Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Whether your goal is to lose weight, save money, or speak a language, out of the many obstacles you will encounter on your path, the biggest one by far is you. In a language-learning context I see people spending countless hours on forums and even the few blogs like this one to get the latest […]
My Hungarian mission is progressing very well! I am at the stage now where I can have telephone conversations entirely in Hungarian. Not bad for just having spent a few weeks in the country so far! But in just under two weeks, this mission will be coming to an end and I’ll be moving on. […]
The printing press was invented in 1440. Apart from the Internet, this one invention is probably one of the most incredible things that happened in the last millennium to help spread ideas – books and the ideas they contain have transformed the world. And yet, almost nothing has changed since the 15th century in the […]
Any answer to the question posed in the title of this post will inevitably be loaded with presumptions, bias, personality preference, anecdotal or confused sources of evidence, guesses with no actual experience, irrelevant criteria and many other things that lead it to give an impossible or misleading real answer, because simply, there is just no […]
As the name of this blog suggests, I move somewhere new about once every three months (although I was in Berlin for four months and will have only spent just over two months in Hungary by the time I leave, so this time limit fluctuates). This means that my date of departure is slowly approaching […]
If you read different sources to see what language ‘experts’ have to say about mastering a language, you’ll get such vastly different advice that sometimes it’s hard to know which one to apply. Listen a lot even when you sleep, read all day, study thousands of words of vocabulary before you are ready to speak, […]
Ever since I started travelling over nine years ago, I have arrived at each location by myself, many times not having a single contact or friend waiting for me in my destination. This has been essential for my language missions, since I need to immerse myself in the local language. Bringing someone with me to […]
It’s September and people are going back to school and are learning languages inside classrooms again. I think it’s time for me to open up this pandora’s box and discuss why I don’t think classrooms work for language learning. Of course, the classroom itself isn’t the only problem so rather than argue for the sake […]
I get told so many times that someone has been studying Spanish/French/Japanese/etc. for five, ten (or whatever) years. Despite this, in most cases, if they tell me how many years they have been studying it, it’s usually a precursor to “but… I don’t speak it!” This is usually to justify how hard their language is, […]
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