Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
“I’m sorry sir, but there’s no way I can let you fly to the states today!” Of all the times to hear this, 33 minutes before your international flight is scheduled to take off while you are still trying to check in, is among the worst. Not getting into the states would have meant well […]
Hello from Colombia! I’ve just arrived and am ready for my last language mission of 2010. Since the blog started just over a year ago, I’ve learned pretty good Czech and Hungarian (both in two months), got by in Thai, managed to convince Brazilians that I was one of them, and passed most of the […]
My time in this Amazing city has come to an end! I’m quite happy with the progress I made in Hungarian, and genuinely sad to leave! As this post goes live, I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic, on my way to Las Vegas to attend the Blogworld conference to meet some blogger friends and make […]
Rather than write a long post about a topic that I have covered in various forms before, I’ll make this short. Above you will see a video showing me talking Hungarian with Bálint Kőrösi, who translated the Language Hacking Guide to Hungarian for me. My level in the language is the result of my two […]
Whether your goal is to lose weight, save money, or speak a language, out of the many obstacles you will encounter on your path, the biggest one by far is you. In a language-learning context I see people spending countless hours on forums and even the few blogs like this one to get the latest […]
The printing press was invented in 1440. Apart from the Internet, this one invention is probably one of the most incredible things that happened in the last millennium to help spread ideas – books and the ideas they contain have transformed the world. And yet, almost nothing has changed since the 15th century in the […]
Any answer to the question posed in the title of this post will inevitably be loaded with presumptions, bias, personality preference, anecdotal or confused sources of evidence, guesses with no actual experience, irrelevant criteria and many other things that lead it to give an impossible or misleading real answer, because simply, there is just no […]
As the name of this blog suggests, I move somewhere new about once every three months (although I was in Berlin for four months and will have only spent just over two months in Hungary by the time I leave, so this time limit fluctuates). This means that my date of departure is slowly approaching […]
If you read different sources to see what language ‘experts’ have to say about mastering a language, you’ll get such vastly different advice that sometimes it’s hard to know which one to apply. Listen a lot even when you sleep, read all day, study thousands of words of vocabulary before you are ready to speak, […]
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