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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And you don't necessarily need to be fluent for this.
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People assume that.
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The friend making only kicks in once you've reached those very high levels.
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But it doesn't have to wait until that long.
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I think back certainly to earlier this year, when I was in Malaysia and Taiwan, where I was working with a beginner level of Malay and a really rusty level of Mandarin that I hadn't properly used in 14 years.
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Despite this, I still made loads of.
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Friends and I got invited to things and I had locals light up the second I tried to speak, even if poorly, in their language.
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That willingness to try is what does it.
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The grammar can be a mess, the accent can be all over the place, but people don't care.
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What they respond to is that you came towards them instead of waiting behind that glass.
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But here's what's really
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Going on, in my opinion, when you speak even a little of someone's language, you're essentially telling them something before you've said anything of true substance.
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By speaking their language, you're telling them that you care.
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You're meeting them at their level rather than coming in as a conquering foreigner.
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And people open up to that in a way they almost never do for the tourist who stayed comfortable.
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The tío and tía across the road didn't necessarily adopt me for those breakfasts because my Spanish was good, even though my Spanish is very fluent.
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They did so because I tried to actually stay for a conversation with them.
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So if you've been learning a language and you're stuck wondering whether it's worth it, whether all that study is going to pay off, your answer is that it's not because of what's going to happen in that textbook.
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The payoff is that breakfast experience like I had that you didn't know you could have.
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The friend that you meet on a canoe in a river in the middle of a random state in Mexico, the family that walk beside you and
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Showing 461–480 of 589 · page 24 of 30
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