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 · You Don't Need a Good Memory to Learn a Language · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

Most people assume that if you can pick up languages, you must have some kind of steel trap memory.

And that vocabulary just sticks to you.

And for me, it's always been the exact opposite.

I've I've really come to believe that my terrible memory isn't something I succeed in spite of.

It's actually a big part of why I got good at languages in the first place.

And it's been like this my entire life.

When I was taking German back in school, I was always unable to take the

the vocabulary list to heart and I would forget it very quickly.

And then years later, when I've made a first proper run at Spanish, the same thing would happen.

I'd learn a word, feel good about it, and then it would just slide right out of my head by the next morning.

So the obvious conclusion that I almost drew myself is I'm just not destined to learn languages because a bad memory feels like a closed door stopping you from being able to do anything like that.

If you can't remember words and a language is made up of thousands of words, then surely you are done before you've even started.

But that's not what happened because I decided since I couldn't trust

My own memory to do its job, I was forced very early to go and build systems that would get the job done for me.

So I never had the option of just absorbing vocabulary like a sponge, so I got clever about how I would make it stick.

So I have met people who are just really good at remembering things with a natural memory, and they don't have to build any.

any kind of system and get used to absorbing a language like that, they might get further on raw recall at the start, but down the line, when the language gets big and requires a lot of other things beyond just memory.

They actually have nothing to fall back on.

So I want to push back on the idea that a great memory is the key to language learning.

I've met people who can recite the likes of pie to an absurd number of digits, or who, if you're talking to them, can pull up some really random fact at the dinner table that I'd never be able to produce in a hundred years.

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