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

And what I guess loads of you have done at some point with your own struggles is I kind of decided this just wasn't right for somebody like me.

Some people have the language gene and I clearly wasn't one of them.

So that's how I started off.

But fast forward a few years later to a night in Florianopolis in the south of Brazil.

And I was at a couch surfing event.

And for the first time in my life, this particular event was a very important moment for me because I found myself bouncing between separate groups of people speaking in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian with native speakers in a single evening.

I'd never done that before.

So I managed to find my groove in one conversation and then slide into the next conversation in a completely different language.

And my brain somewhat kept up with it.

I got better with it over time, but this is the first time I truly ever in my life felt like a polyglot.

And somewhere in the middle of that evening, I kind of had that light bulb moment that...

has carried everything ever since.

Nothing was added to my brain since that original Spanish class.

The only thing that changed is I finally started opening my mouth and getting it wrong.

Speaking from day one all the time on purpose.

The worst student in the class and the guy hopping between four languages at a party were the same person with the same brain.

One of them was just willing to sound ridiculous in front of strangers and the other wasn't confident enough for that.

And everything since then has been essentially different versions of that realization applied over and over for 23 years.

A language is not a talent test and it's not a passport stamp.

It's people and the willingness to meet them where they are.

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