Why your streak is lying to you
Ines explains why daily app streaks feel productive but rarely lead to conversation, and lays out a weekly routine built around listening, speaking and one honest mistake a day.
Portuguese from the dish pit, with Karim Haddad
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Show notes
Learning in the noise
Karim Haddad arrived in Lisbon from Beirut with a culinary diploma and about ten words of Portuguese. Two years later he was running a kitchen pass in it. Ines asks him how that happened without a single lesson, and separates the parts that were luck from the parts that were method.
- Why a kitchen is a brutal but effective classroom
- The notebook Karim kept in his apron pocket
- Being laughed at, and deciding it did not matter
- How to build a Karim-style immersion when you do not work in one
Next time: the German exam that took three attempts, and why the third one worked.
Transcript
Hola, welcome back to Borrowed Tongues. I am Ines Castellanos Roig, and today I have a guest who makes most language courses look slow. Karim Haddad is a chef from Beirut. He moved to Lisbon with almost no Portuguese, took no classes, downloaded nothing, and two years later he was shouting orders across a kitchen in a language he had learned entirely by ear. I wanted to know how. Was it talent? Was it desperation? Was it the notebook he kept in his apron pocket? We talk about all of it, including the night a sous chef laughed at his accent and what Karim decided about that. Stay to the end, because I turn his story into three things you can do this week even if you work in an office. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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