Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
For those of you who don’t know my background, I have a Bachelor’s degree in Electronic Engineering and actually worked as an engineer several times. Perhaps you would think that it’s hardly the pre-requisite for becoming a full time language hacker, but I actually feel that my engineering background has been a big contributor for […]
In about a month I’ll be starting the first of several intensive missions of 2011 to learn to speak a new language well starting from scratch. It will be totally unrelated to any language I’ve learned to date, and yet I’ll be speaking it confidently from day one. How can I be so confident about […]
(Note: The Fluent in 3 Months book has been converted to be read on all devices, using the techniques in this post.) Thanks to ditching dead trees and embracing 21st century technology I have been reading a lot more lately and really enjoying myself. I’ve got the fantastic Amazon Kindle (International free 3G version since I’m […]
Let’s face it; being able to speak multiple languages would be really cool. But can it be done by the average person without getting really confused? When I was living in Spain, still only able to speak English, I hung out with a Brazilian who absolutely wowed me as he switched between people at our […]
As the site grows and I get more comments and more e-mails, I’m starting to see a pattern of the same questions emerging. So I thought I’d simply collect several issues in this post and answer them in FAQ style. If you have any other questions related to the website or my language projects (keeping […]
I’m sure the title of this post will have many people doing a double take, but yes you read that right: Hungarian is easy. Hungarian is not an Indo-European language (i.e. Hindi actually has more in common with English/French/German/Russian etc. than Hungarian does), so it’s very different to all of its neighbours and this gives […]
This tip is taken from one of the weekly Language Hacking League e-mails. For more free tips like this in your inbox, as well as two free chapters of the Language Hacking Guide, enter your e-mail address on the right of the site. In this post I’d like to share some of the enhancements I’ve […]
Today I’ve got an interesting treat for you all! Almost 140,000 words (534 pages) of free information about learning languages. This project was headed by Claude Cartaginese, who gathered the advice from dozens of “youtube polyglots, hyper-polyglots, linguists, language learners and language lovers” and put them all in this one book, which is free to […]
In my current language mission I’m trying to prove that you can speak any language in the world anywhere in the world. So far I’ve mentioned how you can search social networks for nearby speakers, and take culturally relevant classes in the target language. There are actually infinite ways to practise your target language without […]
Social