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

I didn't learn my languages because I'm special, but because I wanted to connect with people.

And wanting to connect is about the most ordinary human motivation there is.

Nobody needs a gift for that.

And that's essentially the gap between 21-year-old Benny and 44-year-old Benny.

On one side, a monolingual guy who was the worst in his Spanish class and had quietly written himself off ever learning a language.

On the other, all those numbers I told you at the start, there was no gene that switched on between those two extreme points.

no knack showed up in my 30s i just kept doing the unspecial thing of showing up speaking badly and keeping at it on consistently and the compounding of time did the rest for me

So all the numbers I said, the eight languages, 20 dabbles, 12 flavors of Spanish and French, all the 51 countries is downstream of that one clueless, unconfident 21 year old deciding to start his multilingual life adventures.

So here's my birthday wish for you guys, and I would spend it on you rather than me.

I hope this year brings your own light bulb moment.

Maybe a big, huge one like the one I had in my first polyglot evening, where you look up mid-conversation and suddenly realize you're doing the thing you were once completely sure wasn't for someone like you.

Maybe that or maybe something small, just a little realization that I'm finally using the language when I never have before.

If you keep speaking, it'll arrive sooner than you think.

And speaking of me flexing my polyglot muscles, I also wanted to mention that I am starting to send out way more language-specific help than I ever have before with my email list.

So if you join it, you'll get a free Speak in a Week course.

And then every week,

I have been emailing people every single week for 16 years now with language advice, but it's been a general email for the most part and I'm going to tailor it much more to language specific tips.

So when people sign up, they have a drop down menu and you can pick your target language and I'll help you out with that.

So if you're already on the list, I should know your language, but feel free to reply to any of my Friday emails to confirm.

And I'll make sure you're getting the language specific updates that I'm sending.

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