Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
I’m exactly five weeks into my mission to speak Dutch. While there are major advantages of my German and my English giving me a head start thanks to many linguistic similarities, I have had a major set-back in this mission that has been slowing me down tremendously; simply finding opportunities to converse! Dutch culture is […]
This is a guest post by the author of Life by Experimentation, Zane, who quantifies the path to self-improvement. He creates real-life experiments to assess everything from sleeping less to traveling cheaply in order to live a more productive and skillful life. He speaks Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French and Arabic with varying degrees of fluency. […]
I’ve written about learning grammar in great detail before, but it’s worth mentioning again. This time I’ll attempt to give a concise summary of the steps I take in learning a language (skipping a lot of details obviously). Grammar: from the start, in the middle or never? The way I learn grammar has been very […]
Kids are great! I was an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher for several years in several countries, teaching mostly children, and I could see how quick they were at learning a second language. Of course, who of us doesn’t want to go back to our childhood, when things were simpler and the world […]
Obviously, writing a language learning blog means that I get asked the question all the time about the best language learning course or materials to invest in. Since I can’t really say that any purchasable material particularly impresses me as a “must” for language learning, I like to try several ones on for size to […]
Quick note: In case you missed the announcement for what my next language mission is in the e-mail list, don’t forget to “like” Fluent in 3 months to see it in your Facebook stream tomorrow! I’ll also announce it on twitter tomorrow. On Saturday I went to the Deaf Night Out here in Austin, where […]
I’m on the last week of my American Sign Language mission! This has turned out to be one of my most interesting language projects yet! So interesting in fact, that I am pretty sure I’ll come back to the states for another month (after I’ve tackled my fourth language this year) to continue my progress […]
Words. Who needs them? Of course, if you want a really high academic level in a language then learning vocabulary, by whatever way you do it, will get you there. Most exams will test you on your memory capacity for even some obscure words that you’ll never actually need in real life. And some people […]
Perfectionism is usually thought of as a desirable quality to have. You can’t get better than “the best”, right? Well, in my opinion perfectionism is among the worst possible attributes a person can have if they really want to achieve anything in life. Yes, high standards are important, and yes, if what you do is […]
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