Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
If you liked this post, I’ve also written about How to speak like a Carioca, and how to learn Portuguese after Spanish. Brazilian Portuguese Motivation is extremely important in being able to improve your command over a language. Today I’d like to share my motivation for deciding to make Portuguese the first language that I […]
Exactly a month ago I arrived in Rio with the mission of becoming Brazilian in 3 months. As in my previous language mission, I’ll give a monthly update for those curious of my progress, and my hopes of reaching the goal of walking the walk and talking the talk enough to convince some Cariocas that […]
Sorry traditionalists, but printed dictionaries are on the way out! They are either too small to contain enough entries or too large for those of us who travel, as well as being too expensive. In the time it takes me to go get a big fat dictionary, and flick through the pages for a particular […]
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is How can I become a polyglot like you? A polyglot is someone who can speak several languages. You can see me demonstrate the ones that I know in the compilation video above. You can see the full version of all of those videos in several different languages on my videoblog. [Edit: Here’s a much cooler video I made in 8 languages]
Right, let’s get down to business! If you want to sound like a local, you need to work on many things and your foreigner accent is one of them. When I speak in English I’ve got a lovely wee (slightly watered down) Irish accent. However, when trying to speak my first foreign language I had […]
Hello from Rio de Janeiro!! Since I’m still just settling in (and getting over jetlag), tonight will be the first time that I go out on the town! Obviously the main part of this mission is to get out and meet Cariocas who can help me understand their language and culture a little bit more, […]
EDIT: This mission was a success! You can read how I spoke Portuguese with no foreign accent, and how I adapted to life in Rio. I also wrote about why I love Brazilians so much :=) After learning 6 languages to fluency in 6 years of travels, and learning to speak Czech in just two […]
Want to speak Spanish well, speak French well, speak German well, or any language for that matter? If I can do this with Czech starting from zero, imagine what you can do! I’d like to summarise everything I’ve discussed on the site regarding my earliest intensive language experiment. I was initially aiming for fluency in 3 […]
You can call it a brick-wall or a plateau, but if you work on a language long enough you may eventually hit it; a point where you simply aren’t making any progress. This has happened several times for me in the past in other languages, especially after sprinting into it in the initial stages and […]
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