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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

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Language & Travel Hacking · Everyone in the Room Thinks They're the Worst · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

I'm your host, Benny Lewis, and today I am talking to you from my 19th Mexican state of Jalisco, specifically from the city of Guadalajara, which is hosting the World Cup starting this week. voice-verified

But another advantage of being in such a major city after being off the beaten track for several weeks is that there are voice-verified

Loads of meetups here, including my favorite kind, language exchange events. voice-verified

So a few nights ago, I was sitting at the German table of a language exchange, and there were several tables for other languages too. voice-verified

You just put up a chair wherever you see the flag of whatever you want to practice. voice-verified

And across me was a Mexican lady talking about her plans to visit Germany one day. voice-verified

And she was holding her own for a good several minutes in German, telling me all about it, until she hit one word that she just simply couldn't figure out, and that glitched threw her completely off her game. voice-verified

She stopped and apologized for her level and she switched to Spanish to do so. voice-verified

But the thing is that up until that moment I had her filed in my head as a confident, capable German speaker. voice-verified

The apology genuinely surprised me. voice-verified

It took me out of the conversation and it made me realize, oh, she thinks she's struggling. voice-verified

And this is someone who's never been to Germany. voice-verified

She's never even left Mexico in her life. voice-verified

She built her level through studying and by going to German practice opportunities like that one. voice-verified

And she was using it to have a real conversation with me. voice-verified

So the only other person in the whole room who thought it wasn't good enough was her. voice-verified

She wasn't a unique case either. voice-verified

Over at the Italian table, there was a guy who apologized for nearly every mistake he made. voice-verified

And in the shorter chats that night that I had in French and Portuguese, uh with other people whose only language growing up was Spanish, I found similar mentality voice-verified

Yeah. voice-verified

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