Turkish Foods: 19 Must-Try Dishes & Essential Vocabulary
Discover the best of Turkish foods with our guide to 19 must-try dishes, from kebabs to baklava. Learn essential food vocabulary too!
written by
Articles
Top ten lessons learned in travelling the world for ten years
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!
The American Accent mission: Learning about phonetics and sentence rhythm in English to help with OTHER language projects!
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 […]
The many problems with being a long-term lone vagabond without a base
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, […]
Why I’m a Humanist after a decade of serendipitous and wonderful travel experiences
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 […]
The 23 strangest habits you’ll pick up after living in 23 different countries
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 […]
The Art of Making Mistakes – How and why mistakes help you to learn languages (Guest post by Luca)
“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.
Best free online language-specific monolingual and bilingual dictionaries
Throw away your dusty old dead tree dictionaries! They are either too bulky (and expensive) to use conveniently, and not updated regularly enough, or they are too small to cover all the words you might need. It’s the 21st century, so lets embrace all the free online dictionaries available to us! Multilingual dictionaries When discussing […]
Sound Rehab: A 5-Point Program for Kicking Your Visual-Addiction
(Note: Flow courses are currently discontinued, you can learn about my new courses here) I’m a musician, and I advocate learning language with your ears instead of your eyes. But I often get pushback for this view: “You can’t just assume that everyone is an auditory learner like you. Personally, I’m a visual learner so I […]
Polyglot conference and re-activating Hungarian
After last week’s announcement, you should know that I had an intensive project to re-activate my Hungarian! The reason I was doing this was to prepare to go back to Budapest to attend the Polyglot Conference, and I had a great time at it, but I did want to make sure I was using some Hungarian outside of it. In this post, I’ll say how both the mission and the conference went!
Firstly, I had signed up for six hours of Hungarian spoken lessons via italki. While I had blogged that I would be putting about ten hours into the project, once again my super-secret project in Berlin was consuming my time, and I barely had 10 minutes before each lesson to quickly revise things. So in total, I had about 7 hours of exposure time to Hungarian before arriving.
I find that because I am so busy on another project, if I don’t actually schedule a lesson, then I can keep putting off the work, so I’m really glad I did put aside that time in advance. Busy or not, when you know you have another person scheduled to talk to you, you’ll make the time!
Social