Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
One thing I love about this blog is that when people see me struggle as a beginner learner, it reminds them that I’m not in this to present myself as a “guru” or language ninja, but that it’s all about trying to get people to be OK with struggling themselves. If an experienced language learner […]
In less than two weeks, I’m going to hit my anniversary of not having had a base anywhere in the world for ten entire years. I’ve essentially been a “homeless vagabond”, even if leaning more towards the flashpacker style of doing it with a laptop, and having a roof over my head the whole time (well, […]
So, I’m Julie Ferguson and I have nothing on Helen Keller! I am, however, severely deaf and partially sighted.
My parents realised that I had a hearing problem when I was 2 years old, though I didn’t get my first hearing aid until I was 4. Unfortunately, when I was 4, nobody could understand me babbling away in my version of English, except for my mum and my brother. Apparently, I was bad. I couldn’t even pronounce my own name (it sounded like Ooee Fehuhoh).
I was sent to speech therapy for intensive work before I started primary school, and I remember working on all those weird sounds especially “spoon”. My particular hearing loss makes it difficult to hear consonants, especially s, h, and f.
This has been a very interesting project!
I started back in September, with three months to intensively learn the language while in Brazil, and then spent January and February travelling through Egypt (ultimately not doing more than a couple of hours intentional work on my Arabic level, although getting lots of practice), and if you check out the above completely unedited, and unscripted conversation, you can hear what my Arabic sounds like!
Unlike in my other videos, where I was focusing much more on an interesting message that the native speaker could share with the world, this time I did most of the talking, but had a very special guest interview me – the first person I ever spoke Arabic with! It’s got an almost poetic conclusion to the mission that I should finally meet her just before I leave! I found Amera on italki in September, and she is one of the teachers I stuck consistently with all the way through to December.
After a LOT of work to prepare the lyrics, round people together, send way too many emails, have contributors pick verses and languages, give them feedback for several different takes, blend it all together, get through the immense task of video and sound editing, and making sure everyone was happy with it… “Skype me maybe” is finally ready for the world! 🙂
As you can see, the storyline is that I’m a hopeless language learner, ready to give up, when 16 of the Internet’s most famous polyglots show up to give me some encouraging words… in the tune of Carla Rae Jepsen’s “Call me maybe” that was popular this year, and inover thirty languages. Yes, it’s as crazy and as good as it sounds! 🙂
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” […]
Last week I shared some FAQs for a long-term traveller, and taking a bunch of questions that readers have been sending me on Facebook, twitter and the LHL email list, now I’ll discuss some language learning issues that people have been wondering about. Note that I discuss FAQs about the website and my missions separately […]
There are many people out and travelling the world, and luckily more and more are trying to speak the local language when they see it isn’t so hard. Every day I’m hearing/reading more and more success stories from others, and I thought today’s one was among those worth sharing! This guest post is from Marcus, […]
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 […]
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