Well, I had a Greek 6 month challenge under my belt: I intended to study three months at home, and then three months in Greece. I also intended to achieve level B2, which would mean I could understand the main ideas of complex texts, interact quite fluently with native speakers and express myself fluently after these six months which seemed quite reasonable at that time. Time’s up and I give you some of my recollections of how this whole challenge …

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I want to talk a bit about making the lingua franca, the international or the bridge language of the world. I don’t want to give you a summary that you can find everywhere else, instead I want to share my idea with you. Having that in mind, you still need some context first.
The Lingua Franca
My Oxford American Dictionary gives the definition of lingua franca as:
a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different.
The …

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Ziad Fazah is supposedly the worlds greatest living polyglot who can converse in 58 languages. That’s the story I had heard. Personally, I have never met Ziad but I heard he wrote books about languages and he spoke to some people in different languages. That was what I used to know.
That was until I saw this video (in Spanish):

Summary of the video: he gets asked a bunch of questions in a bunch of languages and he doesn’t answer any while …

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This is a great moment because I have been waiting to write this for the last 3 months or so. Probably more. Also because I did not know whether I would make it. I believe I know enough Portuguese now to say that I have made it so that’s why I’m writing this now. I have managed to learn Portuguese in 5 months and I am going to tell you how I did it here.
Some background
First of all, I should …

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Learning languages in a limited amount of time – is it possible? Well, some people do it. I want to collect a small list of personal stories of people who have done this from the web and link to them here. Here goes:

Chinese in Two Years – a story that I have found in Aspiring Polyglot’s blog about a guy who has learnt Chinese from scratch in two years. Well, pretty impressive, considering it’s Chinese and not some Romance language …

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