Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Meet Maneesh Sethi. Maneesh is a friend, an inventor, and a fellow language learner (he has been a DJ in Berlin, and spoken on stage in Italian, among other things) with a very particular passion… For years, he has been obsessed with solving the problem of maintaining motivation that we all face in trying to […]
One of the most popular posts on this blog is my 29 life lessons learned in travelling the world (for 8 years straight). I’ve personally been to a couple of dozen countries, but then there are people like my friend Chris Guillebeau. He has been to every single country on earth! I’ve met Chris on […]
I met Frank at the very start of this year’s US book tour after being in touch for a while via the blog. When he sent me this great guest post, the Spartan in me couldn’t resist running with it! It’s about picking essential words to learn at the beginning of your language adventure, so you […]
Now that the summer has wrapped up, it’s time to dive back into language learning, and let’s start with some thoughts on non-European languages! For that, my hyperpolyglot friend Judith Meyer is back and has written up this excellent post for us. I met in Esperanto gatherings and always see her busy answering Quora questions, […]
While my book tour continues, I’m happy to welcome another guest post about a concept in language learning we’ve all looked into at one time or another – using children’s books to learn foreign languages! Let’s see what Tim Johnson has to say on this! ——— There are a several language learning methods that allow […]
In today’s guest post, Kerstin from fluent language shares her thoughts on learning new vocabulary. Enjoy!
My name is Kerstin and I’m a dictionary fiend. Learning new words and figuring out how they’re related to other languages is one of my favourite parts of language learning.
You can learn a lot about how language works by studying how software-engineers approach the challenge of speech-recognition. In the early days of the field, engineers theorized that getting a computer to recognize speech was merely a question programming a large database of word recordings into it. For example, get a speaker to say the phrase “I can’t wait to watch this Kickstarter video!”, and the machine would be able to link the phrase with the sounds from its database and tease out the co
What comes to mind when I say the words “goal setting”?
Is it:
a) Yes! I’m there!
b) I never bother
c) I know it’s important, but…
I’ve known people who fall into all three camps. Some people seem to have a natural ability to set goals and stick to them. Others just get started and don’t bother with goals.
But when it comes to language learning in particular, I suspect there’s a fairly large number of people who fall into the last category.
I’m a classic example of this. I’m great at setting goals – I can set goals and decide how I’ll achieve them all day. Sometimes I actually do 🙂 But, inevitably, after a certain period of time, I fall off the log. I can’t, or don’t, follow through.
Happens every time.
I have massive respect for people who are strong at goal setting and have the stick-to-it-iveness to follow through. But what happens if you just don’t work that way?
It’s the feeling of stagnation, like sitting around and waiting for something to happen because you know you’ve been putting in the work.
It’s what happens when you feel a huge rush of demotivation because you’re really tired of studying this language every single day and not seeing much of a return for it.
Benny Lewis has definitely hit them before and so have thousands of other language learners.
BRICK WALLS. At the end of the day, some get through them and some don’t.
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