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

Person after person quietly convinced that maybe they shouldn't even be there since they aren't ready yet. voice-verified

A lot of them maybe comparing themselves to me and coming up short in their own heads. voice-verified

But here's what I think none of them could actually see while they were apologizing to me is I was fishing around for my own words. voice-verified

I was in my own head. voice-verified

You see, German and Italian are my rustiest good languages, so I still speak them well, but I struggle because it's been years since I've used them very consistently. voice-verified

My French and Portuguese are better, but right now my head is so stuffed full of Spanish, since that's what I'm speaking all day, every day, that everything else kind of has to elbow its way out. voice-verified

So rather than me sitting there grating everyone else, I was busy overthinking my own language problems. voice-verified

And at events like this, it's almost funny that everyone at the table thinks they aren't good enough. voice-verified

So when I told the German learner that she should be proud of herself, she shook that off and instantly compared herself to me and said how much worse she was. voice-verified

But I've had months or sometimes years of living in some of these countries. voice-verified

The comparison simply doesn't work for someone who's never even been abroad and especially is only at the beginning stages of the language. voice-verified

And the mistakes themselves were never actually the problem. voice-verified

If you voice-verified

Look back on any of these conversations, they kept pushing through the simple mistakes for the most part, and what actually stops the conversation isn't a wrong word ending or a missing word. voice-verified

It's the moment you decide you're not good enough and you go quiet. voice-verified

The self-judgment is the only thing in the whole room with the power to actually shut you down. voice-verified

I'm lucky that I've been doing this such a long time that I let go of most, if not all, of my own self-doubt when it comes to language learning quite some time ago. voice-verified

I still noticed my mistakes. voice-verified

I'm just not afraid of them anymore. voice-verified

And the proof I lean on is dead simple. voice-verified

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