Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
I’ve spent 3 hours today looking like this, and currently have a splitting headache. To contrast with yesterday’s post, where I talk about comfort in the language in the pre-fluency stage, I thought I’d give you another glimpse into the huge amount of discomfort I’m also going through a lot of the time. Since I […]
[Captions in traditional and simplified Chinese, as well as in English. Youku link for those in mainland China] Keeping up with the video-every-two-weeks plan, here is my two month point! After a bumpy start, where I hesitate a bit because of being quite aware of the camera, once I got used to it, you can […]
Since we are at exactly the half-way point of my three month mission to speak fluent Chinese, it’s time for another video update! This time, it is 100% unprepared, unscripted, and unrehearsed 😉 Check it out: [Subtitles in traditional & simplified Chinese, as well as in English; enable Youtube’s closed captioning to see – mistakes […]
The late and great Steve Jobs was famous for many things, and was arguably one of the most influential contributors to how advanced personal use technology developed over the last few decades. But another thing that he was quite well known for, which definitely contributed a huge amount to how much he achieved, was his […]
Whether or not I feel lonely in travelling by myself for such a long time is one of the biggest questions I get asked when people hear about my lifestyle of over eight years of solo travel, and something I’ll tell you all about today. What you read may surprise you!
There are thousands of ways to learn a language; Pimsleur, LingQ, Rosetta Stone, lots of studying, silently absorbing (click the links to see why I don’t fully recommend learning these ways). There is also SRS, image association, singing along to your favourite songs, and lots of other things that I do recommend. You can argue […]
Now that I’m about a month into my Turkish mission I can say that things are going slower than expected. I’m behind on where I would normally be at this stage in learning a language. This has nothing to do with any issues with the language itself; Turkish is actually one of the most logical […]
This blog post was written on my 8 year travel anniversary in 2011. In 2013 I celebrated my TEN year travel anniversary with a much more visual representation of the top ten lessons learned in travelling the world, including the absolute best footage from my travels, and you can hear me speak out the lessons […]
There are many myths about language learning that I’m trying to dispel as nothing more than lazy excuses on this blog. The fact that you are too old, your destiny (genes, background etc.) is against you, you can’t afford to travel and there are no opportunities to speak where you live or systems to speak […]
Social