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 […]
From the blog’s origin era (2009–2014) — kept as lived proof of the method. See all the missions. 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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Ever since I started travelling over nine years ago, I have arrived at each location by myself, many times not having a single contact or friend waiting for me in my destination. This has been essential for my language missions, since I need to immerse myself in the local language. Bringing someone with me to […]
It’s September and people are going back to school and are learning languages inside classrooms again. I think it’s time for me to open up this pandora’s box and discuss why I don’t think classrooms work for language learning. Of course, the classroom itself isn’t the only problem so rather than argue for the sake […]
I get told so many times that someone has been studying Spanish/French/Japanese/etc. for five, ten (or whatever) years. Despite this, in most cases, if they tell me how many years they have been studying it, it’s usually a precursor to “but… I don’t speak it!” This is usually to justify how hard their language is, […]
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