Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
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 […]
A lot of people are a bit fuzzy about this so I want to make it absolutely clear: If you move to a country for a few months (or even years) it’s very possible you will NOT learn the language. Out of all the advice I give on this blog, based on my lifestyle you […]
A lot of people are surprised when I tell them that I am not really that passionate about languages. It’s unlikely you’ll see me ever studying a language like Latin or ancient Greek, or picking a language based on integrate grammar points or because its phonemes or particular tones could be a “fun challenge”. There […]
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 […]
This detailed post describes how my first week in Amsterdam went. As requested, I’ll be giving regular updates on how I’ve been adjusting to a new culture and learning a new language. In future I’ll send this update (which will likely be much shorter and include occasional videos) to the Language Hacking League, so sign […]
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 […]
It’s time for a new language mission! DUTCH! I’ve just arrived in Amsterdam, and I plan to speak fluent Dutch by May 31st (so technically not even 2 months; actually in 8 weeks). There’s many ways to define fluency and I’m very precise about mine. There are some obvious advantages I’ll have and some big […]
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 […]
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