Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
In my inbox I see hundreds of people sharing their language learning woes every day, and in person I meet many people everywhere I go who struggle to start a language. There are many reasons they give, some of which are valid, but many times they are just excuses. Nothing reminds us more of this […]
As I continue on the book tour, I have been getting asked many questions face-to-face with people, many of which remind me of things that I can talk about on the blog more. One of the biggest ones by far is Why 3 months? You see it in the title of the blog and the […]
A belated Happy 2014 to everyone! And a สวัสดีครับ (hello) from Thailand – my temporary stop before I head to Japan in a couple of weeks to begin my language and cultural immersion experience there. I can’t wait! This post is an update of my plans for the year, but it’s not the big news […]
We are now coming into the final days of month two, so it’s time for another video! In this video I stuck to the topic of my travel plans in Japan, so I edited it to stay on that topic. As such, my italki teacher Yuri didn’t get a chance to show how good she is and how well she can communicate with learners – sorry about that!
I’ll take a break from uploading Japanese videos next week so that I can keep focused on improving my comprehension to interact with natives better, (which will be more of a theme next month, as me doing most of the talking has been the theme this month) as well as finally tidying up the last of my basic vocab and grammar issues so that I have a solid level to improve from for the final weeks of the project.
6-8 hours a day of complete focus and efficient learning, for 6 days a week, is the ideal and what I aim for, but so far it hasn’t happened. I’m going to see if I can get a new wind and make this next week the most efficient one yet to balance out the previous week.
While I realize many people think that I have the absolute ideal conditions any language learner could dream of, of “no responsibilities” and an uninterrupted 12 or so weeks of non-stop Japanese learning, the fact is that it will get interrupted. That’s life.
As you all know, I am currently in Valencia, my favourite city in the world! I wanted to give myself 2 weeks to settle in before starting my big language project, which I’ll announce here on the blog (with a cool video intro!) on Monday! That’s also the day I’m beginning the project, and even […]
I’ve hinted to it in various blog posts, and said it directly in my most recent travel one; I’m an atheist, but since the word gets a little bad rep (it sounds to some like anti-theist or that your life philosophy revolves around opposing religion), the title I prefer is Humanist. This very simply means […]
After last week’s announcement, you should know that I had an intensive project to re-activate my Hungarian! The reason I was doing this was to prepare to go back to Budapest to attend the Polyglot Conference, and I had a great time at it, but I did want to make sure I was using some Hungarian outside of it. In this post, I’ll say how both the mission and the conference went!
Firstly, I had signed up for six hours of Hungarian spoken lessons via italki. While I had blogged that I would be putting about ten hours into the project, once again my super-secret project in Berlin was consuming my time, and I barely had 10 minutes before each lesson to quickly revise things. So in total, I had about 7 hours of exposure time to Hungarian before arriving.
I find that because I am so busy on another project, if I don’t actually schedule a lesson, then I can keep putting off the work, so I’m really glad I did put aside that time in advance. Busy or not, when you know you have another person scheduled to talk to you, you’ll make the time!
I get asked by people every day what the “secret” is to learning another language, and they don’t seem satisfied with my answer of there is no secret; you need to work hard, speak often and early with people, make many mistakes and use it for real etc. So you know what? The “truth” is […]
Social