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 […]
No matter what you’re doing, whether it’s learning a language, trying to become a writer, starting a business etc. it seems like everyone these days has a step-by-step layout about precisely how you can succeed in it. It’s hard to decide which one to follow, especially when some of them conflict with one another. That’s […]
Any answer to the question posed in the title of this post will inevitably be loaded with presumptions, bias, personality preference, anecdotal or confused sources of evidence, guesses with no actual experience, irrelevant criteria and many other things that lead it to give an impossible or misleading real answer, because simply, there is just no […]
Whenever I meet new people and try to help them with their language learning missions, when they hear that I have already learned to speak a few languages and ask me to list them, the one that always gets their attention the most is Esperanto. Most people have never even heard of it, but occasionally […]
Right, let’s get down to business! If you want to sound like a local, you need to work on many things and your foreigner accent is one of them. When I speak in English I’ve got a lovely wee (slightly watered down) Irish accent. However, when trying to speak my first foreign language I had […]
My big hobby after languages is making videos. I’ve combined the two on my multilingual site with several videos about my travels and other subjects, in 7 languages. This has really helped me to practise my languages as I travel. But instead of just making the videos about different random topics in several languages, I’m starting on a long-term project of making videos about languages as I learn them or travel to the country where they are spoken.
Please note: Livemocha closed down in 2016 after being acquired by Rosetta Stone. Busuu is still going strong! Over the years, I’ve tested out a lot of different interfaces for learning languages. Some have been a huge improvement to how I learned previously, some can be helpful in particular ways, and some just aren’t for me […]
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