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!
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2,000km train journey video: Benny gets his Chinese name, makes new friends and meets pandas!
Here it is! My video of the epic 2,000km (that’s about 1,250 miles in “old money” as we say) train ride I took to get to Chengdu, starting from Shanghai. This video shares the people (and pandas) I met along the way! 🙂 Click CC to enable subtitles (in English, and traditional or simplified Chinese) […]
Why Chinese isn’t as hard as you think: Encouragement for Learners
“Mastering” Chinese can indeed take a long time to do, but getting to a very useful intermediate level is well within the reach of most people, and from that point progressing further won’t be that bad. It is indeed hard work, but if you put it side by side with European languages, then saying it’s “damn hard”, or “orders of magnitude harder than European languages” is nothing but an exaggeration
Why getting mistaken for a native speaker is much easier than you think
Someone thinking you are a native speaker of your target language is the holy grail of language learners. It’s something many of us dream about, but then sigh to ourselves that it’s just never going to happen. Well, today I want to burst that bubble and tell you that many people genuinely thinking you are […]
Benny’s 3.25 month video: questions that waste your time
Here you go! My 3 month and one week Mandarin video! [Video also available on Youku. Click CC to enable captions in English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese] My interviewer is John Pasden, who writes at the 10-year-strong blog dedicated to all things Chinese-learning, Sinosplice. He is a co-host at Chinesepod (which I’ve been listening […]
Analyse your mistakes: An honest look at what I did wrong these 3 months
As you all know, there are countless ways to go about learning a language. I have a general plan of action that I like to apply myself, but there’s no such thing as a “perfect” way to learn a language. Perfection is not something that humans need to concern themselves with in anything outside the […]
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 […]
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