Is the Exchange Dead?

There have been tons of discussions in the past about points and the expiration of points, and I don’t want to revisit any of that. However, I do have a more general question for those of you who have been active on the site longer than I have (or for the staff). I’ve been studying Korean for several months and am currently doing a 90 day challenge. I want to meet all of my targets, including speaking and writing. I’ve done some speaking off the site and entered it in, and of course I could do the same with writing. But, if I can get good writing correction from a tutor or have meaningful fifteen minute conversations with a tutor who then sends me a report, that seems worth a few bucks…

However, I’ve noticed that there is very little, if any, current activity on the Exchange, at least for Korean. There hasn’t been any writing corrected in months and there haven’t been Korean conversation times listed for weeks. I guess I could contact tutors one by one and ask them, but I can’t even tell who is still active on the site.

Any thoughts? Should I just use LingQ for listening, reading, and vocabulary, and go elsewhere for speaking and writing?

Also, if I’m completely misunderstanding how conversations and writing correction works, please correct me.

I cannot speak for Korean but in general you’ll not see all Exchange activities on the Exchange site because requests can be made privately. I for myself only correct writings if they were sent privately, because I dislike to compete with other tutors not knowing how many points I’ll get in the end.

You should ask Alex (from the LingQ stuff) which Korean tutor he recommends: Login - LingQ

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Hi! The Exchange, as VeraI notes, only displays publicly shared activities. To find a tutor, go to “Exchange > Find a Tutor”. You can use the filters on the left to, for example, list tutors by Activity Score or Recently Active to find tutors who have been active.

Let us know if you have any additional questions!

Do you guys keep statistics for which langauges are the most active for the exchange? I would not expect Korean to be so active compared to something like French, for example.

The exchange is active, but it probably varies a lot by language. Give it a try, and see how it goes before going elsewhere…

The Korean exchange page is not exactly bustling with activities but I do see one request made this month and a couple from December.

I for one am always willing to help although I have not done anything to register as a tutor.
Specifically, I am not ready to engage in live talks, but I am willing to help with anything related to writing or correcting - even if there is no points offered.

I think you can just fire off your requests and see what happens.
You might be surprised at how many people are lurking ready to help under the quiet surface :slight_smile:

Thanks, Alex. I have done that, and that’s what led to my question. The “recently active” Korean tutors are new to the site and haven’t done much of anything yet. The really active tutors from the past year or so seem to have largely abandoned LingQ. I’ve reached out to a couple of them and have gotten no response. That’s why I thought I might be doing something wrong. But, I’ll give it another try before giving up. Maybe I’ve just had bad luck.

I’m really only looking for a way to do writing correction anyway. I may be interested in conversations at some point, but I have a tutor I speak with occasionally outside LingQ.

Unfortunately, there are no active Korean tutors here.

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Thanks, Imani, for the response and for your many contributions to the content library. It certainly does appear you are correct on this.

Have you found a tutor? I’m also trying to find someone to have very basic conversations with soon.

Same here. In my view, private requests are better for both the tutor and the student.

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I’ve had two conversations this month. I contacted the tutor directly on his profile page using the “Request Conversation” feature. You can search for Korean speakers who offer tutoring: conversation and/or writing corrections and then make a direct request. I hope that we get a Korean speaker/tutor that will regularly set up a teaching schedule. That would be awesome!

Edit: (I had conversations this week: Sunday and Monday)