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

So they have brilliant memories.

But they still a lot of them sometimes can't hold a basic conversation in another language.

So memory on its own is not the thing you need.

It's what you do with the memory that counts.

So what are the systems?

Well, for me it comes down to two specific ones that work together.

The first is mnemonics.

These are silly little mental images that hook a foreign word onto something else that sounds similar.

And I used to make nearly all of these up myself, but these days I'll actually happily get AI to suggest one whenever I'm stuck.

And I mentioned a few in my book that you might have heard.

If you read it yourself, like when I was trying to remember the French word for train station is Gar, I pictured Garfield, the cat, running stressfully through the train station, and that helped me make that connection.

Or when I was learning Mandarin and I had to learn that the target is Mubiao.

Then I picture a cow who says moo with a target on its ass being shot with an arrow made of Bs for the B and the Ow.

So it was this elaborate story, but it helped me remember that word when I needed to say it.

And eventually with these mnemonics, the great thing is you only need to use them a handful of times and then you just naturally know the word.

More recently, a couple of years ago, when I was learning Korean and needed to remember that the word for early is iljeek, I

Asked AI for a suggestion and it told me it sounded a little bit like French il est chic.

And so I pictured instead somebody who is always annoyingly early all the time and impeccably dressed and looking very chic.

And that kind of image helped me remember, you know, il chic, il est chic, and you make that connection and you remember what early is.

In Korean.

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