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

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Language & Travel Hacking · Why it's good to be the worst in the room · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

And while I'm up in Donegal this week, cheerfully.

out of my depth.

I hope you will push yourself out of your comfort zone.

I can promise you that the person who comes out the other side is worth every awkward minute it comes to become them.

So m thanks as always for listening and until the next time, happy language learning and happy travels.

Language & Travel Hacking · Summer language project: Boosting my Irish · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Language and Travel Hacking Podcast.

I'm your host Benny Lewis and today I'm talking about Irish, the language that is going to be my focus this summer.

Today I'm actually heading back to Ireland on a flight as this podcast goes out and it'll be the first summer that I've spent in Ireland beyond just very brief trips in a very, very long time.

After 23 years of chasing other languages around the world, pretty much only ever returning to Ireland for real time for the period leading up to Christmas, I wanted to actually spend the summer in Ireland and I am definitely not going to switch off my language learning.

I'm coming home specifically to fix my Irish.

Honestly, out of all the languages I keep up, the ones I call permanent rather than a dabble, Irish is pretty much my weakest after Mandarin.

And that stings more than I'd let on because it should be my language.

I'm Irish.

I learned it in school, but the problem is I spent decades focusing much more on other languages and I got very far with a lot of them and my Irish kind of lagged behind.

And there's something a bit backwards about being able to hold my own so confidently in so many languages while the one from my own country is one I'm so shaky in.

So Irish has always been one I really want to get right someday and I let slide the longest and I really do want to get it to fluency as soon as possible within the restrictions of my travels bringing me outside of Ireland as much as I do.

So at the end of last year, I finally did something about it and I kicked off a proper Irish project and I went home for a whole month.

I had an intensive burst and for several weeks I threw real hours at it every day and it worked.

By the end of those bursts, I was doing much better and it's like that with anything.

Anytime I stop treating a language as background noise and give it true concentration, it climbs and I get better at it.

Showing 161–180 of 589 · page 9 of 30