Are any of you familiar with Benny the Irish polyglot and his website and language learning approach? I hope to have a discussion with him about where we agree and where we disagree in our approaches to language learning. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who is familiar with his method. I will let you know when we have the discussion and will post it here as a podcast.
2 comments on “Benny the Irish Polyglot”
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I’ve been subscribed to his blog for the past several months. I’m not sure he has a specific "method", he’s kind of all over the place. But the one thing that I admire about the guy is that he is very motivating and communicates very well about the psychology of language learning, rather than the grammatical or academic side, and I think that is the primary reason why I’ve stayed subscribed to his blog. I look forward to your podcast with him, Steve. it should be interesting.
Don’t know why, but didn’t succeed to post this in the other comment thread… :(One thing I usually say about Esperanto but what is actually valid for speaking early as well: it’s not something that is impairing you to do other things, it’s something you have in addition. Beginning to speak early is not the same as not having a lot of input. Sure, a lot of input is a necessity for speaking fluently, you absolutely should do that. But speaking early and learning to get around in the language is a useful thing as well, and you have a chance to make some contacts to get more input :). This helped me a lot to learn Portuguese (and you can ask Benny how much time it took me to have something like working communication…).The same about Esperanto: it is in no way something that limits what you can do, it can only enrichen your view on the world. Speaking Esperanto I still speak English (and I would argue better than if I shouldn’t have learned Esperanto). Actually, I speak 9 languages by now and mostly due to Esperanto. It is no magic, speaking early isn’t either, but it can actually help to get a grip on the situation, and that is worth it!