Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
As you all know, I’m attempting to get Fluent in Arabic in 3 months, in a city 500km deep inside Brazil. It’s on! A good start is essential if you want to get the momentum to learn as fast as possible, so this meant that I did as much as I could not related to […]
I spent a month in Austin (TX) and learned enough ASL to make a multilingual music video in ASL, but not enough to record a video interacting with someone. But then I made it a major focus to improve my ASL to a level where I could interview people to share Deaf culture and more about ASL and how it works with the world. Check out today’s video, entirely in American Sign Language.
I met up with fellow Youtube polyglot, Moses McCormick (see his Youtube channel) in Columbus, Ohio and the two of us went to a mall simply to walk up to complete strangers and practise a bunch of languages with them.
In this post I want to outline how I am writing multilingual updates in the new social network Google plus that only those who want to see them (natives and people learning the language) will. I’ll also say how I’m doing the same thing in Facebook and twitter, and invite you to a video “hangout” […]
There are many wholesome reasons to learn and use languages. Mine are cultural to enhance my travel and social experiences. Some people learn to understand their heritage, to be able to better appreciate music and literature, and some are passionate simply about languages in themselves and what makes them up and how they work. Others […]
Thanks to my interpretation of the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, I can speak languages shortly after arriving in a country.
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I am not really that passionate about languages. It’s unlikely you’ll see me ever studying a language like Latin or ancient Greek, or picking a language based on integrate grammar points or because its phonemes or particular tones could be a “fun challenge”. There […]
In my current language mission I’m trying to prove that you can speak any language in the world anywhere in the world. So far I’ve mentioned how you can search social networks for nearby speakers, and take culturally relevant classes in the target language. There are actually infinite ways to practise your target language without […]
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 by in Thai, managed to convince Brazilians that I was one of them, and passed most of the […]
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