Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
(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, […]
Idohosaa Ness shares his vision of language education: Every student should have a personalized learning experience. No teacher should ever have to repeat herself more than once.
Shortly after I started blogging on Fi3M, I came across another site about learning and improving your ability to learn and made contact with the author. A few months later, Scott Young and I met up while I was passing through Paris briefly. (He’s the one who took that photo of me in front of […]
As you all know, I’m a huge fan of Quebec and especially of its French dialect (here’s a video of me in French, interviewing a Quebec girl about the differences) and the wonderful people there. Because I genuinely tried to speak like them while living in Montréal, rather than rigidly sticking to the French I […]
One of the most prominent myths in language learning is that you have to go to the country to successfully learn it. This is so untrue!! I have always said that it depends on your attitude not your latitude and moving to the country may not help at all in some cases. This topic will […]
It’s time for another guest post from Fi3M’s most frequent guest contributor, Idahosa, of The Mimic Method. Since I’m currently working on improving (among other things) my accent in various languages, this post is very timely for myself! I’ll get into using Soundcloud too for feedback on the specific problems I need to fix (such […]
Recently there was an interesting article on Lifehacker called I learned to speak four languages in a few years. Here’s how by Gabriel Wyner. He got in touch with me and asked to guest post about his relevant experience as an Opera Singer (as you can see in the photo!) to help him learn several […]
Social