Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Over the years, I’ve had a lot of missions, goals, projects or whatever you want to call them (16 of which I’ve blogged about, so far) to learn languages and take on many interesting other objectives. Generally on this blog I try to see the good in what I can, and I consider each project […]
with a pretty successful Polish mini-mission behind me, tomorrow I am flying to Oslo!
Of course I plan to be a respectful tourist and be fully capable of ordering food, asking directions, being polite, and giving basic info about myself, all in Norwegian.
However, since I am not under any pressure to do something else (my trip to Warsaw was specifically to speak at TEDx, and preparing for that talk took time out of the 5 hours I had planned for polish, knocking it down to only 2! The talk went well, and you can see a cool visual representation of what I was saying in the image above that was drawn while I was saying it!) I think I will actually manage to do five full hours of preparation this time! 🙂
As you saw last week, I challenged myself to take five hours to learn enough Polish to help me get by on my brief visit to Warsaw.
In the end, I didn’t actually do that as planned… because I was so busy preparing for my TEDx talk (which will be completely different to the other one I gave, but still with the same topic of encouraging adult language learners – online in the next month or two), and working on my secret 3-month contract, that I only had two hours total time to invest into learning Polish.
Despite having even less time than I initially planned, I was pleased to learn what I needed and can even share the results with you on video!
On Wednesday, I’ll be arriving in Warsaw to give a TEDx talk. Unlike the first one I gave, which was completely made up on the spot and only the second time I ever had a stage to myself like that, this time I have been preparing for it in advance and want to give a completely different but really powerful talk that could inspire many language learners. It should hopefully be up on Youtube in a month or two!
I’ll only be in Poland for 3 days, but I’m going to have a unique mission this time of giving myself 5 hours to cram for Polish to become as effective a tourist as I can be! Right now, I don’t know any Polish at all (other than likely common vocabulary that many languages share), and I’ve been too busy with a full time contracted job I have here in Berlin (much more on the top-secret reason I’m in Berlin later) as well as preparing my talk over the last week.
This has been a very interesting project!
I started back in September, with three months to intensively learn the language while in Brazil, and then spent January and February travelling through Egypt (ultimately not doing more than a couple of hours intentional work on my Arabic level, although getting lots of practice), and if you check out the above completely unedited, and unscripted conversation, you can hear what my Arabic sounds like!
Unlike in my other videos, where I was focusing much more on an interesting message that the native speaker could share with the world, this time I did most of the talking, but had a very special guest interview me – the first person I ever spoke Arabic with! It’s got an almost poetic conclusion to the mission that I should finally meet her just before I leave! I found Amera on italki in September, and she is one of the teachers I stuck consistently with all the way through to December.
After I got back from Siwa, I got on the train to Cairo for my flight to Sharm el Sheikh. Unlike the previous occasion that I had gotten the train, I arrived with plenty of time!
But I had a completely different problem this time! After I got on the train, I was a little weary of anything happening to my window after rocks had been thrown at it on the Luxor-Cairo leg, and the sun was shining in on my face, so I thought I should pull down the blind of course.
(Today’s video is in English, but has a brief segment in Arabic when I chat to my jeep driver).
Don’t worry, next week I’ll get back to language updates, including a video where I do most of the talking, all spontaneous, so you can hear what my level truly is. For now, I wanted to share my favourite place on my travels in Egypt: the Siwa Oasis!
It’s a 10 hour or so bus ride from Alexandria (where I ended the first leg of my travels), through a road that has only been paved in recent decades, and as you can see it’s a huge area of fertile land covered by palm trees, rather than our stereotypical image of an oasis being a single watering hole.
When you leave the chaos of Cairo, you are instantly hit by how peaceful Aswan is. No constant horns and no polluted skyline. As you can see in the start of the video, you also get the more typical view of the Nile we expect with huge sand dunes right by the bank of the river.
While in Aswan, I got to learn about Nubian culture, as most of those I would speak to were Nubians. This included the Felucca boat and sailor that I hired for the day through a local company. The captain picked me up and brought me as far downstream as we could go for the first half of the day before we turned back.
After leaving Cairo, the first stop on my Egyptian travels was Aswan, the furthest south in the country where you can find a major settled area, and where the Egyptian part of the Nile begins after Lake “Nasser” and the High Dam.
By far, the most interesting part of my time there was discovering things about the ethnic group known as the Nubians, which at one point in history were able to overpower the Pharaohs of Egypt, but have had an unfortunate history of displacement and migration, especially in the last century.
To share that story, I let Gasser M. Anwar, a Nubian working in the tourist industry, take the microphone to share his perspective on it all with us. With subtitles in English and Arabic as always!
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