in Esperanto! Click “CC” to activate subtitles in English (as well as original Esperanto), or if you’re in China (and not using VPN software to circumnavigate the “Great Firewall of China” as I’m clearly doing to be able to use Youtube) then check it out on Youku. I […]
Here you go! My 3 month and one week Mandarin video! [Video also available on Youku. Click CC to enable captions in English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese] My interviewer is John Pasden, who writes at the 10-year-strong blog dedicated to all things Chinese-learning, Sinosplice. He is a co-host at Chinesepod (which I’ve been listening […]
As you all know, there are countless ways to go about learning a language. I have a general plan of action that I like to apply myself, but there’s no such thing as a “perfect” way to learn a language. Perfection is not something that humans need to concern themselves with in anything outside the […]
One confusion people have when they arrive on my site is this non-existent “claim” that I’m here to prove that fluency in 3 months is possible, which I’ve never made. Proving this is not the point of the site. But I find the question itself (asked generally) quite silly: of course it’s possible. When a […]
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