25 Must-Know Halloween Words for a Spooky Season
Halloween is just around the corner, and it's time to brush up on your spooky vocabulary with some special Halloween words!
Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Halloween is just around the corner, and it's time to brush up on your spooky vocabulary with some special Halloween words!
In continuing the summer series of guest posts, today’s is from Emily, who blogs over at The Babel Times. Her interesting suggestion is about how she learned German from children while living in Switzerland! People often complain that you feel like you are being judged when with adults, and while this is simply not the […]
Today’s guest post is from Judith Meyer, who writes at Learn Yu and is one of the most accomplished polyglots I’ve ever met! We met at an Esperanto event, and have since hung out in Berlin. Of course, I made sure that she contributed to the Skype Me Maybe music video last year! Despite her […]
Today’s guest post is from Mariola Czupowska, who blogs at the Language Wanderer. She is from Poland and was recently inspired to learn Norwegian! She set herself an interesting challenge of recording videos in the language, and used a trip to Oslo to motivate her to make even more progress. I found her story interesting […]
Today, July 10th, is my 31st birthday! It is also the day that I decided, exactly 10 years ago, to set off on my travels with no definite date to return “home”. Home is now wherever I lay my hat at the end of the day.
To celebrate this “travelversary” I have created a video that I can truly be proud of, to represent those 10 years, which you can see above.
As you can imagine, this is the long-awaited follow up to my 29 life lessons learned in 8 years post, that has been read almost 2 million times, which I wrote 2 years ago at my 8 year travelversary. These 10 lessons are (mostly) different though, so definitely check it out! To make it much more interesting, I had help to edit it professionally and included the absolute best videos and photos from my entire time on the road!
Time to reveal what my fun part-time language mission for the summer is, and you may be surprised by how genuinely practical it is!! Basically, rather than learn a new language, as I normally tend to do (or maintain my current languages, which I am doing anyway this summer), I’ve decided to learn a new […]
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, […]
I’ve hinted to it in various blog posts, and said it directly in my most recent travel one; I’m an atheist, but since the word gets a little bad rep (it sounds to some like anti-theist or that your life philosophy revolves around opposing religion), the title I prefer is Humanist. This very simply means […]
While I usually blog about language learning, I know a lot of you enjoy my travel and cultural updates as much or more. I’ve been travelling the world since 2003, but even forgetting the time involved, I have lived in twenty three countries (and counting); that’s lived as in, spent at least a month (usually […]
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
—Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
Making mistakes is a fundamental part of every cognitive process, whether solving a math problem, making important decisions, or trying to convey meaning in a foreign language.
What’s more, making mistakes and learning from them is not simply a human skill. According to scientific research (link: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/2012/08/monkeys-mistake-detector/), animals not only learn from their own mistakes, but they can learn by observing their peers messing up. In the animal world, avoiding blunders may dramatically improve one’s chances of survival. Both humans and animals learn to live and live to learn. Human beings, however have a unique skill: the ability to process and ponder their mistakes.
This can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. Let me explain why.
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