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 · Mexico or Spain Spanish? You're Asking the Wrong Question! · 25 May 2026 podcast

Now, this can happen also for other languages. voice-verified

I'm not talking just about Spanish, but dealing with French dialects, Portuguese, or any language you may be thinking of and breaking it up into dialects. voice-verified

The honest answer is that this question is so far down your list of actual problems that it shouldn't even be on the list yet. voice-verified

Let me put this to you another way. voice-verified

I'm Irish. voice-verified

I speak with an Irish accent and I use Irish phrases. voice-verified

I've spent many years in the United States and I've spent several months in both England and Australia and many years meeting people from South Africa and Canada and every English speaking corner of the world. voice-verified

None of them has ever stopped the conversation and said, Benny, this isn't working out. voice-verified

You're simply gonna have to change your accent to speak like I do before we can continue. voice-verified

It just doesn't happen, especially in brief exchanges. voice-verified

Now obviously there are certain examples I could give of when a local term caused confusion, but I can truly only count them on one hand despite many decades of talking to thousands of people. voice-verified

So this is the entire dialect problem played out in a language I happen to speak natively, and it's not really a problem for me in English, so why are we acting like it's a five alarm fire in Spanish or French or Portuguese or other languages with obvious dialects? voice-verified

You see, when you're a beginner, what you actually have on your plate is enormous. voice-verified

You're trying to remember what the verb endings do. voice-verified

You're trying to keep present and past straight without melting your brain. voice-verified

You're trying to catch a sentence at full speed when half the words are still very strange sounding to you. voice-verified

You're trying to find the courage to just open your mouth in the first place. voice-verified

That is the workload. voice-verified

That's what's hard. voice-verified

Worrying about whether your Zed should sound like an S or a th in some context down the line, I promise you, is a luxury problem that's way down your list of triages of emergencies to solve. voice-verified

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