Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Since we are at exactly the half-way point of my three month mission to speak fluent Chinese, it’s time for another video update! This time, it is 100% unprepared, unscripted, and unrehearsed 😉 Check it out: [Subtitles in traditional & simplified Chinese, as well as in English; enable Youtube’s closed captioning to see – mistakes […]
The late and great Steve Jobs was famous for many things, and was arguably one of the most influential contributors to how advanced personal use technology developed over the last few decades. But another thing that he was quite well known for, which definitely contributed a huge amount to how much he achieved, was his […]
Whether or not I feel lonely in travelling by myself for such a long time is one of the biggest questions I get asked when people hear about my lifestyle of over eight years of solo travel, and something I’ll tell you all about today. What you read may surprise you!
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 […]
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 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 […]
There are many myths about language learning that I’m trying to dispel as nothing more than lazy excuses on this blog. The fact that you are too old, your destiny (genes, background etc.) is against you, you can’t afford to travel and there are no opportunities to speak where you live or systems to speak […]
In years of constantly comparing the many successful vs unsuccessful language learners to see what really makes them different, I can share another huge realisation with you today. Many of the major questions most people start asking themselves in language learning are, in my opinion, things that should be coming much later in the priority […]
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 […]
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