Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
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, […]
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, […]
It’s been a few weeks since I arrived in Hungary and got my teeth into my latest mission. I had a bumpy start, but got over it and am on schedule towards my end goal! So it’s time for a mission update! 🙂 Starting with grammar: great in theory, but not useful for speaking Since […]
If you’ve come here to find a detailed explanation categorising down to precisely one answer, or a small list of the toughest languages, then stop reading the post right now. I’m not in the business of discouraging people so if you are looking for some more discouragement, you’ve come to the wrong place! The term […]
I’ve had many jobs in the last many years on the road but the one that I could always rely on was ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. I worked in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and Ireland as an English teacher for non-natives and found it to be very satisfying work. However, what I […]
Rather than learning languages for academic or professional reasons, I do it to vastly improve my travel experience by allowing me to socialise almost entirely with residents of the country I am visiting. Even though all the studying I did in for my exam in Berlin prevented me from socialising as much as I would […]
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