Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
When you understand “language genes” to be something that some people have and you don’t, then you’re being ridiculous. I’ve seen this in many iterations: language talent, gene, skill, knack etc., and today I’m going to tell you why I think it’s all nonsense. The part of your genetic makeup that helps you deconstruct and […]
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) […]
“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
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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