Benny Lewis

speaker

589 appearances 9 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 Aug

Benny Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Language & Travel Hacking · Celebrating 23 years of speaking from day one · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

So that means 51 countries, eight languages I speak well, another 20 I've dabbled in,

12 different national flavors of Spanish and French and 23 years since I left Ireland around my 21st birthday to begin my nomadic adventures.

And this very week, tomorrow as you're listening to the podcast, I turn 44.

I'm giving you all these crazy numbers up front so we can get that out of the way.

But what I actually want to do for my birthday episode is introduce you to a different person, me at 21 when this all started.

That clueless version of me is the part of all of this that genuinely matters to other people getting into language learning.

Because when I was 21, I only spoke English.

I wasn't outgoing.

I wasn't confident.

I was good at maths, but not really much else, honestly.

I had no gift for languages and no dream of becoming a polyglot.

And the word itself wasn't even on my radar.

I just wanted to travel, which, mind you, I still do.

That part has never changed.

Travelling has always been this thing on my mind, but languages were essentially the wall standing between me and that goal.

So I moved to Spain and I did the sensible thing of signing up for a Spanish class.

And I was the worst student in the room.

I'd sit there and not understand a single thing the teacher said, and I'd leave every class feeling more defeated than when I walked in.

And it didn't help that six months into living in Spain, I, despite being in the country, was surrounded by the language all the time, but was still doing everything through English, ordering food, making friends, sorting out where I lived.

I could barely communicate the basics in Spanish, so I had to do it all in English.

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