Chinese Clothing: A Comprehensive Guide to Traditional and Modern Styles
When you think of Chinese clothing, different images probably come to mind. Perhaps you envision the elegant flow of a silk qipao...
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Is fluency in 3 months possible?
One confusion people have when they arrive on my site is this non-existent “claim” that I’m here to prove that fluency in 3 months is possible, which I’ve never made. Proving this is not the point of the site. But I find the question itself (asked generally) quite silly: of course it’s possible. When a […]
Benny travels China: the real point of the mission to speak Mandarin as quickly as possible
It’s time to announce my next 3 month project, while clarifying what the real motivation behind my Mandarin 3 month project has been! I am going to travel deep into China – beyond 1,000km inland – by land (no flights), over the next two months, and then travel through Taiwan (outside of Taipei) for several […]
When climbing any mountain, focus on the steps, not on how steep it is
Back in December, I hiked a segment of the Inca trail over several days to eventually end up at Machu Picchu. This photo is of me looking on to Huayna Picchu (in Quechua, literally “the young peak”, where Machu Picchu is “the old peak”); about 400m (or 1,300ft) of vertical hiking that I still had […]
How to get over a plateau stopping you from making progress: how I’m doing it with my Chinese
One of the biggest questions I get asked by people already deep into their language learning project relates to how they should get over the plateau they are stuck in. There are many different types of plateaux you could be looking at. Maybe you have learned some basic vocab but can’t muster up the courage […]
The simple guide to adding captions/subtitles to Youtube videos: My 2.5 month Mandarin video
First thing’s first: This video is my 2.5 month point in Mandarin! Subtitles included in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, as well as English. [Youku version here] I met up with fellow Youtube polyglot Mike, a.k.a. Glossika and he agreed to bounce some questions off me to demonstrate my progress since the last video. Check out […]
Free online Irish language learning resources and cool videos
This weekend is St. Patrick’s Day, the background of which I discussed in this post a year ago (while insisting that Americans do NOT call it “Patty’s day”) Another thing that happens this week is Seachtain na Gaeilge [literally, Irish (language) week] – an awareness initiative aligning with the week leading up to or around […]
Unnecessary elitist standards: get rid of them and fluency is yours for the taking
When discussing language learning with people who have unrealistic standards for what they must have in their second language before they consider their level good enough, I’m left amazed at the screamingly obvious issues they don’t seem to be aware of: The elitist standards you require are something that we may not even have for […]
How we all benefit when women are multilingual
Today’s guest post is from Susanna, author of Language is Music, who speaks seven languages and promotes learning languages with music and the media. Susanna and I made a multilingual video together in San Francisco and she also wrote a previous guest post here about listening techniques and how to use songs to learn languages. […]
No pain no gain
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 […]
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