Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
One of the most important things I’ve learned in my first year of blogging about my 3 month language missions has probably been discovering that achieving the “impossible” is actually easy. It turns out that several people that I’ve come across or read about have achieved the impossible several times over each. Taking their lead, […]
Can you guess what I’m thinking from looking at my expression in the photo? When I run into some study-focused learners and the discussion turns to languages, sometimes I honestly feel like we are talking about completely different things. A lot of them like talking about subjunctives, past participles, cases and word roots, conjugations, tone […]
Whenever I meet new people and try to help them with their language learning missions, when they hear that I have already learned to speak a few languages and ask me to list them, the one that always gets their attention the most is Esperanto. Most people have never even heard of it, but occasionally […]
Check out this video that explains everything in this post, with airport footage from an actual trip I made with 40kg: Ah, no-frills airlines. How we both love and hate you at the same time! Since quite a lot of us are on a budget nowadays, we try to find ways to pay less as […]
“I made a new video – I look cool in it! Want to come up and check it out?” Sounds like an innocent enough thing to say, right? While talking to a German friend of mine (a girl, but seriously just a friend and one I’ve had for many years), I wanted to say this […]
This post has been a long time coming. Teachers and linguists are going to hate me for this, but it has to be said: You can never speak a language by just studying it, no matter how much you study Yes, you read that right. Studying is the wrong thing to do if you want […]
It’s been a month since I arrived in Berlin, so it’s about time for a mission update! To make it more interesting, I’ve decided to include this multilingual video tour of my flat. I also made (just English) videos to show my home in Prague and Rio, since I host Couchsurfers most of the time […]
My life is so unfair – forget the starving children in Africa, or people with terminal illnesses; they have no idea what I have to put up with. I have seperable verbs and conjugations to deal with. Oh, woe is me!! For example, German has strange word orders, prepositions at the end of sentences that […]
*Note: Written in 2010 Just one week into my latest crazy mission and I am happy to report that I have only been speaking German with Germans since I got here. Apart from with my landlord (who is American) and lunch with a Canadian friend, I have used no English at all outside of the […]
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