Articles


New mission: Speak any language, anywhere

written by Benny Lewis

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 […]


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Reading time: 4 minutes

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How I became a pro Language Hacker

written by Benny Lewis

The question of “What do you do?” has always been a tough one for me to answer. I have actually had about 40 jobs in the last 10 years, so answering with a single description just doesn’t describe what I “do” with my life in any real sense. I was the race controller at a […]


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Reading time: 10 minutes

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Two months in Budapest

written by Benny Lewis

My time in this Amazing city has come to an end! I’m quite happy with the progress I made in Hungarian, and genuinely sad to leave! As this post goes live, I’ll be somewhere over the Atlantic, on my way to Las Vegas to attend the Blogworld conference to meet some blogger friends and make […]


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Reading time: 7 minutes

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Speaking with mistakes quickly is better than speaking “perfectly” slowly

written by Benny Lewis

Rather than write a long post about a topic that I have covered in various forms before, I’ll make this short. Above you will see a video showing me talking Hungarian with Bálint Kőrösi, who translated the Language Hacking Guide to Hungarian for me. My level in the language is the result of my two […]


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Reading time: 2 minutes

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Your worst enemy on the path to success? You!

written by Benny Lewis

Whether your goal is to lose weight, save money, or speak a language, out of the many obstacles you will encounter on your path, the biggest one by far is you. In a language-learning context I see people spending countless hours on forums and even the few blogs like this one to get the latest […]


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Reading time: 6 minutes

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Social media Saturday – What happens in Vegas… gets blogged and tweeted!

written by Benny Lewis

My Hungarian mission is progressing very well! I am at the stage now where I can have telephone conversations entirely in Hungarian. Not bad for just having spent a few weeks in the country so far! But in just under two weeks, this mission will be coming to an end and I’ll be moving on. […]


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Reading time: 3 minutes

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Books are dead – it’s time to ditch 15th century technology

written by Benny Lewis

The printing press was invented in 1440. Apart from the Internet, this one invention is probably one of the most incredible things that happened in the last millennium to help spread ideas – books and the ideas they contain have transformed the world. And yet, almost nothing has changed since the 15th century in the […]


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Reading time: 11 minutes

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What is the best language learning course? Looking at the numbers

What is the best language learning course? Looking at the numbers

written by Benny Lewis

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 […]


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Reading time: 10 minutes

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