Today (March 17th) is St. Patrick’s day! So I thought that I’d share this video with you to celebrate seachtain na Gaeilge - the week of Irish language and culture. Here is some more info about Irish if you are curious.

You can also watch this video in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto…
and of course, in Irish!!

This video is a compilation of some of the videos I’ve made over the last year and a half. Rather than just being in one language, I’ve mixed it up with the 8 languages I know right now! Enjoy

Don’t forget that you can also check out my regularly updated blog, in which I talk about how I learned all of these languages! That’s at fluentin3months.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ04Y085alM

Low quality video in Esperanto with English subtitles (high quality one here)

Today I’d like to share my excellent experience with 360 Esperanto speakers in the north of the Czech Republic with you all! The “IJK” (International Youth Congress of Esperanto) is the world’s largest gathering of young Esperanto speakers (sometimes reaching up to 1000 people), and was by far the best week I’ve had in a long time!

Note that this video is not in English. I usually translate my videos to 7 languages, but this is very time consuming for videos that will not be watched as much. So this time it is only viewable in Esperanto (of course), and Czech (both with subtitles). Apart from the relevance of it taking place in the Czech Republic, I made it in Czech to practise the language as part of my experiment to see if I can learn it to fluency in just three months.

I hope you enjoy this short video! Do let me know your thoughts in the comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xKu9FqvFNk

(video in English)
Note that this post is a copy of the one over at my fluentin3months.com blog. There may be more comments over there.

This is a short video (less than 3 minutes long) I made about how to start learning Italian while I was passing through Rome again this year. There’s only so much you can say in 3 minutes, so it’s mostly a light-hearted video that obviously can’t be so detailed and is not to be taken seriously! Most of all, it was a good excuse for me to dress and act silly around Rome! You can watch it embedded through Youtube above in English, or through Dotsub below in Italian with English subtitles. [Note that these may not be viewable in feed readers / for email subscribers, so you might have to click through to my site]. You can also watch it entirely in Esperanto, French, Spanish and Portuguese on this site by clicking the links to the right!

(video in Italian with English subtitles)

Useful links

Here are some useful links that might help you in learning Italian! Feel free to share others in the comments:

http://www.wordreference.com Great free online dictionary with an excellent, active and helpful forum for asking for translations of particular terms

http://it.answers.yahoo.com and http://answers.yahoo.com Another forum, the famous Yahoo Answers, but in Italian! If you have intermediate Italian, then ask a question (in Italian) about the language in the Società e Culture –> Lingue section. A huge amount of natives are only too eager to help. This is great for getting extremely quick answers for questions or having small text reviewed, for free. Note that the answerers are non-linguists (and sometimes mostly teenagers) so you should wait until you have several answers to be 100% sure. For beginners in Italian, use the second link for the same site in English and post your question in the Society and Culture –> Languages section. When writing in English, usually the wordreference forum is much better; non-natives would be answering in the English version of the Yahoo Answers site, and once again there are a lot of teenagers with time to kill there…

http://italian.about.com Interesting blog for beginner to intermediate learners. Includes regularly updated articles and free resources for learning the language.

http://www.transparent.com/italian/ Another blogger with a good chance of doing really well in the Top 100 Language Blogs, with excellent frequent tips about the language with lots of examples.

http://www.marinajonica.org/ A blog entirely in Italian written by an Italian (and good friend of mine) about Montegiordano in the beautiful Calabria region in the south of Italy. Italians blog too, so if you do a search for a topic that interests you (technology, music, etc.), but in Italian, then you can practise by reading modern content written by natives regularly. http://blogsearch.google.it is a good search tool for finding such blogs.

As I mentioned in the video, twitter is a good way of practising each day with an Italian status update. Feel free to follow my regularly updated Italian twitter! It is not proofread, so I can’t guarantee that there are no occasional mistakes.

The Internet is full of sites in Italian; anything you can find in English (news, sports, blogs etc.), you can almost certainly find it in Italian!! A quick search on Google will give you a list of radio stations and even some live streaming video that you can watch/listen to. If you feel like sharing a site about learning Italian, or one in Italian, do so in the comments!

I hope you liked my video!! Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.;)

Anyway, in the mean time I have started another website, that I plan on updating about twice a week (it’s only in English this time!!) Basically, I have decided to learn one of Europe’s hardest languages, Czech, in just 3 months!!! I am blogging about the experience, but not actually discussing Czech itself so much as giving general language learning tips that I’ve picked up as I have learned my other languages, which I am currently applying to learning this new language. Feel free to follow me on my other blog to read all about it at www.fluentin3months.com if you are curious about what techniques I use to learn languages, or are generally curious to follow this experiment and see if I’m successful! You can subscribe on the left of that site, and all comments are appreciated!

In the mean time, I still have some interesting videos that I will be posting here asap!! Thanks for your patience

But for those of you who want to hear my best tips now, you can check out an interview that was just taken with me over on the More Oftens podcast/blog. It’s a new podcast by some friends of mine, Zac and Brady. They asked me some interesting questions and I gave some tips for how I travel so much and manage to learn languages quickly. You can see the post directly on their site or download the MP3 to listen to later. Be warned! The entire interview lasts over 45 minutes, so maybe download the podcast/MP3 to listen to later!

All comments about the interview appreciated here below or on the More Oftens blog.

This video is in HD quality. If your connection is slow, or the video is not loading, you can watch it directly on Youtube in normal quality. It is also originally on Sam’s blog here. I have also added subtitles to the video on the non-English versions of my site.

Today I have a guest video post from a good friend of mine, Sam Powers, who I hosted in my house in Buenos Aires through Couchsurfing. He also has a video blog, in which he and his friend William are travelling all around the world on a tight budget and sharing their story in a written and excellently edited video blog. Even though he recorded and edited it, I still feature highly in the video, so it’s only appropriate to include it here!
We show you an incredible event that we were a part of in Buenos Aires; a pillow fight that thousands of people took part in! It is what’s known as a flashmob; where hundreds or thousands agree to meet (in this case, with the help of a facebook group, other sites and word of mouth) and do something crazy to confuse the general public and have a great time. The result; 2,000 people and a huge pillow fight! Many, many thanks to Sam for sharing this video with us!
If you enjoyed this video, leave a comment below (or on Sam’s Blog!) and don’t forget to subscribe to our blogs to see more of our videos!

This video is in HD quality. If it is not loading or you have a slow connection, you can view it directly on Youtube here.
This video is also available in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Esperanto and Irish!

Have you ever wondered how to subscribe to updates on a website? Have you ever seen this symbol on web pages and wondered what it means?

RSS is all over the web, but so many people don’t even know what it is! In this short fast-paced video I explain it as I run around Buenos Aires and show how it can be used.
Some important links that you should refer to after watching the video include how to use Google Reader, and Google Alerts for RSS feeds on Google searches, and everywhere else just look for the RSS symbol or something similar! If you like this video, make sure to leave a comment and of course… don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed!!

This video is in HD quality. If it is not opening or you have a slow connection, access it directly through Youtube.

Before I get into sharing my funny and practical video ideas for this year with you, I thought I’d kick off the year by showing how I started it! This 1 minute video (in Esperanto, with subtitles) shows me in my ridiculous costume that won the “most catastrophic” costume of the Internacia Seminario event, followed by the countdown to 2009.
If you’d like to see more of what happened that week check out the full video (about 4 minutes) on my Esperanto blog and change “Esperanto 100%” to “English 100%” for English subtitles in the video. You can also see a very funny Jerry Springer sketch (also with English subtitles) that we did, in which my gay character’s boyfriend had a secret to confess! All videos of the week can be seen on my flickr account.

Leave comments if you like it!

2008 was a great year for me; I started in London, travelled through the Northeast of Brazil and hosted 40 people during the Carnival, then went to Tenerife to hike up Mount Teide. I spent a nice summer in Ireland to improve my Irish, followed by a quick trip to Slovakia to learn Esperanto, then the states to camp in the desert and finally Argentina to learn some tango!

I started the year with the plan to share my travels on this blog through videos (since as you can tell from this entry, I’m a very dull writer!!) and I’m very happy with how it’s progressed. I’ve recently redesigned the site to include some “widgets” on the right, such as my upcoming travel plans, an easy subscribe option with number of subscribers (already over a hundred) and I’ll add more options as I expand on the website. I’ll constantly update these widgets so even though I still only post one or two videos per month (it’s a lot of work since I translate each video to 7 languages), but the right hand side of my site will change regularly.

For example I have included my twitter updates, and every day I will be writing in this miniblog in each of the 7 languages on my blog. It is somewhat like an independent facebook status update and you can always see what I’m up to on that! If you want to practice another language I recommend you try to write in such a miniblog daily in that language. The maximum character limit of 140 means it really isn’t that much work. It’s been great for making sure I write in each language that I want to practise every single day.

So what’s to come in 2009? My current travel plans include spending 2 months or so in the Goa region in India, followed by 2 months in Sicily. After the summer somewhere in Europe I’ll head back towards Latin America. However, these plans may change. If I find some interesting events or discoveries in those places I’ll make short videos to share with you in documentary style!

In the mean time I’ll be uploading a lot more playful advice videos, not related to where I am. These will be about some things I’ve learned in the last few years that I’d really like to share with you that help me travel better and use the Internet to work efficiently. My most popular video by far has been the hand-luggage one (over 16,000 views in just two months), so they will be in a similar ridiculous, funny (yet practical) style. Upcoming videos include the following:

* Hand luggage video part 2: How to bring all you want with you, this time using NO BAGS. If you liked my towel trick, you’ll love my other ideas…
* What is RSS?
* Stumbleupon video – channel hopping of the 21st century.
* How to avoid wasting time on the Internet

By popular demand I will also be sharing some language learning tips and giving hints as to how I travel so much while working and possibly giving some translation tips too. If you’d like to see any of these videos as soon as they are available and haven’t subscribed yet, just use the email (or RSS)  subscription option on the right!!

Your comments now and later will be much appreciated!! How I develop the site depends entirely on the feedback I get from you. What do you want to see, what don’t you want to see? Complaints or compliments? Just type them in below!

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming

This video is in HD quality. If you have a slow connection, you can watch it in normal quality directly on Youtube.

This video is also available in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto and Irish!

I was living in Buenos Aires for a few weeks so I took the chance to learn a little about the famous dance, tango, which is hugely popular in Argentina and Uruguay. I managed to master the basics and learn a few things about tango culture, so I made this short video (3:33 long) to show my progress! Many thanks to my instructor María José (“Majo”). If you enjoy it, make sure to leave comments and subscribe to see my future videos!

Click here to watch the video on Youtube in lower quality (slower connections)

You can also watch this video in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Irish and Esperanto.

For the last week in August, this normally barren desert is occupied by 50,000 people for the “Burning Man” event. It’s very difficult to describe what the event is about, but hopefully this short video will give you a slight idea!
Please leave comments if you like it! Don’t forget to subscribe to my blog or check out my other videos too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luUndflUCpQ

Click here to see this video in high quality. You can also watch it in French, Spanish and Esperanto, Portuguese, la Italian, and Irish.

This is the first of my travel-tip videos. One thing that is currently a problem for budget travelling is the extra charge introduced by including checked luggage. To avoid this and waiting around in the airport, it’s much better to fly only with hand luggage when you can. In this short and comical video I show how you can bring a lot more than you think! If you enjoy it please leave a comment, check out my other videos and subscribe to see more!

This year I found out about Esperanto, the international and neutral language, which is also the world’s easiest to learn. It encourages open cultural exchange without preference to any particular speaker. I very much liked the idea, but I wanted to see if it really worked! So, I signed up to the first international Summer Esperanto Study program in Slovakia, which was organized by Lernu ; a website for learning Esperanto for free. I saw an international community that I never knew existed. I found out that Esperanto isn’t just a language; it’s people and ideas that work together. I hope that this video shows exactly why this was only the first of many Esperanto events that I will be going to.

If you would like to see more, there are photos and all the unedited videos on my flickr profile.

If you liked this video, please leave comments!

Click here to listen to it as you read the transcript (11 minutes long).

For the first minute, Toni talks about a Spanish TV series: “Around the world in 80 days”, then he continues…

Toni: Our next guest’s blog has a title that reminds us of this series; it’s called “Around the world in 80… Mays” (years)! We have this story’s main character on the line! Benny Lewis, how are you doing? …. Hello, welcome to Aragon Radio, how are you doing Benny?

Benny: I’m very well thanks!

Toni: Nice to meet you! So, “Around the world in 80 Mays” Are you going to spend your entire life travelling?

Benny: Well not my entire life, no. The name sounds cool that’s all. But I’ve already been travelling for 6 years straight and I’ll be continuing for maybe 5 or 6 more.

Toni: 5 or 6 more years, so around 12 to 15 years in total then?

Benny: Yes. The thing is, if you travel so much, you realize what’s important such as family, and some day I’d like to settle down. But it is possible that I spend that much time travelling now that I know how to.

Toni: Benny, you were born in Cavan, a town in Ireland, and you always go back there between travels. When did you start this travelling adventure exactly and why?

Benny: I spent summers between university years in the states and had quite a good time. So when I graduated, I went to Spain. I was originally only going to stay for three months. But I liked it so much that I decided to stay for a year and I really worked hard to learn the language. After the year, I asked myself why can’t I just do the same thing over again; travel, spend a year in a country, learn its language and move on to the next one.

Toni: So, your trip to Spain really changed your life then?

Benny: That’s right. It was the first time that I really lived abroad, since I was more of a tourist in the states.

Toni: So you prefer to stay longer in a country and learn about its culture… so if someone wants to get to know a country, even just a little, spending a week there just can’t be enough, right?

Benny: Oh, definitely not. I’ve discussed this at length with other globetrotters; “what is the difference between a traveller and a tourist”? If you go somewhere for just a weekend, you don’t see anything really. For example, I spent 9 months living in Paris and in a weekend I basically showed the best of the city to my family and they loved it. But in the rest of the 9 months I really got to see what daily life was like for Parisians and even tried to live like they do. I do this each time in every city I visit.

Toni: Benny, you speak seven languages at the moment, is that right?

Benny: Well… I prefer to say that I can “get by” in 7 languages!

Toni: If you “get by” like you do in Spanish, then that’s quite impressive!! Your Spanish is fantastic!

Benny: Ah, thanks!! Yes, the others are more or less the same level as my Spanish.

Toni: So you have a talent for languages then, it’s even a part of your work now, isn’t it?

Benny: Right now it is… but when I say I speak seven languages, people think that I was born with natural talents. They always say “What a pity I’ll never be able to do the same!” But actually, I never did well in languages in school, and when I first went to Spain I only knew a few words like “hola” and “siesta” and that was it. But I always carried a small book in my pocket to study whenever I would be waiting and I really tried hard to reach a higher level and I avoided speaking English; that is quite important. I know a lot of travellers that say that they just can’t learn languages and it’s because they travel with their friends from home or boy/girlfriend or whatever. That’s why I try to always speak the language of the country and after a year anyone in the world can learn a language if they try hard enough. Erasmus students do it all the time. The only thing that’s a little impressive about me is that I repeated the process 6 times over!

Toni: Benny, give me the address of your blog so our interested listeners can check it out.

Benny: Irishpolyglot.com, www.i-r-i-s-h-p-o-l-y-g-l-o-t.com

Toni: …g-l-o-t.com so that’s www.irishpolyglot.com

Benny: Yes, the name is just “políglota irlandés” (Irish polyglot) but in English.

Toni: Irishpolyglot.com, then?

Benny: Yes, exactly.

Toni: And here I can see “The Hike up Mount Teide”!

Benny: That’s right; I always dreamed about living in the Canary Islands. My interest in Spain began when I was a teenager and Spanish students from there spent the summer in my town to improve their English. So this year I finally made it to Tenerife, and I didn’t quite know what to expect, but on the very first day I made friends, went to a party and even found an apartment. Some locals invited me to hike up to the top of the Teide with them and the experience was so unforgettable that I recorded it with my camera and edited it in the style of a documentary, and it can be watched on my site; I’ve gotten great feedback from it, it’s only 6 minutes long and I added music and Google Earth animations to show each step of the journey from space. The blog is for showing everyone how my travels are going using videos and soon I am going to go into more detail explaining how I do it all; learning languages and travel so much etc.

Toni: This is all very interesting!! So tell me something; it must be very expensive travelling around so much?

Benny: That’s what they say. I’m always asked if I won the lotto or if I have rich parents who pay for everything, but honestly, you can travel around the world with very little money. I usually only have a couple of hundred Euro to my name. What’s much more important than earning large amounts of money is learning how to spend the money you have well. I don’t have a car and I don’t buy a lot of unnecessary items for example, so when I go to a country and look for work, it may not pay that well, but I always have enough to buy a plane ticket with Ryanair or Easyjet or any other cheap airline and go to the next country and start over.

Toni: And on top of all that, you are an active “Couchsurfer”, aren’t you? That’s something that we have always been fascinated by here.

Benny: Yes, Couchsurfing really is interesting. It’s another way that you can travel around without spending much. There are travellers that return home to their daily lives but want to somehow keep the travelling spirit alive in them and meet other globetrotters without having to travel themselves. So they make a profile on Couchsurfing.com and host people in their houses. The guests don’t have to pay anything of course. There are a lot of good security features so you know you won’t have any problems, so each time that I start off in a country I spend a few days staying in the house of someone from the city itself and not in a hotel or youth hostel, which may be lots of fun, but you will only end up meeting other foreigners and of course, you will spend a lot more. Then, if I decide to spend a lot of time in a city, I’ll rent my own place and let couchsurfers stay in my house. Usually I’ll have a a spare bed or comfortable couch for them and for me it’s great because I get to hear all of their stories.

Toni: That’s great! So, today we found out about the amazing story of Benny Lewis, a full-time globetrotter!! It’s been a pleasure, many thanks for your time and we wish you the best of luck in your future travels!

Benny: Thanks to you, it was my pleasure!

The Irish language and culture is really amazing; even after I have seen so many other ones from around the world. So I thouroughly enjoyed a week at Oideas Gael’s language and culture course in Gleann Cholm Cille, Donegal, Ireland. I made this video (in the style of a documentary) to show what it was like from my eyes. If you enjoyed it please leave comments

Here is a video documentary about my experience hiking up the Teide with locals from the island. I used some new editing techniques and included 3-D Google Earth shots to show exactly where we were at each step.

Please do leave comments or contact me to let me know what you think about it!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY

Here’s the two of us just before dancing:

• Completely new design using WordPress technology, which gives easier navigation, separation of posts and the ability to add comments, like most blogs out there
• Option to subscribe to find out immediately if I have made a new post
• A page to directly contact me through the site.
• Side menus for language selection, viewing my microblog twitter feed, etc.
• Automatic language detection!! I quite like this one; entering the base address www.irishpolyglot.com will automatically give you my site in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto or Irish based on your browser’s default language setting. If you select a language other than the default, then it will be saved for your next visit!
• Each page is entirely in the selected language. Not just the posts, but the site’s date-format,  clickable buttons/links, headers etc.
• From an administrative point of view, I’ve done most of the work coding the site so adding a new post is easy and I can do it more often.

My work is far from complete, but it’s a great improvement on the previous version!! As far as design on the site itself goes, I still have to tinker with the overall page layout and design until I find one that I like (not this one), write a good “About me” page and iron out a few minor problems.

Why all this work? What will I be using this site for? At the moment all posts are only about my travels since late last year; hardly interesting to anyone who doesn’t know me, although I will continue to write about where I am. The reason I’ve put so much work into improving the site is because eventually I’d like to get lots of visitors for other articles that I’ll be writing. In the last 6 years that I’ve been travelling I’ve learned a few things and can give some general travel tips and language learning tips. Also, I’ve been on the net since 1993 and am online nearly all day, and like to keep up to date with the latest developments out there when not travelling so I have a few very useful web 2.0 secrets I’d like to share! Otherwise I’ll be writing about things I believe people would like to know about, and hopefully the site will naturally evolve into something really worth a visit one day.

Any site-design advice, or general blog tips are appreciated! Any any thoughts in general or encouragement will be well received, just contact me or leave a comment below