Unconventional language hacking tips from Benny the Irish polyglot; travelling the world to learn languages to fluency and beyond!
Right, let’s get down to business! If you want to sound like a local, you need to work on many things and your foreigner accent is one of them. When I speak in English I’ve got a lovely wee (slightly watered down) Irish accent. However, when trying to speak my first foreign language I had […]
In the previous post I explained my background (and need) to become a freelance translator. In this post I will go into more detail about how I got work, what that work involves and why it’s not as easy as you think!! Finding translation work I was in a pretty bad situation a few years […]
A lot of people have been asking me how I fund my language-learning travels – did I win the lottery? Do I have really rich parents that pay for everything? Maybe I donate a lot of plasma, sell property or invest in the stock market? Actually, for many of my travels, I had quite normal jobs […]
Edit: This post was so well appreciated by people that I’ve rewritten it and added it to lots of other unconventional tips, in the Language Hacking Guide. I recently shared my most important decision ever that started me on the path to becoming a polyglot, but it lead to a lot of questions that some […]
Today I’m going to share the most important decision I have ever made in learning languages. This choice changed me from a hopeless “I’m not talented with languages” person to eventually become the polyglot that I am today.
So, you’ve got a couple of phrases learned off from your phrasebook, you’ve got a positive attitude and you’ve even enjoyed quickly learning off lots of new words, but the whole point of all of this is to actually converse with native speakers! In the early stages of speaking a language you may think that […]
Continuing from my previous two posts about focussing on specifying your motivations and minigoals, it’s important to have a clear idea of the end-goal. i.e. FLUENCY (for many people). You will find this hard to achieve if you don’t know what you are aiming for, so today I am going to attempt to define this […]
Please note: this article was written in June 2009. Those who know me, are aware that I can actually take a lot with me on cheap flights, but I still have to decide what is and what isn’t coming with me for my next 6 months on the road! (Czech Republic, then likely somewhere in […]
Social