Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
My time in Istanbul is officially over – for the next two weeks I’ll be with my family in Ireland before hitting the road again. (To find out where I’m going and clues of what the next language will be, see Facebook) But to wrap up my time in Istanbul, I’d like to share this […]
There are thousands of ways to learn a language; Pimsleur, LingQ, Rosetta Stone, lots of studying, silently absorbing (click the links to see why I don’t fully recommend learning these ways). There is also SRS, image association, singing along to your favourite songs, and lots of other things that I do recommend. You can argue […]
About six weeks into learning Dutch I was ready to go on 25 speed dates entirely in the language. It’s not quite the same thing for me now five weeks into my Turkish mission! Due to some annoying health problems and some frustrating travel related issues I’ll mention soon enough (that have nothing to do […]
In the last eight years, I’ve invested serious time into learning 16 languages (so far; I’ll be giving clues to the 17th one in the e-mail list throughout August, to be started in September. You can sign up to that on the top-right of the site if you think you’ll be able to figure it […]
I wrote in great detail before about why adults are much better language learners than kids, but now linguists are starting to chime in! There is a stupid rumour going around that you can’t learn a language after a certain age (was it 6, or 12, or 14? I forget where the drunk blind man […]
Now that I’m about a month into my Turkish mission I can say that things are going slower than expected. I’m behind on where I would normally be at this stage in learning a language. This has nothing to do with any issues with the language itself; Turkish is actually one of the most logical […]
This post was originally part of my introduction e-mails for the Language Hacking League (which you can sign up for on the right to get similar tips or links twice a month in your inbox after an introduction series). Considering how I use Turkish as an example (but you can apply this tip to all […]
This blog post was written on my 8 year travel anniversary in 2011. In 2013 I celebrated my TEN year travel anniversary with a much more visual representation of the top ten lessons learned in travelling the world, including the absolute best footage from my travels, and you can hear me speak out the lessons […]
How comic writer Mars Dorian set himself the challenge of learning Japanese in 12 months so he could read Manga comics. Did he make it?
Social