Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
I’ve always said that total immersion and avoiding English are the key to learning a language quickly. However, even when living in the country, watching TV, socialising and doing everything else in the local language, you may still be exposed to too much English on your computer. And if you can’t travel yet to practise […]
Exactly a month ago I arrived in Rio with the mission of becoming Brazilian in 3 months. As in my previous language mission, I’ll give a monthly update for those curious of my progress, and my hopes of reaching the goal of walking the walk and talking the talk enough to convince some Cariocas that […]
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 […]
EDIT: This mission was a success! You can read how I spoke Portuguese with no foreign accent, and how I adapted to life in Rio. I also wrote about why I love Brazilians so much :=) After learning 6 languages to fluency in 6 years of travels, and learning to speak Czech in just two […]
Want to speak Spanish well, speak French well, speak German well, or any language for that matter? If I can do this with Czech starting from zero, imagine what you can do! I’d like to summarise everything I’ve discussed on the site regarding my earliest intensive language experiment. I was initially aiming for fluency in 3 […]
In an ideal world, you would have a native beside you every time you spoke or wrote something, so that they could help and correct you. This is not possible for many of us! Luckily, thanks to modern technology and the Internet, you can have your grammar and spelling corrected immediately and automatically, in any […]
Today I’m going to share the most important decision I have ever made in learning languages. This choice changed me from a hopeless “I’m not talented with languages” person to eventually become the polyglot that I am today.
There are lots of excuses people make for not progressing in a language; I’m not smart enough, it’s too hard, I can’t remember any words, etc. But the one I’ll almost always hear is I don’t have any time. Time is a funny thing. It can fly, run out, and be up. It can be […]
Continuing from my previous two posts about focussing on specifying your motivations and minigoals, it’s important to have a clear idea of the end-goal. i.e. FLUENCY (for many people). You will find this hard to achieve if you don’t know what you are aiming for, so today I am going to attempt to define this […]
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