You Don’t Have to Leave Your Town to Learn a New Language

There are no more excuses about not having the money to go to the country of the language you want to speak. If you live in a metropolitan area, you are likely to find ethnic, cultural and language enclaves where you can find native speakers with whom to practice your target language.

Multilingual Benny Lewis of Fluent in Three Months and I traveled to various cultural communities in San Francisco to show that you can practice or learn a language in San Francisco without having to leave the city. Russians would speak to us, but they didn’t want to be recorded on film. Somehow my eyes decided to hide from this photo, too, although I am not particularly camera shy.

Unfortunately, due to timing issues, we didn’t get to speak to people in the Mission District in Spanish and no Russians wanted to be filmed. But we made a wholehearted effort to speak to as many people as we could.

Benny moves to a new country about every season to learn a new language and show that you don’t have to take expensive classes or have a personal tutor to learn a language. He immerses himself from Day One.

He is currently living in Chicago on his mission to learn Klingon for the Star Trek Convention. Obviously, there are no Klingon enclaves in Chicago where he can sit for a coffee and wax on in Star Trek lingo. So he will be up to his own devices to learn the language as he has done for so many already. He has many videos on his YouTube channel in various languages, including American Sign Language, Esperanto, German and many others.