Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Hello from Ireland today! After some time with my family, I fly to London for a week (location locked meet-up details right now on the Facebook page), and then I start my next language mission! To find out what that is, make sure you are subscribed to the Language Hacking League email list, by signing […]
The decision I made seven years ago to study Chinese at university changed my life. Right from the beginning I decided that I didn’t just want to learn some Mandarin, I wanted to be proficient. I wanted to speak the language to an advanced level and be able to read a newspaper and write characters with ease. It’s fair to say that I got stuck in immediately, and got completely immersed in my studies!
Seven years later, I can’t say that I’m perfect and don’t make any mistakes, or that I understand and know how to say everything. There’s still a lot of room for me to improve, but I have achieved my original goal. I can speak Mandarin fluently, and I know all the simplified and traditional characters other than the really rare ones. I speak and use Chinese every day, and it has really become a part of my life and a second language to me now.
In continuing the summer series of guest posts, today’s is from Emily, who blogs over at The Babel Times. Her interesting suggestion is about how she learned German from children while living in Switzerland! People often complain that you feel like you are being judged when with adults, and while this is simply not the […]
Today’s guest post is from Judith Meyer, who writes at Learn Yu and is one of the most accomplished polyglots I’ve ever met! We met at an Esperanto event, and have since hung out in Berlin. Of course, I made sure that she contributed to the Skype Me Maybe music video last year! Despite her […]
Today’s guest post is from Mariola Czupowska, who blogs at the Language Wanderer. She is from Poland and was recently inspired to learn Norwegian! She set herself an interesting challenge of recording videos in the language, and used a trip to Oslo to motivate her to make even more progress. I found her story interesting […]
“Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
—Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM
Making mistakes is a fundamental part of every cognitive process, whether solving a math problem, making important decisions, or trying to convey meaning in a foreign language.
What’s more, making mistakes and learning from them is not simply a human skill. According to scientific research (link: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/2012/08/monkeys-mistake-detector/), animals not only learn from their own mistakes, but they can learn by observing their peers messing up. In the animal world, avoiding blunders may dramatically improve one’s chances of survival. Both humans and animals learn to live and live to learn. Human beings, however have a unique skill: the ability to process and ponder their mistakes.
This can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage. Let me explain why.
(Note: Flow courses are currently discontinued, you can learn about my new courses here) I’m a musician, and I advocate learning language with your ears instead of your eyes. But I often get pushback for this view: “You can’t just assume that everyone is an auditory learner like you. Personally, I’m a visual learner so I […]
So, I’m Julie Ferguson and I have nothing on Helen Keller! I am, however, severely deaf and partially sighted.
My parents realised that I had a hearing problem when I was 2 years old, though I didn’t get my first hearing aid until I was 4. Unfortunately, when I was 4, nobody could understand me babbling away in my version of English, except for my mum and my brother. Apparently, I was bad. I couldn’t even pronounce my own name (it sounded like Ooee Fehuhoh).
I was sent to speech therapy for intensive work before I started primary school, and I remember working on all those weird sounds especially “spoon”. My particular hearing loss makes it difficult to hear consonants, especially s, h, and f.
Today’s guest post is from my friend Matt Kepnes (aka Nomadic Matt), who wrote here earlier about How to travel the world like Indiana Jones. He has extensive travel experience, and his book How to travel the world on $50 a day has just been published today. If you are in any of these cities, […]
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