How much does living in different countries shape your personality and influence your personal development?

In an episode packed with cultural exploration anecdotes, writer, translator, and educator Kelsey Lechner shares her experience with learning six vastly different languages, keeping her career tightly related to languages in unexpected ways, and adapting to new cultures while living in countries like Tanzania, Japan, and Bangladesh.

Kelsey also shares her flexible language learning strategy pointers, which she developed while learning Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, Swahili, and Bengali. She and Benny discuss how social acceptance works when trying to adjust to new cultures, how to take missteps in cross-cultural communication in stride, and how to deal with culture shocks.

(Psss… Wait until minute 28 for a funny anecdote about how mixing up Bangladesh and Spanish led Kelsey to hit up on someone without meaning to!)

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Podcast theme: “A New Beginning” by Shannon Kennedy