- In a little bit. And now we'll also be talking to
Nell McCafferty soon, but first,
my next guest grew up in Cavan,
he left school with mediocre German and poor Irish,
but ten years later he roams the world
picking up languages wherever he goes.
He calls himself the Irish polyglot,
here to tell us the secret,
please welcome Benny Lewis!
(audience applause)
(big band music)
So, Benny, you grew up in Cavan,
which is of course the language epicentre
of the world isn't it?
- That's right, it is. Yeah.
You'd be surprised,
you run into lots of Polish and even Irish.
There's a weekly meet-up, The Glour Braphney,
where everyone gets a bit of cold rye
in there you know?
- [Host] Okay, so what languages did you have
coming out of Cavan?
- I had just the English.
(laughter)
Like you said, I had a C in German,
I dropped down to pass Irish,
I just never had an interest in it in school, you know?
- So you went off to Spain, and you spend six months there
without picking up any Spanish either.
But then you had this epiphany,
a guy at a party, yeah?
- Yeah, so this Brazillian guy, when I met him
I thought he was American, because he spoke to me
in a pristine American accent.
And, he turns over to this other Brazilian,
and he saying something like,
(speaks in foreign language)
and then he flicked over to this French girl,
who was trying to chat him up,
and he was like, (speaks in foreign language),
and then he clicked over to the Spanish organiser
of the party and said, (speaks in foreign language).
And he flicked all these languages,
and back to English with me.
And I was like, "Bloody hell, you're a genius aren't you?"
And he was like, "I'm not a genius, I just keep practising ."
And, I, after the six month stint,
that was actually the one thing I wasn't doing,
and, something I always like to tell people,
is that languages, they can't really be learned.
They should be lived.
So, after the six months I made a switch,
where I tried to live, really, through Spanish,
and use it every day, and the biggest thing
I had to change is I had to make lots of mistakes.
- Because you see that's why most of us are
too embarrassed to speak the little bit we might have
of any language, in a way,
because we're making fools of ourselves.
You've got to get over that one.
- Yeah, you have to get over it because
you're not actually making fools of ourselves
because language is a means of communication,
so when you think about it in a more academic sense,
where you have to pass this exam,
you've got to get all your grammar right and so on.
That's not what it is in the real world.
As you said, I've travelled quite a bit myself,
and I've never felt, when I was starting with the language,
and speaking it really poorly, I mean like Tarzan-like speak
"Me want go eat here", um, people are always very patient.
And like we would be, if you were in Dublin,
and a tourist came up to you, and he kind of
spoke to you in broken English,
you'd give him a few seconds to ...
- [Host] I'd steal their iPhone
(laughter)
How many languages do you speak now?
- I'd actually have, in varying degrees, twelve languages.
Two or three would be like,
(audience applause)
That's only in the last, like I said
only spoke English.
- He says that, but it's not as if any of us
are going to know if he's speaking all those languages
or not, he could be making all of this up.
- Yeah. Because it's like in varying degrees,
they wouldn't wonderfully perfect.
There's two or three, I can work professionally,
like an engineer, my background, studied engineering.
Didn't do anything with languages in Uni.
And then there's others where I can have nice conversations,
others where I can reactivate that I've forgotten, you know?
- Okay. Remarkable.
Now, the thing about it is that you've written this book,
which is called "Fluent in Three Months",
and there is a lot of technical stuff in there.
But what I was interested in about the book,
the more bigger picture stuff.
So, basically, the first thing was to get your motivation.
That's the most important thing.
Because, I've made a stab at Italian so many times,
and then I kind of give up, and then I read your book
and I thought I need to find a passion for it,
and a motivation, and then you would do it , yeah?
- Yeah, like, I could have said to myself,
having done German for five years,
"I don't have the language gene."
"I wasn't meant to learn languages."
But, what the problem was
that I didn't see German as a living language.
I just saw it as rules in a book.
And when I got back into it later,
and I had this passion, and I let go of these excuses,
because, like, one thing people might say is
that I'm too old.
And, that's not true at all.
There are people who start learning languages at every age.
I've met people in their 70's
and succeed in learning languages.
You're never too old.
People would say, I don't have the time.
But you can make the time, just an hour or so a day.
Or people would say, I can't travel to the country.
And actually, I've learned quite a lot of languages
just via Skype.
I would just hop on the Internet.
Talk to someone in their home country,
for just three or four euro an hour.
Because, they're actually in some small village,
where that's actually decent money, and I would
get trained one on one, and speak the language
through virtual immersion,
without having to buy a plane ticket.
- Okay. Fantastic.
And the other thing you say as well is that
we should be like, if you want to learn French,
watch French movies, listen to French music and stuff,
and you absorb a lot of it that way as well.
- Yeah. And you can do all of that
over the internet as well.
You can listen to French streamed online,
you can watch a tv news station (speaking French),
France24.com, there's so much resources out there.
- And if we do all of that we'll pick up the language,
it will start coming to us better, yeah?
- Yeah. Because, it's all, like I said,
it's about living the language.
It's not about locking yourself away
with some dusty old grammar book.
It's getting out there and using it.
Even with my Irish, which I was miserable at in school.
You know, it's such a pity, but I discovered later,
I went off to (speaking foreign language)
and they were really kind of motivating me.
And I made friends though the language.
When you see it as this living thing,
then the courses don't matter, you can make mistakes,
you just get your point across,
it makes a world of difference.
- Okay, so you have travelled the world,
would you like to inspire other people to learn languages?
You have a website where people can go,
and there's lots of tricks and tips there, is that right?
- Yeah. The website is FluentInThreeMonths.com,
and just started this little website myself,
and it's now at almost a million visitors a month.
And I, use this, I actually get hundreds of emails a day
from people thanking me, and I'm not giving them anything
like quirky tips, like learn while you sleep or something.
I'm just doing, like you said, giving them the little nudge.
And saying, it's okay, you can get out there,
you can see videos of me on YouTube, and
I'm not confidently strolling in and bursting
out in fluent language.
I'm actually hesitating, and you can see me sweating.
Messing up the word order, and yet,
the other person I'm speaking to has the patience,
and that gives me the momentum to get started.
And once you've got that motivation,
you've got that passion, and you get started,
there's nothing that can stop you.
- Brilliant. If you can do it, then anyone can.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Benny Lewis!
(audience applause)
And Fluent in Three Months is available now,
and Benny is doing a nationwide book tour next month,
so for more details log on to FluentInThreeMonths.com