Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
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 […]
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 […]
NOTE: The Language Hacking Guide is now available to be read in its entirety in six languages (seven next week), translated by natives. The stone of Rosetta You might think that this post has something to do with expensive yellow boxes that you can buy at airports with language learning software. Nope. The Rosetta stone […]
Every Friday I send out an e-mail to the Language Hacking League with a list of interesting websites to check out, as well as more precise updates regarding my own language missions. This particular tip got a great response from our readers, so I’ll share it on the blog too. It’s very easy, and yet […]
Can you guess what I’m thinking from looking at my expression in the photo? When I run into some study-focused learners and the discussion turns to languages, sometimes I honestly feel like we are talking about completely different things. A lot of them like talking about subjunctives, past participles, cases and word roots, conjugations, tone […]
Over the last month, I’ve changed my ways of trying to communicate in the local language, and I’ve been living the life of a typical English-speaking tourist. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve tried this, as I almost always work on linguistic immersion as a means of getting to know […]
Those of you who have been following this blog and reading some of my best tips, know that sometimes I focus on advice for those of you already abroad. Even though you don’t have to be rich to be able to travel to another country to learn a language, sometimes it just isn’t desirable or […]
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 […]
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