Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Ever since my viral post about the 29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years (over 2 years ago), I’ve started to get more and more questions about finding love on the road. How can a long term traveller have a girlfriend? What about leaving a wake of broken hearts behind? And […]
Sorry that this video is so short! Starting next week, I’ll get back into weekly updates until the end of the project with maybe just one break (so that’s six more videos up until the week my 3 months runs out), but I hope this teaser snapshot shows you more or less how I’m doing right now!
The reason the video isn’t longer is because my Skype recording software crashed after 4 minutes, which is a pity because Yuri asked me interesting questions and we had a real exchange (you only hear her say a couple of words in this video), discussing how my parents visited me here in Valencia.
Last week on Wednesday, I reached the one month point of my Japanese project. After an excellent start, I had a little bit of a bumpy final bit of my first month that slowed me down a little, but am back on track now to hopefully make up for lost time by the end of […]
It was all going smoothly until language number seven came along. This time was different. The “method” that I’d applied so well up until this point was suddenly no use to me. I felt like a fraud. The language: Cantonese (the Chinese dialect of Hong Kong). The place: Doha, Qatar.
Wednesday was my one month point in the three month Japanese challenge, so to really make my mark I wanted to record one last video with a prepared script before I get into recording spontaneous Skype (or in person) chats for the next two months. To really make it count, I decided to record a music video!
This video is quite an oddity because it is entirely in Japanese… and yet many of you who will have never learned any Japanese will understand quite a lot of it even without reading the lyrics that are edited into the video. And that’s because the video is made up entirely of words Japanese has borrowed from English, but said as closely as possible to the Japanese pronunciation (written in the Katakana script every time).
I’m quickly approaching my one month point in Japanese, and can give you some updates on how I’m doing there soon! In the mean time, I got this interesting guest post suggestion from William Peregoy. I’m quickly seeing that the scare tactics used on Japanese learners, like in every other language that I’ve come across, […]
A little tradition I’ve kept up since starting the blog, is to give you a video tour of almost every place I temporarily call home! For instance, in English I showed you my penthouse in Rio, my lovely flat in Medellín, the flat around the corner from the Danube in Budapest, and the beach cottage […]
Today I’m very pleased to announce to you that I have been awarded the title of National Geographic’s Traveler of the Year! Check out the full article and interview here. You’ll see it in print in the November edition of the magazine later this month. And no, it won’t look anything like this cheesy image […]
In a change from my initial plan to wait a month before uploading conversations, here is my 10-day update in Japanese. This video is entirely in Japanese, and absolutely and utterly non-scripted (apart from the intro). I messaged my Facebook page, targetting just those in Japan, and Junpei offered to let me record a chat […]
Social