Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
While I usually travel to new countries for cultural immersion, and learning the local language hugely enhances that experience, for the next four weeks I’m taking a fun diversion! My next language is Klingon. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s the fictional language used by one particular alien species on the TV […]
Back in 2008, I made a video about a very interesting event that takes place in the desert in Nevada, which you can view at the bottom of this post (you can also listen to the commentary, with subtitles for the interviews, in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Irish and Esperanto.) Now, this is where I’m […]
This is something that has been bothering me for some time, so after giving my thoughts on it, I’d love to hear yours. What do you understand it as meaning if someone says that they are a “linguist”? As far as I’m concerned, a linguist is someone who studies linguistics. Linguistics can be a fascinating […]
Today I’ve written a guest post on Get Rich Slowly about How to learn a foreign language without spending a cent. Check it out for a list of my favourite free resources as well as a generally great website that J.D. Roth runs for saving money and spending it wisely. That post is necessary to remind […]
My time in Istanbul is officially over – for the next two weeks I’ll be with my family in Ireland before hitting the road again. (To find out where I’m going and clues of what the next language will be, see Facebook) But to wrap up my time in Istanbul, I’d like to share this […]
There are thousands of ways to learn a language; Pimsleur, LingQ, Rosetta Stone, lots of studying, silently absorbing (click the links to see why I don’t fully recommend learning these ways). There is also SRS, image association, singing along to your favourite songs, and lots of other things that I do recommend. You can argue […]
About six weeks into learning Dutch I was ready to go on 25 speed dates entirely in the language. It’s not quite the same thing for me now five weeks into my Turkish mission! Due to some annoying health problems and some frustrating travel related issues I’ll mention soon enough (that have nothing to do […]
In the last eight years, I’ve invested serious time into learning 16 languages (so far; I’ll be giving clues to the 17th one in the e-mail list throughout August, to be started in September. You can sign up to that on the top-right of the site if you think you’ll be able to figure it […]
I wrote in great detail before about why adults are much better language learners than kids, but now linguists are starting to chime in! There is a stupid rumour going around that you can’t learn a language after a certain age (was it 6, or 12, or 14? I forget where the drunk blind man […]
Social